Gunn's Golden Rules

society and culture on this planet. I’m also fascinated by the ceremony of it. But I haven’t been to a church since my niece was baptized, and she’s now twenty-three. None of the weddings I’ve been to since then have been in a church. I consider myself an agnostic, because I believe there are many things we don’t fully comprehend.

Going to church was not my favorite thing when I was young. From a very early age, I was very suspicious of our priest. My parents thought I was crazy and just trying to get out of going to services, but I said, “No, there really is something weird about that man.”

Indeed, one day when I was nine or ten, the priest was up at the pulpit. He went into a silent prayer and … never came out of it. After a few minutes the ushers realized he’d left the plane of reality the rest of us were on, so they had an intervention and took him away.

And yes: I smiled very smugly at my parents all the way home.

That’s the mind-set I had when I went to see a psychic once about thirty years ago. I was in the middle of a personal and professional crisis. A dear friend, who is a clinical psychologist said she’d been to see this psychic, had an amazing experience, and encouraged me to go, too.

I scoffed and said, “One of those people with a neon sign?”

“No,” she said, “I did my homework. This woman Jean MacArthur works three months of the year each in New York, Paris, London, and Washington. She’s a consultant to NASA and the FBI.”

Why not?I thought. I’m certainly not a crystal person or an astrology person, but I figured it would be good for a laugh if nothing else. I went with another friend of Pat’s named Molly. Molly is a dear friend of mine, too; she’s the painter with whom I shared a studio during my years as a sculptor. She’s extremely smart and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so for her also to agree to see this person was disarming to me.

I was so disappointed when Jean MacArthur answered the door, because I was expecting to see Isadora Duncan, and instead she looked like the checkout lady at the Safeway. She looked very haggard and had scars running along her neck. She shook my hand, and we sat down. She told me to write down my date of birth. Then she said that I couldn’t lie to her, and that whatever I said to her went through God and back to her and vice versa.

I was sitting there thinking, This is ridiculous.

“You will put your work as an artist on the shelf,” she told me. “This will happen soon. You will enter the academic arena.”

I was thinking, Fat chance.I hated school.

She told me a lot of things about my father that I thought she couldn’t have known without talking to him or other members of my family. Did she talk to Molly in advance?I wondered.

She said she didn’t believe in talking about prior lives because such talk wasn’t useful, but then she paused and said, “However, I have never met a new soul … until today.”

I can still hear her saying that, and it still gives me chills. It’s not that I put any factual stock in it, but there was something about it that sounded right somehow. When she said that, I thought, New soul is at least an apt metaphor for my openness and sometimes naive belief in people.I’d just had my heart broken, and felt duped and humiliated, and I liked that notion of “new soul” more than “fool.”

“Whatever I see in my third eye I will never share unless it’s something you can change,” she said next. “If I tell you the train’s coming, watch out—that means you have a shot at getting out of the way. But if the train’s going to hit you no matter what, why say anything?”

I thought that was kind of a relief, and kind of a disappointment. After our session, she told me about all these surgeries she’d had. She said her third eye takes a terrible physical toll on her. I left my session thinking, What a charlatan.

Meanwhile, when Molly left her appointment, she looked stricken and said, “I have to see a doctor. Jean said something’s wrong with my blood.”

Molly went to an appointment with her doctor. There was nothing wrong with her. The doctor said, “What sent you to me?” and she was too embarrassed to say. So Molly and I said many disparaging things about Jean MacArthur.

The next week, Molly’s identical twin sister was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a form of leukemia. Again, I don’t believe in psychic phenomena, but we found that quite spooky at the time.

And even if I am not a believer, I did find that meeting incredibly useful. I still think about Jean’s train- wreck analogy whenever I talk to the Project Runwaydesigners. I talk to them only about things they can change.

If we get back from Mood and they’ve bought only red fabric, I don’t say, “Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t get green!”

It doesn’t advance the plot. That’s why I wasn’t that thrilled by Nina’s words to the designers the day before the Bryant Park show in the Season 6 finale: “If you have anything referential, get rid of it!”

Get rid of it? The show was the next morning—a little late for replacing a whole look. Nina tends to talk about things the designers can’t change. Editors go there more than teachers. Editors are all about changing and improving all the time—which is what makes them so great and valuable to the industry, but it also makes them a little infuriating when there are unavoidable constraints. I like to talk only about the way things are, not the way they would be in an ideal world.

Maybe that’s why I like etiquette so much: manners help us deal with the way things are, with the place we find ourselves in, whatever that is. Rules of behavior come in handy when you can’t think straight, as when you’re extremely happy or sad over a major event like a birth or a death.

Funerals are especially tricky for people. At your most emotional you suddenly have to do some very complex logistics, usually involving last-minute travel reservations, car rentals, and ironing.

Which reminds me—one tip for the men out there: Make sure you have a nice dark suit and tie. Even if you never have cause to wear them in the rest of your life, you will need one for funerals. It’s shocking how many men in their thirties don’t own a tie and don’t even know how to tie one! Even if you don’t need one for weddings, you need one for funerals. What message are you sending if you show up in a sweatsuit to a funeral? It’s a basic lack of respect. Every man needs a suit. Okay, end of lecture.

I should tell you about my father’s funeral in the mid-nineties. He’s been dead for more than fifteen years, and before that he’d been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s for seven years. And yet, between you and me, I’m still not completely over his death.

When I went home years ago for the Thanksgiving holidays, my father was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. My mother and I went to see him, and he was pulling his IVs out and very disoriented. They had to restrain him. That’s how bad it was.

Well, the next morning, Thanksgiving Day, his doctor asked us into his office, and he had a social worker in the room with us. I thought, What are all these people doing here on Thanksgiving? This must be serious.Sure enough, the doctor said that my father had Alzheimer’s and told my mother, “This will ruin you financially. This will tear your entire family apart. And your husband will lose his soul.”

In other words: Happy Thanksgiving!

When we left, we were both shaken up, but in the parking lot Mother turned to me and said, angrily, “What does that doctor know about our financial circumstances? Or the strength of our family? This won’t tear us apart. And that’s ridiculous that your father will lose his soul. How overdramatic.”

When we got home, the phone was ringing. My father was restrained, but he had access to a phone and he kept calling over and over again, every minute and a half. Mother got to the point where she wouldn’t answer it. My niece was a year and a half or so, and she kept pointing to the phone every time it rang, saying, “Pop! Pop! Pop!” which was her name for him. She knew it was Pop calling. It was very cute, and very depressing. Finally, we