When Fashion Week was over, I flew back to America, hugged James hello at the Dallas airport, and went back to my parents’ house. Life felt good, like things were really beginning to click on a lot of levels. I had a great boyfriend. I had a part-time job to pay the bills. I had strong connections with the fashion world and was becoming an established freelance writer in it. There was only one thing missing: an actual career.
But I had some big ideas for that.
For the past several months I’d been planning, dreaming, hoping, praying, researching. I knew what my perfect job would look like, but I also knew nobody would hand it to me on a silver platter. I was perfectly willing to work for someone else and figured that’s what I probably should do first, to learn the ropes. But one of my editor friends had turned the tables on that idea awhile back when she suggested I should just go out and do it myself. This woman was in her late forties and had really been giving me a leg up in the industry.
“It’s really hard to find your perfect job,” she said. “Why not create it yourself?”
Create my own job, I thought. Y’know . . . I think I could do that.
CHAPTER 18
LOLO Magazine
Lauren
I dreamed of a magazine that would inspire people to live their lives out loud.
It wouldn’t be just any ordinary young women’s magazine. It would capture the true vitality of life—purpose, drive, color, beauty, and fun. I wanted to create a magazine that would showcase all the paradoxes of young women’s personalities—something serious yet lighthearted, something important yet also whimsical. I didn’t want articles to read like stodgy academic journals or hard-hitting news reports. I wanted them to sound like cool conversations, like the ones I had with other girls in our dorm rooms at college, or the ones I had with other young professionals at busy New York street corner cafés.
Already, I knew on a personal level the taste of true enthusiasm, when a person has great excitement for a subject or a cause. I loved art. I loved travel. I loved fashion. I loved beauty. When a person is truly enthusiastic, she’s free to live in light of what God has called her to be passionate about. That’s what I wanted this magazine to hold out to other young women—an invitation to be truly enthusiastic.
On the beauty front, I wanted people to see how character is the highest aesthetic a young woman can have, and how character is expressed not only in how a woman looks but—particularly—in how a woman acts. On the fashion front, I wanted people to be able to take the high-street editorial images they saw in magazines and translate those looks into their own style. On the food front, I wanted people to know how to eat healthfully and experience optimum energy for everyday living. On the travel side, I wanted people to be culturally well-rounded and experience worlds beyond the bubble of their hometowns.
That’s what my magazine would be about: food, fashion, beauty, health, and travel. But the twist would be practicality.
Anyone could live out loud.
That’s the message I wanted my magazine to convey.
Molly, one of the editors I’d worked with, had offered me a lot of advice career-wise. She encouraged me not to wait for the right opportunity to come along but to make it happen myself. I prayed through the idea, talked to my parents, and knew this was the direction I wanted to go. Molly helped me formulate a business plan and set me in motion, then set me free.
I soon enlisted the help of a good friend, Shannon Yoachum. She was in her last semester at the University of Texas and headed for a career as a fashion journalist. I invited Shannon to Fashion Week in New York City, where we spent a lot of time talking through the magazine’s conception. Although she has a strong personality, we soon found that we worked well together. We understood each other’s ideas, and our working relationship felt natural and complementary.
We began working together on story ideas and on how we wanted the magazine to flow and feel. We created a logo, wrote sample articles, and secured illustrations. But just when things were really coming together, we hit a snag. Our web builder fell through, and we didn’t have a lot of money left by then. We knew that a high-quality, custom site like we wanted would cost at least ten thousand dollars to create. Through a referral we met Josh, a talented young designer, who created our site perfectly, then sent us the bill. “I believe in what you’re doing,” he said. His bill was—miraculously—less than a thousand dollars.
After months of preparatory work, launch day finally arrived in August 2011. We had all our content ready. Everything was laid out and positioned in different sections. In previous weeks, we’d sent out announcements on social media sites. Finally, we counted down from ten, took a deep breath, and turned on the website. LOLO Magazine had officially come to life. We formally announced the magazine’s beginning on our Facebook and Twitter feeds and crossed our fingers. We were expecting a few hundred hits the first day. At the end of the day, we checked our stats. Our magazine had been viewed by more than four thousand visitors. It was a huge start!
Every day was a learning process. We set a goal of researching and writing three new articles per day. Though we soon found out that was an overly ambitious pace to maintain, we kept working hard. We met with people in the industry, went to fashion events, and interviewed insiders. We experimented with subject matter and found out which articles connected most strongly with readers and which ones turned out to be duds. We secured pictures and wrote captions and learned how to best position articles and features. Other companies began to contact us with products they wanted us to review or events they wanted us to cover. We managed the social media that drove the exposure—posting our articles on sites and answering comments. We handled the business aspect of things, learned about advertising and marketing, and took care of taxes.
Despite all the work we were putting in, we were hardly making any money—far less than minimum wage. But we expected that. Our goal for the first year was to grow our readership, and after that to secure a strong advertising base. After launch day, our numbers dipped into the hundreds, but then quickly and steadily rose.
The magazine was always on my mind. It felt like a newborn baby. I worried over it, prayed over it, and stayed up at night feeding it. But mostly, I just enjoyed it. I truly loved every second of what I was doing. Running LOLO Magazine was my dream job. The possibilities of where it could go seemed endless. Each day’s pace was brisk, but we soon learned to delegate more and contracted with freelancers to write some of the articles. We enlisted the help of a couple of college interns. One of our correspondents lived in New York and was positioned to get the inside scoop on what was happening there. Both Shannon and I stayed active in every part of the magazine’s functioning. We quickly branched out into video, and I did interviews with actor and model Kellan Lutz from the hugely popular Twilight Saga movies, fashion designer Rebecca Taylor, and my former colleagues from Gossip Girl, actor Chace Crawford and costume designer Eric Daman.
What I loved most was how people said the magazine was truly connecting with them. People felt inspired by what we did. Because of our articles, they experimented with style. They traveled to other cities. More than one person told us they changed college majors as a result of our magazine’s influence. We didn’t talk directly about God much in the articles, but more about “life at a deeper level.” We weren’t afraid to incorporate faith into all aspects of life. I felt like a roaring lamb.
With the magazine launched and running smoothly, I focused again on personal matters. In November 2011 James and I decided to cool our relationship. We’d been on-again, off-again in recent months, but it felt like now was the time to call it quits officially, at least for a while. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did. Very much.
But—hoo, there were complications.
The closer we became, the more I realized just how serious this relationship was becoming. At our age, we weren’t dating simply to date anymore. We weren’t fourteen and hanging out at the movies. We were in our twenties
, and our dating had become intentional. We were considering spending the rest of our lives together, and we both took the prospect of marriage extremely seriously. When we decided who to marry, we both wanted it to be the firmest decision we’d ever make. Neither of us wanted to have any doubts in our minds.
But in my mind, doubts kept poking up.
Not about James, actually. Overall, he was great. Sweet, kind, loyal, fun.
But about myself.
When I looked honestly into my heart, I knew I still considered other guys. I didn’t know if that was normal—if everybody felt that way when they were in a serious relationship. Was I the only one in the dating world who wanted to keep her options open as long as she could? Maybe the problem was that I simply couldn’t commit to the great guy I was with.
I prayed about it all the time. I talked to Brittany and Shaun about it. I talked to my mom and dad about it. I talked to some other wise women I knew. They all saw the complexity of the situation. I was getting mixed signals about what I should do. Everyone loved James. Yet they understood that I needed to be clear on things if we were to proceed, and I wasn’t clear. Some thought I should go another direction. They were confident that someone else was out there for me—I just hadn’t met him yet.
One wise woman even had a highly specific dream about me and some imaginary guy. He and I were married, far into the future, with three beautiful young sons named Hudson, Dawson, and Canyon. Those names didn’t come from me. I’d never mentioned anything like that to her, and I had no idea what to think of all that. I couldn’t discern if her dream was a fluke, the result of a slice of bad pizza she may have eaten before bed, or if this woman was truly seeing into the future—like perhaps the homeless man had done years ago.
His predictions had come true for both Brittany and me. Just as he had said would happen, my world now contained innovation and travel and writing and celebrities. I hobnobbed with VIPs and was aligned with “eminent people of the world,” just as he’d foreseen. (Although . . . I had to say there was one more thing the homeless man had mentioned—something about me fighting battles—that hadn’t come true yet. I wondered about that every once in a while. But I figured maybe it referred to starting my magazine.)
None of us could see into the future. That’s why making a decision about James was so difficult. He was an amazing young man—concrete and solid and real. I so desperately didn’t want to lose him. But in my head I vacillated back and forth between being sure and being unsure, and so I needed to be honest with him. James needed his future wife to hold him as number one in her life. But until I could figure this out, or until God clearly showed me the direction to go, I didn’t want to lead James on. He deserved all of me—and I couldn’t give that to him yet—so I had to let this play out. I had to see if God was steering me in another direction. And that’s why I broke up with James.
“Promise me you’ll be really careful, Lo,” James said when he dropped me off at my house the night we broke up. “I can’t quite explain it, but I have this feeling like something bad is coming your way.”
I nodded, and we hugged, even as I shivered a little. James was always there for me. He sees God’s purpose in things, even difficult things. What more could a girl ever want?
On Wednesday night, November 30, 2011, I wrote what would become my final journal entry for some time. I set my pen down, turned out the light, and pulled the covers up around my chin. Tomorrow was Thursday, a new day at LOLO Magazine. I felt good about that, like I always did. And then there was only one more day after that until the weekend. I was looking forward to Saturday. December 3. Brittany and Shaun were coming over to decorate the Christmas tree early. I knew we’d have a lot of fun. After that we were planning on going to church in the evening, and then over to our friends’ house for dinner.
I hoped Dad could make it. He’d been looking worn down lately.
I sure hoped he wasn’t coming down with a cold.
CHAPTER 19
A Painful Journey Back
Jeff
The wind blew from the north on the evening of December 3, 2011. And when the steady gusts of Oklahoma air pushed south along the Highway 75 corridor and reached the Aero Country Airport in McKinney, Texas, the wind’s direction set into motion a series of events that would change our lives forever.
I wouldn’t learn this simple fact about wind direction until months later when I visited the accident site for the first time. I had been in constant contact with Mike (the owner of the airplane) since the accident. But I had yet to visit the crash site for myself. Nothing within me wanted to go there. The thought of seeing the place where my daughter nearly died brought the horror of that night back up again. And those were memories we were all desperately trying to put behind us.
Still, I needed to learn as much about the accident as I could. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the courts, and the insurance companies were wading through the countless legal issues surrounding the accident. Meanwhile, there had been a lot of baseless speculation from others about what had happened that night. I had learned early that it was better to stop reading the online comments below the myriad of news stories that came out after the accident. The majority of comments were positive and encouraging. People expressed their sympathies and wished Lauren a speedy recovery. But a small segment of comments were accusatory, mocking, and even cruel, which is a typical result whenever people develop opinions based on speculation or jump to conclusions. The most hurtful comments were from people who called Lauren a “dumb blonde” and assumed she must have been drunk, high on drugs, or texting. Regardless of stance, everyone seemed to have an opinion about the accident—both the people who supported Lauren and those who ridiculed her. I didn’t want to answer all these people’s questions, nor would I be able to. I just wanted to see the accident site for myself.
On the afternoon I toured the airport, Mike personally showed me around. The sky was overcast and had a glare that made me squint. Seeing the site proved too emotional for me at first, and for a while I just walked around the tarmac silently, choking back tears. I wouldn’t learn everything I needed to know about the accident that day, but Mike was able to clarify some things for me.
In northwest Texas, Mike explained, private airport runways are typically built from north to south, because generally the wind originates from only those directions, and wind direction dictates which way a pilot will take off, land, and park the plane.
That’s precisely what happened the night of December 3. With a north wind blowing, the pilot landed the plane and maneuvered it off the runway onto the taxiway, as he should have. He parked the plane on the tarmac behind Mike’s hangar. The plane’s nose faced north, because a pilot is trained to park a plane facing into the wind.
The plane’s design offered only one point of entry and exit. The door was located on the right side of the plane. This meant the plane’s door faced east toward the taxiway, not west toward the hangar and the house. If the wind had been coming from the south, the plane’s nose would have faced the other direction, and Lauren could have climbed out of the plane and walked in a straight line directly into the hanger and the house. But because the plane was parked to the north, it meant that when Lauren exited the plane she needed to walk in a semicircle around the plane to return to the hangar and the house. When she climbed out of the plane, I suppose she could have turned to the right and walked around the back of the plane. But instead she turned to the left and walked into the propeller.
There was a logical reason she did this.
Newscasters widely reported two potentially misleading terms: that Lauren was a “fashion model” and that she had flown in a “private plane.” I understand how Lauren could be mistaken for a model, but she’s never done any modeling except for Dallas-area friends and their photography businesses. She’s never considered herself a model or called herself one. One news report even called her a “supermodel,” which made Lauren shake her head with a mystified smile when
she heard about it later. (“Supermodel” is a highly specialized term that applies to only a few of the world’s top models, such as Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen.) The private plane part was partially correct, but the problem is that when people hear those two terms in proximity—“fashion model” and “private plane”—it’s easy to envision some sort of glamorous celebrity walking down the steps of a sleek corporate jet.
That wasn’t the way it happened.
The plane Lauren rode in was a 2011 Aviat Husky A-1C. It’s a tiny, utterly basic bush plane. If you’re a hunter in the Yukon or a mail carrier in the remotest sections of Alaska, this is your dream airplane. Its mission is to take off and land on dirt roads, fields, and mountainsides. The plane features two seats total, one behind the other, and a tight-fitting empty space in the back where you could squeeze in a dead elk along with a sleeping bag or camping stove. Stem to stern, the entire plane is only several feet longer than a Ford Taurus. The cabin height is just four feet, and the cabin width is just twenty-seven inches.5 Picture a flying canoe. An enclosed kayak with wings and a motor.
This was the second Aviat that Mike had owned, so he was familiar with the plane. The pilot who flew that night had clocked tons of time in Huskys and tail-wheeled airplanes. The plane’s operations were nothing new to him.
The narrow cabin area became one factor in the accident. You don’t stand up and walk around inside the cabin of an Aviat Husky A-1C. You don’t gracefully walk off the plane or even climb down a folding staircase onto the tarmac like you do from a small commuter plane. Climbing in and out of the Aviat Husky A-1C is no easy matter, and there is no placard on the inside or outside of the plane that explains the techniques. To get in, there is a stirrup on the lower part of the plane’s exterior that’s intended to be a footstep. Then there is a grab bar near the top of the plane. If you put your foot in the stirrup and grab the bar up high, you can swing your legs up and get in the plane. To climb out, you basically reverse the order. Mike explained that it feels like climbing backward down a one-step ladder. Mike noted with a chuckle that when his oldest son took the test for his private pilot’s license, the FAA examiner got stuck in the plane for a full twenty minutes. This is one tight plane.
Still Lolo Page 14