Baddiewinkle - Baddiewinkles Guide to Life

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

Rosedale 0632

Auckland, New Zealand

www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF, UK

www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

195 Broadway

New York, NY 10007

www.harpercollins.com

Photograph by Ryan Hall.

Photograph by Ryan Hall.

BADDIEWINKLES GUIDE TO LIFE. Copyright 2017 by Baddiewinkle, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Published in 2017 by

Harper Design

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

195 Broadway

New York, NY 10007

Tel: (212) 207-7000

Fax: (855) 746-6023

www.hc.com

Distributed throughout the world by

HarperCollins Publishers

195 Broadway

New York, NY 10007

ISBN 978-0-06-265564-6

EPub Edition July 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-265566-0

Library of Congress Control Number

2016955894

A Call to Action

This book is dedicated to YOU. Yes, you.

Im giving this baby to you because I know what its like to feel stuck. I know what it means to suffer loss and heartache, to experience death, drama, a midlife crisis, and, hell, to dread getting older. I also know what its like to sing and dance, and live life in full color.

Sometimes we need a friend to pull us out of the valley weve cast ourselves into. This book is my call to action for you to start living!

Push aside your roadblocks, mental or otherwise. I dont care if youre twenty or thirty or ninety years old; today is the day that you change your outlook on life.

To my fans: Thank you for lighting up my life. Keep doing you.

I have a confession:

Baddiewinkle isnt my real name.

Its Helen Van Winkle,

but you can call me Baddie.

Everybody else does, even the haters.

Hi, haters! Miss me?

Photograph from family archive.

Dont get fooled by this smile. I may look innocent but, deep down, Im a natural-born rebel.

I CAME TO MY NEW NAME AND PERSONA LATE IN LIFE BUT, DEEP DOWN, IVE ALWAYS BEEN BADDIEWINKLE.

From the time I was a young girl, growing up during the Depression in West Liberty, Kentucky, Ive been a rebel, a rule-breaker, and Ive broken plenty of hearts, too. The best Kentucky has on offerbesides me, naturallyis bluegrass, pretty women, and fast horses though people often get the last two confused. Dont get mixed up with a Kentucky woman! Ive been stealing your man since 1928, and dont you forget it.

People often ask me what it was like to live through the Depression. Id be lying if I said it wasnt hard. I dont have one personal belonging from my childhoodno doll, no toy, no blanket. We didnt hold onto things. People were important: family, friends. There wasnt money for anything else. I had six siblings, and my brothers and sisters and I would entertain ourselves with ghost stories. We rode down steep hills on old wooden wagons and, during the winter, careened down those same hills on sleds, our fingers and toes numb from the cold. These memories are better than any toy I could have held onto.

I wanted to be a movie star, someone beautiful and exotic-looking like Hedy Lamarr. Can you imagine the kind of clothes she must have had? I dreamt about it, and took to swapping out my ugly, brown school stockings with colorful socks. I kept the socks a secret as best as I could, and changed into them after I left my mothers watchful eye. A classmate of mine wanted to be Rita Hayworth, so we hit it off. Today, I have a closet brimming with out-of-this-world clothing. If its hot, its mine: pink, see-through, confetti-bombed with glitter, tiedye prints, the more outrageous and colorful, the better. My favorite designers are visionaries and hellions, people who arent afraid to think big: DI$COUNT UNIVERSE, The Ragged Priest, UNIF, Gucci, and Y.R.U.

Photograph from family archive.

This image is photographic evidence that I was born strong-willed and stubborn.

Photograph from family archive.

While I grew into myself as a teenager (seen here with my soon-to-be husband Earl), I never abandoned my sense of mischief.

Photograph from family archive.

Footloose, fancy-free, and forty years young.

If you think Baddiewinkle is a character Im playing and the clothes are just dress up, well, darlin, youre wrong. The truth is much deeper than that. Baddiewinkle is the loudest and most colorful public expression of who I am. Its not an act. It just took me a few years to own up to who I am.

After finishing high school, I took a business course and worked as a maintenance clerk in a parts factory, ordering gauges for machines for twenty-eight years. Can you imagine me doing that? Sometimes I cant. The company was Dresser Industries, and I ran the inventory from top to bottom.

Before working at Dresser, I had a two-year fling with Dependable Auto Supply. While that job was brief, it brought long-lasting stability to my lifein the form of my wonderful and loving husband, Earl.

You could say that job supplied me with a dependable man. Earl owned an auto body shop where I worked while we raised our family. For our first date, Earl and I went rollerskating. He was a hopeless romantic. Besides rollerskating, we loved to dance, and, lucky for us, Kentucky is