Crackerjack Team

In the new paradigm I no longer try to do everything myself. Times were tough in the D and I had to save myself some money by not having parttime help….you can imagine how much fun I was. Starting out afresh with new people is always hard. I'm terrible at delegating, too busy multi-tasking to explain things AND not especially detail-oriented or organized. The most important thing I needed was someone who can sell, a closer. Someone with the confidence to sell a thing, even though they may not know much about it. I needed Jerry Meresky. He conveniently lives across the street, he's a closer. He used to have a furniture store in Detroit and offered to help me out. He's doesn't really need the money as much as something to do. He's free on the precious weekends and old school for real. Jerry is my 82 year-old sales associate. OK so the phone connection thing is too tiny for his fingers to plug it in and out of the fax machine. Forget it! he's a deal maker and knows how to move a heavy thing. He likes to work the crowd, smooth with the ladies (whooo-ahhhh). At the other end of the spectrum is my Sunday fill-in Jenna Zerbo. She's 22, cute as they come, and in-love with the stuff. OK she can't lift the 100# concrete Madonna. Hey, the men are falling over themselves to do it before she even thinks to ask. She works at Inn Season, our favorite vegetarian restaurant around the corner, and is use to waiting on customers. That two-page, neatly printed receipt with all the zeros she collected on a Sunday made my heart sing. Jenna it turns out, is also a closer. Plus she wants to work in exchange for stuff. You know I'm all about the barter!! My serious saving grace is behind the scenes. David King, who actually rents studio space from me, paints for me, runs interference with Hollywood (he use to work out there, he gets it), opens the store for customers that come off-hours, moves heavy stuff AND helps with the weeds…He listens to my rants, he's cerebral, intelligent AND easy on the eye. Down kitty. Last but certainly not least is Amy Nolfo Wheeler, the upstairs dealer that covers the store on Thursday and Friday. She's the other mom with muscle, thinks nothing of schlepping an oak entry door down the stairs by herself, NEVER misses a good garage sale, makes it all look like a million bucks upstairs AND drives in from Indiana every week. Are you feeling the love? how lucky am I? At the risk of sounding like I'm all that, here's what I think this is guys. You gotta make a nice place for luck to live in your life. I tell my kid this all the time, take an interest in other people, BE OF SERVICE. Sounds like a religious thing alright I can live with that. I learned it from my parents, I practice it everyday. I think if you work hard and try to help other people whenever you can, it will come back to you. When I made that early Saturday am call to David and said, "gee I messed up can you help me RIGHT NOW…I'm grateful that he wants to and will. Same for Jerry, Jenna and Amy. So when you get the call to help, I'm just saying that you ought-a should take it.

Middle Aged Wisdom

The very thing that makes you good at something will inevitably catch you up short somewhere else. It takes awhile to learn patience with your weaknesses and how to work around them. The other thing that comes with time is truly getting that things are rarely as "dire" as they may initially appear and to expect change. So you might as well calm the *&#!? down and ride it out. I remind myself of this about 100x a day.

For instance, I just get to chillaxin at the cottage on a beautiful holiday weekend when the call comes in (barely, poor cel service). I forgot 3 things "Real Steel" needed for the scene they are shooting shortly. They expect it to be delivered stat. I've got an 82 year-old man running the shop. He's not running anywhere else. Being ultra reactive, I am good at the quick response, but what comes with it is a tendency to panic. It's not that your failings will ever go away. It's more like the company that won't leave. You learn to acknowledge the feeling without getting dragged down by it. "Oh, you're still here. Well, if you want to hang out, cool, but I'm going to bed." You have to be a problem solver. I'm good at working the network. I've got good help in spades. I take a calming breath and text message David King (and thank you jesus for david king) . It goes through and he's on his way. Problem solved

People it's all in the details. It's all about service. It's all about smiling when you might rather scream. I could have started this blog out with that. Oh yeah, there's like a billion books I could have read on this already. Which reminds me of another of my failings, I'm stubborn, I gotta learn everything the hard way.

Baby Jesus Out of the Manger

I watched as my baby jesus (aka my 11-year-old Wyatt) loaded his own bags in the bins and walked through security…from the other side of the gate…on his way to Italy for a month. He never looked back. I've said this 10 times already and it's still shocking to me. Oh I know, "whatever! another madonna and child melodrama" and "it's different when it's your own!" blah blah blah. I'm just saying! Proud mother teared (big surprise) with pride to see that young man looking forward to his bright future. "He's gonna be a senator or an ambassador!" my friend Danielle said, so there. He's off with 3 other American messiahs to an international peace camp where they will hook up with kids from 10 other nations. Some genius, a woman naturally, came up with the idea in the late 40's that if kids came together at this tender age, they'd make lasting friendships and wouldn't shoot at each other later. I think Dickie Cheney missed his flight. These people are so enlightened. His mother is crossing his fingers that he will actually write and collect interesting stuff in his new journal (and floss and brush everyday…) Everyone's checking to see how the parents are doing post departure. Shoot Rick and I are so busy I'm glad he's got something more interesting to do than traipse around with his nintendo while we work. We left the airport and proceeded to work until late into the night. More movies and a t.v. show added to the line up. Stay tuned for tales from "Machine Gun Preacher" and "Detroit 187." "Transformers" will be here in a few weeks and I just got word that Sean Penn is doing a whole movie here and we will be busy with productions until May of next year. With any luck I'll actually make a decent living this year.

Everyone's a movie maker

I was told that 18 movies are being made in Detroit this summer and 2 in Hollywood. Who knew? Here on the ground we are scrambling to pull it together. I'm supplying 5 or 6 right now, looking for stuff, keeping design projects on track, running the store with my crackshot team, lots of deadlines. I tell my sister, the chef, that it's like constantly being on the line preparing Saturday night dinner. I learned from my set decorator pal Selina, you get up early to get things done. I could script a documentary about my last two weeks. Here's how my shot list might begin. 1. 6-6-10. Late night, darkened bedroom, see me throwing clothes in a bag, barking orders to rick and wyatt. I was suppose to organize props for Monday when I got the call. Not good. I gotta drop everything and head across the state. My brother-in-law, kingpin of the Heritage enterprise, is having bypass surgery on his leg. My sister Lia is exhausted and worried. The $90mil thriller breathing down my back and casual apparel's new salvage look at Saks 5th Ave will have to be managed from the road, see cel and laptop go into briefcase 2. 6-7-10 camera looking over driver's shoulder: it's me on the phone. I drive a short distance and park, race through my grocery store(shout out to www.holidaymarket.com) grabbing gourmet items. Rule #1: where there's a crisis, a Gaggino is cooking. 3. see me fill a cooler, jump back in van 3. car drives short distance to library. Rule#2: Gaggino women are either talking and laughing or they're crying. I get a Sedaris book on CD for inspiration: 3 hour surgery+ 2 hour recovery, I'll need a few hours of material to entertain Lia 4. trauma waiting room hectic with people, shot of clock 4:00pm. pan to me, Lia, her bff Reggie, her daughter Elyse, table is set, everyone's eating, talking and laughing loudly 6. dark windows, trauma care empty except one guy asleep in a chair, pan to clock: 11:30pm. It's not going well. There in a heap, the three Gagginos. see rule #2. 7. surgeon walks slowly out double doors towards us, face tired, serious. 8. shot of clock 1:00am. Crap everywhere, Gaggino's wasted. Surgeon in scrubs, walks with vigor, Lia is up. Good news! They save Rodger's leg. Lia gets her sanity. I'd be happy with 6 hours of sleep 9. Me and Lia in her bed, clock says 4:30am, still stuck on rule #2. It's the let down after the stress...a Gaggino response, I get it, pet her hair and shhsh her. 10. Daytime in trauma care room, cooler is restocked, Rodger in bed joking, we talk shop. 11. Nap time, Lia comes willingly. 12. One stop before I gotta go home. 13. Inside The Heritage Co., flagship store. I'm hauling stuff for my store out to the van. 12. cut to van clock, 7:00pm, 2 more hours until I'm home.. now that's raw footage.

Smooth Sailing

Three days off in a row, just in the nick of time. I'm on fumes. Thank god I don't have far to go. We have a little cottage near Lake Huron and it's a blessing that the cellular service is bad. It takes a while for me to stop flitting from activity to activity and worrying about what might be happening at the shop. I have an inner junk mogul that thinks we could be wildly successful if I could just control that bum who wants to have fun and relax, all that mamby pamby talk about balance, whatta wimp! It's when I start to lose everything, or break things and just plain fall apart from exhaustion that I will finally stop and take a break. Truth is I'm more effective if I would quit acting like everything is a crisis to solve immediately. That cottage was the best thing we ever invested in and it has saved my life. Instead of two new cars in the driveway, we have a small, old-fashioned stone cottage. Of course it's furnished with everything found, recycled and reclaimed and it couldn't be more charming, if I don't say so myself. I've learned to live with a certain amount of disrepair in the interest of a better family life. Our son runs free like we did as kids and Rick putters around on assorted ongoing projects. It's the first weekend we've been able to get away and since it's only a summer place, we have to open it up after the long winter. The weather is absolutely gorgeous and rather than embark on a major cleaning project, we unpack, turn the water on and I head out to round up manpower to get my little sailboat in the water. As the salvage slave is always trying to prove, you don't have to have a lot of money to live well. I bought that Sunfish knock-off years ago for $100 and it was rough looking then. I leave it on the beach all summer long and when it cracks somewhere, it gets the only fiberglass patch I have patience for i.e. full of sand from the get-it-back-in-the-water-now beach repair. It should have a paint job but I couldn't care less and it shows. I can carry my sail, rudder and centerboard down to the beach myself, drag it into the water and I'm sailing on Lake Huron like the big guys. I was absolutely thrilled to learn this weekend that I could sail lying on my back, feet steering the rudder and catching some rays. The lake is so big, there was no risk of running into anyone even on a holiday weekend, damn I shoulda' brought beer! Sheer heaven. To think we waste so much time and money on things that just don't matter. Neither Disneyland nor Club Med can hold a candle to the vacation we have every weekend and it costs nothing extra to share it with friends and family. Everyone pitches in and with the talented chefs in our social network, we have 5 star meals prepared in our 1940's kitchen complete with a 70 year-old stove. We pull an old 8' folding table out of the shed, some flea market bought bistro chairs and set the table with vintage enamelware, tablecloth and napkins and mismatched silverware and glasses. If I'm really feeling it, I light candles and cut some flowers from the yard or the wild ones growing on the lake bluff and make an arrangement. Save yourself an expensive trip, you can live like Europeans always have. Afterwords, we might head down to the beach to watch a spectacular moon rise off the lake, light some fireworks or throw a sheet over the clothesline, pop some popcorn and have an 8mm film festival from Rick's vast collection of old movies. It all packs up in an hour and we're home in 90 minutes. I slept more this weekend than I have in 2 months and I'm actually looking forward to an action-packed week with movies to supply, interiors to design and new ideas of stuff to make with the treasures I found at the country flea market this morning. You'll be happy and "get rich" real quick if you quit equating it with the pursuit of more money and start enjoying life's simpler pleasures.

Chasarai Continued

Having elevated the chasarai (Yiddish for juuk, say the ch like you got something lodged deep in your throat kah-zer-eye) to a higher purpose, I speed-dialed those 20-something men Sunday and sent them to wrap the installation from yesterday's MOCAD (www.mocadetroit.org) fundraiser and shove it back into the store. It's like those jeans you saved from high school... as if you'd be wearing them again. And I haven't picked up the load from Brimfield yet! I pick up first thing Monday up in Bay City. I manage to wedge everything into the van still leaving a nice nest for Trooper my trusty Scottie dog. Can't unload until Tuesday, I am meeting my new intern as soon as I return and our first job together is to look at a new interiors project. She has no idea what kinda meshuggeneh (don't you love Yiddish?) she's gonna be working with all summer. If you aren't crazy when you start your own business, you'll surely be there soon enough. My designer pal (www.dunlapdesigngroup.com) Charles Dunlap's assistant Emily saved my life hooking me up with CMU's (central michigan university) interior design program and I soon learn my intern Erika Shrauger can roll with the punches. She has to drive since my van had become a storage pod and off we go to see the loft of Supino Pizzeria owner Dave Mancini. I don't care what you say, the suburban wannabes don't hold a candle to a real urban loft. Dave inherited the last owner's taste however and furniture from his family. This won't do for the reigning pizza king (www.supinopizza.com). Our bachelor needs to chillax, he needs a kitchen for a serious chef who entertains and if I may speak frankly, a bed that fits his 6'5" frame. It's a long way up to those green eyes, but I looked deeply into them and it comes to me: "Austin Powers, " ...with a motor city back drop. Erika measures, dave and I drink wine and I say, you know this intern thing is workin for me....3 hours later, she sure was...can you say designated driver? One wants an intern with absolute discretion, a valid driver's license and street smarts. She's on time the next morning (youngsters this is critical to job security) and ready (well except for the flip flops, she'll learn). The chasarai is everywhere. Designing with a few hundred objects lying around requires a special skill ( A.D.D.) and the willingness to move something until it feels right (O.C.D). I will move things so many times that I will lose them (and my mind), but it's key to the sale. It's a series of stage sets. This round we have Louis XIV in the industrial age, 60's boudoir gone to seed, Medieval dungeon and the madonna, 50's modern and Americana. And that's just the front room. I send Erika home with drawings to do and I prep for Wednesday shopping. We have tile selection for our actor client Ed Kelly, the voice of Lincoln Mercury and he's found an antique English washstand he wants to feature in a tiny bathroom. Lynne Moran at Virginia Tile (www.virginiatile.com) is my go-to girl and she and her staff help us nail a fantastic design, including a dead-on match to this unique blue tile in the c.1900's piece. We also score a deal on tile for Dave's kitchen and eyeball some beautiful tiles for a little bath in our Grosse Pointe Park project. A quick trip to order window treatments and pick up drapes takes longer than expected. I gotta reschedule the graphic design meeting for later. We get some extra time and since it will be a longer day, I decide we deserve a little treat. Bath products at Lush, make-up at Macy's....you gotta set a good example, work hard, play hard and then pamper, pamper, pamper!

When it rains it pours, I need an ark

Remember that cult movie Afterhours, when all the guy wanted to do was go home but kept getting pulled into weird situations? He's taken over my body or I fell into his movie and I can't get out. Slave that I am, of course I scheduled to work all weekend, naturally I signed up for the wine stroll so I'd have 700 people to entertain. I'll just really take that Friday off and catch up on my sleep....right after I follow up with that producer and our long shot on some american pickers show. She's waiting for the lisa/marisa blog and it has to be perfect. I'll spend all morning obsessing over it. Gee how much money did I just spend? I owe people, they know I'm home. A few rounds of the shell game, I cover it barely. I'll just pop into the shop to make sure we're ready for the onslaught of wine drinkers. I'm only moving furniture...2 hours later. I'm so grateful for that solid 3 1/2 hours of sleep. Then I get the call. You know that big break to do something completely creative of my choosing for a prominent client and their fundraiser for the MOCAD (www.mocadetroit.org museum contemporary art detroit)? Only it's 6pm and it's a 30' space and we have 21 hours to conceive, hire, amass, transport, design and install it at said community leader's home. I'm on fumes, I call in the big guns (my husband and his 20 year olds www.richardgagedesignstudio.com) We spend that relaxing evening together wracking our brains, mentally inventorying what's lying around at our shops and what kind of magic we can make. Would have been handy if those goods from Brimfield were in but noooo... I start with this chicken wire man, and those bed springs. Rick has a burn basket, the 12' grain auger. I bank 5 more hours of sleep and we head to our shops. Oh yeah wyatt, what are we doing with him? It's peasant day care, you know pickin' potatoes with the baby on your back? Wyatt's been on the crew since he was born. At 4 months he was in the sling while I set up a show in Ann Arbor, so packed was my van I had to thread him through the window. He's good for 2 hours of running small jobs. Luckily the client has kids. Wyatt's like the pied piper with the kids, the nannies want his number, he's better than nintendo. Moving right along, we start the artistic process...you know stand around and argue over minutiae, assemble this, make the crew break it down and assemble that...Wait!! I have a new brilliant idea. We do that 50 more times. We're having a blast but I'm gonna pass out if I don't eat something. We get food from "the chef" but no silverware and we are filthy. The 20 year olds don't care if they eat with dirty hands, the perfectly plated tenderloin on a bed of bitter greens with a feta and herb pesto. These guys are into this 5 star plate. "I thought we smelled hamburgers. What's arugula? It tastes weird. The "steak" isn't cooked and what's that stuff all over it?" I'm punchy now. I gotta come up with an invoice and get to the wine stroll. I'm two hours late and my phone is ringing off the hook this whole time cause nothing is priced. I follow the designer to find out how to get the check...nothing more nerve wracking than the money part. I mean how much is a junk sculpture of wire and scrap? The clients come outside to see our work, they love it!! She wants us to come back tonight for the festivities, I'm gonna say no? We have dinner plans (...one of the calls that came in, of course I can cram that in) We settle up and I race back to the shop. David King is my hero, running interference at the shop. I grease his palm, send him for more wine, start the shuck and jive for my 700 new prospects. Out at 5:30pm, a good day of business, I lie down for 10 minutes, shower and get into costume. This crowd will be dressed to the nines. I pull out the vintage lace number from the opera singer's estate, my pawn indian jewelry, a leather jacket, cowboy boots, war paint, we're off for dinner. Dinner is at Ross Yedinak's house. His cooking is the real deal, there's always room in the schedule for a Ross meal (www.walnutonline.net --he's also an artist). The food is like that off the chart stuff we ate in Brooklyn. Wyatt is having no part of it, well except the dessert. He wants to play badminton outside. He's been good all day, I'm diving for the shots, lace dress and all. We head out for the event. Oh my god, what you can do with an unlimited budget and imagination. They have guys on dirt bikes creating "art" on their front lawn (it gets re-sodded on Monday). They have a live death goth band in full regalia and a smoke machine going, it's ear-splitting. All the big name Detroit art supporters are on hand, it's like fashion week. The people watching is superlative. Wyatt is sneaking around snagging cookies off the tables. We are seen by some of our best clients, this was a good move. Rick carries a sleepy wyatt to the car, I'm in bed by 11:30. I've got until noon to rest and then I have to open the shop....So heads I getta call at 6:00am, tails I sleep in, wanna call it?