When You’re Stuck in Traffic During Fashion Week…

“Are we there yet” is one of life’s most important and torturous questions. The need for an answer is desperately immediate — if you’re the one asking it means you’re either insanely late or five years old, and in both scenarios, that you have to pee – but this question might as well be rhetorical because if have to ask, you already know the answer:

“No.”

Very rarely does that awful rejection come with solutions. During Fashion Week in particular it stings even more, because while there are ETAs and alternate routes, when you’re stuck in traffic and late to a show, time might as well be a napping sloth on that arduous road to Lincoln Center. We even had a sweet ride courtesy of Cadillac (think 20 inch rims and a sound system that could turn a billboard into confetti with one fell bass drop) but traffic’s traffic. And boredom’s boring.

So what do you do?

We sit so frequently on the West Side Highway in the days that count as New York’s week-o-fashion (plus countless hours in cabs on the way to doctors’ appointments, dinners, breakfasts and ear candling) that we’ve more or less come up with a playbook of activities to keep us busy in the backseat once the snacks run out:

When you’re bored in a car, why don’t you…

- Meditate

- Perform an outfit change

- Find unique ways to exit the car without actually opening the door — best performed when the car is at a stand still

- Talk to your car. Ask how its day was.

- Try out avant-garde hair braids on whoever is driving the car

- Play Fashion Week Bingo (Anna Wintour is 20 points, a broken heel is 15, accidental outfit twins are 5, models running to their next show are 2, etc. You can DIY the rules.)

- Do yoga outside of the car during grid-lock. Ours has wifi in it so we’ve been streaming various “how to touch your toes in just 3 weeks!”  videos like it’s our job. (During FW it kind of is though.)

- Try to run faster than the car when it’s actually moving

- Create an impromptu block party while stuck on 15th street headed toward Milk Studios. We’ve got Bose speakers in our car so we’ll handle the music portion of this event, if you don’t mind bringing the portable grill and a variety of chips.

- Throw half-popped corn kernels into other open car windows in the surrounding jam

- Get people to try and catch the kernels (grapes work too) with their mouths!

- Have everyone in your car jump out at a red light and switch seats like you’re in high school and just got your license

- Have a treasure hunt with the weird stuff under the car seats. Later, set up a museum in the back seat and tell everyone you’re waving admission because you’re feeling generous.

- Get in the car next to you and yell, “SURPRISE!”

- Practice your deejay skills

- Learn all of the words to a song you’ve always wanted to know and then, once memorized, inform the car next to you that they just won three free tickets to an impromptu concert by none other than YOU

- Read the driver the horoscopes of everyone in his or her immediate and extended family

- Jump out of the car with an imaginary sword and pretend your car is the belly of a dragon you just escaped, then threaten to battle it the name of your honor

- Last but not least: write a blog post. Kind of like we just did.

Part of a collaboration with Cadillac

Photos by Krista Anna Lewis