Chapter One-Jude

Scene: AIRPORT TERMINAL. SECURITY GATE.
POST 9-11.

“M ISS . You’re going to have to take those off.” “Are you kidding me?” “No, ma’am. I can’t let you through ’til you take ’em off.” “And just what am I supposed to do? Stand here in front of all
these people in my thong.” “No, ma’am. Not your pants. I’m talking about those pins.” “Are you kidding me?” “No ma’am. It’s the law.” The security guard’s voice had taken
on an ominous tone and his officious demeanor was beginning to grate my nerves. “Hey, lady, just do what he says, for crying out loud. We’ve waited long enough.” I wheeled around. A line of about two hundred angry people had formed up behind me, and most of them were doing that irritating
foot-tapping thing. They were becoming increasingly impatient, and beginning to murmur. But who could blame them, all of that waiting and standing around? My head began to hurt.
Frances and I were flying to Washington D.C.’s Dulles airport. We were late as usual, but this time it wasn’t our fault. We had given ourselves an extra hour this time, but just as we were leaving Frances’ house, her enormous, but very loveable Great Dane, Sophie, had dragged a box of tomatoes off the kitchen counter and eaten every last one of them. They had been a gift from a neighbor’s garden and there were three dozen of them neatly packed into the box. Of course, Frances was worried that Sophie would become sick at worst, or leave a horrendous mess on the carpet at best, so she insisted on waiting a half hour to see what might happen.
After 30-minutes of Frances and Sophie staring at each other intently, I insisted that she’d be okay and the kids would be able to check on her when they returned from school. “They’d report to us,” I’d said.
Even with that delay, we still would have made it on time, if it hadn’t been for the woman at the ticket counter who couldn’t understand Frances’ English accent. She kept telling us there were no flights to Dallas that day and Frances kept saying, “Not Dallas, Dulles.”
After several of these exchanges, their conversation began to sound like an Abbott and Costello skit and, frankly, I often thought of the two of us in just that fashion, only in our case, it was more like Costello and Costello, two frazzled women racing to yet another cross continent flight without a straight man, wearing the wrong clothes, fumbling to find our driver’s licenses, even arriving on the wrong day for one flight. It was all becoming far too familiar. In our defense, however, we were doing the work of six people.
Had we not been held up by the airline employee, I might have thought to undo the 35 safety pins running along the outer seams of my designer jeans—all the rage at the time—before getting to the X-ray machine, but probably not.
They didn’t hold my pants together as you might be guessing; they were just decorative and I thought they were cute. The other 200 people in line did not see the humor and didn’t care much for my fashion sense either.
“Now what in the world am I going to do—hold a flight atten¬dant hostage at the point of a pin?” I asked the security guard.
Standing rigid in his starched white shirt, shiny silver badge at eye level, his arms firmly crossed on his chest, he said with an edge in his voice, “Ma’am...”
I quickly started to unfasten the pins, one by one. It took me nearly 15-minutes, all the while listening to the groans and sighs all the way back as far as anyone who could see me and knew what was happening. I could almost feel the heat of their anger on my neck.
Inevitably, many of those closest to me in line were also sitting closest to Frances and me on the plane and so there was no lack of furrowed eyebrows, visual daggers, or prolonged dramatic stage sighs for the next four and a half hours.
We had started our jewelry design business the year before with a ridiculously small investment of $9,000 and it was already beginning to take off. In less than 12-months we’d gone from sales of nothing to nearly a million dollars. It was frantic—we were frantic, and we loved every minute of it.
Now we are celebrating our fourth year together and sales have climbed to an astronomical $8,000,000 that’s right—10 mil¬lion. And it all started at a simple yard sale in Newport Beach, California. Not bad for a couple of suburban moms.
Frances and I together have five kids, which is an integral part of this story. I was divorced by the time we formed our company and was raising three children alone: two girls and a boy. Frances is married, and continues to raise two children, and sometimes my three as well.
Between the scheduling of soccer matches, missed school plays, parent-teacher conferences, a monumental helping of guilt, scratching to pay the bills, flying hither, thither and yon for what seemed an interminable number of business meetings, the relentless ringing of cell phones, and missing flights—somehow we became successful in a business we knew little about.
What we had was a dream, a love for design, unbelievably per¬sistent natures, a deep respect for each other, and a great deal of love and support from our families. We didn’t have business degrees. In fact, neither of us went to college, but I learned we could accomplish anything we put our minds to. We did it, against supposedly impossible odds. Sometimes, we wake up scratching our heads at the improbable launching of JudeFrances.