Laura Clark

Mirrors & Scales and My Pink Suit Laura Clark

It's 1992. Before cell phones, the World Wide Web, social media and dating sites...

Darra van Zandt is a peri-menopausal American housewife living in a small village just outside of Amsterdam with her Dutch husband and six-year-old daughter. A stay-at-home mom filled with angst over just about everything: her weight, her frizzy hair, her chicken neck, superfluous chin hairs and inadequacy as a mother, her latest quandary is the change of life and how swiftly it is passing her by.

One dull rainy April Day, with husband out of town, daughter in school and hormones out of kilter, bored-out-of-her-gourd Darra arranges a baby-sitter and escapes for the weekend by hopping on a train to Paris to find her raison d'être-her reason to be.

Shortly after arriving in Paris, a woman, the spitting image of Darra, except a bit more fashionable in a pink suit, like the one Jackie Kennedy wore on November 22, 1963, nearly knocks over Darra's table as she rushes out of a café. A few minutes later, a tall, handsome stranger begins to pursue the vulnerable Darra. Before the night is over, she finds herself actually enjoying the claustrophobic crowd at a reggae concert, along with the warm beer and secondhand reefer smoke.

Thrown into the middle of many non-housewifely situations, Darra uses periodic pauses of relaxation technique therapy to go to her "quiet place" and to visualize her perfect image: calm, serene, slender, young, beautiful, patient, self-assured and sirenly grandmotherly.

This is a weekend that will change her life forevermore. Darra makes note to self: Honey, you simply must be careful about what you pray for...