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 Belinda Carlisle and Lisa Borgnes Giramonti in Kolkata. Courtesy Belinda Carlisle and Lisa Borgnes Giramonti | It was the middle of the night in rural Rajasthan. The road had become a dirt track, and our taxi driver was refusing to admit he was lost. I was trying to quell a rising panic when my friend Belinda turned to me and winked, “This is going to make a great story someday.” She was right. We eventually found our way to the hotel, but more important, we’ve been getting mileage out of that adventure ever since. We’ve been friends for twenty years, and in that time, Belinda has moved from England to France to Thailand, and I’ve done two LA-to-NYC loops. Traveling together is what cements our relationship. Once or twice a year, we’ll meet up in a new place: the stranger and more unfamiliar, the better. We become our best selves on these trips. We make each other braver, wiser, more spontaneous. And we share the same medical need for coffee in the morning, so there’s that, too. Here, we discuss our favorite memories from our past two decades of travels. — Lisa Borgnes Giramonti  Courtesy Belinda Carlisle and Lisa Borgnes Giramonti |
Lisa Borgnes Giramonti: We met in London in 1996 at a dinner party, and within twenty minutes, we had made a date to go on a Jack the Ripper ghost walk. Belinda Carlisle: We clicked right away. Anybody who goes on a ghost walk is someone you have to take a second look at. Little did I know that you had the same deep-rooted curiosity that I did. LBG: And then you called me up a couple of months after that and asked me to go to Kazakhstan with you for a concert you were singing at. BC: I remember we were stuck in that big corporate hotel, and we had that bodyguard Akmed with the gun, and he didn’t want to take us beyond the gates, but we insisted. We wanted to immerse ourselves with the locals and have an authentic experience. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t, like with that old Soviet bathhouse. LBG: It had moldy gray tiles, and there was that Siberian prison-guard lady who started shouting at us, “No clothes, no clothes!” and we froze and then slunk shamefacedly out. | From Our Friends at Condé Nast Traveler:  |
BC: But that’s what I loved about you: you were willing to try it. What bonds us is a sense of adventure and curiosity. When it comes to traveling, you don’t want to go sit on a beach somewhere. That’s not me, and that’s definitely not you. LBG: Whenever we travel anywhere, we have our little explorer saints looking over us. Women like Freya Stark, Martha Gellhorn, Sybille Bedford. One of our all-time heroes, author Lesley Blanch, was your husband Morgan’s godmother. I know how hugely important she was in your life, and still is. BC: Before I met her, I never knew anybody like her, and I’ve never met anybody like her since. To me, she was the ultimate bohemian soul and traveler. In every way, she was living the dream — traveling all through Afghanistan and the Middle East, she had Bedouin boyfriends and this crazy life. I would go over to her house in the south of France, and she would be in a turban and caftans with all her rugs that she had collected on her travels, and I would practically sit at her feet and say, “Lesley, tell me about Afghanistan.” And she would say, “Well, it was the most beautiful place on the planet, and the people were the loveliest, and they had the most wonderful figs and fruit and nuts …” She is my guardian angel, and I think of her quite a bit. Her stories opened me up to Central Asia, Iran, India, and gave me a different way of thinking.  A glimpse inside a home in Delhi. Courtesy Belinda Carlisle and Lisa Borgnes Giramonti |
LBG: Well, you have guts, that’s for sure. One of the things I’m in awe of is that 1,300-mile charity race you recently did driving a tuk-tuk through India. BC: You have to do it with me next time. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. It was so extreme. I saw parts of India that no one gets to see and probably a world which existed one hundred years ago that doesn’t exist in the big cities. I went deep in the Punjab to towns in which they never see women driving, so for them to see a white woman at the wheel of an auto rickshaw was probably one of the weirdest things. I would draw crowds of 100 to 200 people. When I would pull into a chai stall to get a cup of tea, they would look at me like, The alien has landed. But it’s something I know you would love because it’s ticked all the boxes for me — a little extreme, a little dangerous. LBG: We both like traveling places where all of our senses need to be fully alive. Twice now we’ve gone to hear qawwali music at the fifteenth-century shrine of Nizamuddin [the Muslim section of Old Delhi]. And to all see the Sufi mystics drumming and singing and whirling. It’s so magical; you just surrender to it. BC: Not everybody likes to leave room for the unexpected to happen. Sometimes a trip just needs to unfold. The most amazing things happen that way. That’s another reason why we are so good traveling together. And you like to take naps during the day like me. LBG: And we both like to go to bed early. BC: And we’re early to rise. LBG: And we love to be nerds. We sit around in our pajamas and pore over maps and figure out travel distances and research upcoming itineraries. BC: We research it, we respect it, and we obey the cultural rules. If we’re going somewhere that calls for some modesty in covering our heads, then we cover our heads. And we don’t show up in cutoffs and a tank top. And I think that that’s really important. LBG: Well, I’m proud to say that I own a burkini thanks to you. BC: The burkini has opened up a whole new world for me. I get so many compliments on mine. And I know that local people appreciate us respecting their culture. We know how small travel makes us feel in the grand scheme of things, which I think is a really important thing.  Courtesy Belinda Carlisle and Lisa Borgnes Giramonti |
LBG: You’re always the first to suggest the $40 hotel over the $200 one. BC: I’ll never forget when we went to India and we were staying at the Oberoi in Udaipur and I was on the Stairmaster and the woman next to me said, “God, this place, we could be in Laguna Beach.” And I thought, That is so true. You’re never really going to get the experience of a place if you’re constantly being buffered with room service and fancy sheets. It’s nice to have once in a while, but it’s not necessarily the way I like to travel. There’s so much out there to feed on. You and I have just discovered how amazing the history of the Silk Road is. Every day that I read that amazing Peter Frankopan book The Silk Road, I feel like I’m discovering something totally new. And I know that we’re going to go there and it’s going to be a much deeper adventure because we will be able to look at all those buildings and lift the veil of time. LBG: Well, you know all I live for is traveling back in time. BC: Whenever you go anywhere, you always come back a little different. I remember picking up a National Geographic when I was about eight years old and seeing pictures of Varanasi and feeling like it was familiar. When I’m in Old Delhi, I feel like I’ve been there many lifetimes. That’s what travel does. I love those moments in traveling, when it awakens something deep inside that you didn’t know you had. Lisa Borgnes Giramonti is an LA-based author and artist who refuses to let grass grow under her feet. Belinda Carlisle lives in Bangkok when she’s not performing and travels mainly by plane, train, rickshaw, and tuk-tuk. | | | | |
 | Katie Fricas is a cartoonist and illustrator in New York City; she enjoys long walks on the beach. | | | | |  Illustration by Tara Deacon | When I was a child, I loved weddings. I made a cute little bride, and my services were in high demand. Even those with only a loose connection to my family wanted me in their bridal procession. The little bride is a miniature version of the bride, complete with miniature wedding dress, miniature tiara, and miniature prima-donna ego. I took my work very seriously. I was not one of those toddlers who burst into tears when the opening chords of the processional sounded, running off to Mama with stage fright. Nor did I need to be escorted down the aisle by a parent, clutching my hand to stop me from tripping over. I was a confident walker. No matter how many meters of tulle encircled me, I always made it unscathed to the front of the church, where I would make a military right-angle turn and march to my designated seating. But the shelf life of a little bride is brutally short. You work for one year, two if you’re lucky, then somebody younger and cuter comes to take your place. ’Twas always the way of the world. After that career came to an end, I had to settle for the consolation prize of flower girl. A little bride is the second most important person at the wedding, a close runner-up to the bride. A flower girl, in comparison, is only an extra with confetti. The confetti was a great comfort, though. The church doors would open; the bride and groom would walk out triumphantly; and we would be waiting in a line, poised to shower the new couple with glittering paper. Inevitably, some of the confetti would land on us, and we would spend the rest of the wedding picking out the sparkles from our hair. And then there was the limbo between flower-girl age and puberty, when you were too big for the bridal train and too young for anything else. Weddings became deserts of adult socializing, loud music, oily food, and deep boredom. Little did I know that boredom was better than what was coming next: puberty. In some ways, it’s the same for girls across the world: breasts, hips, periods, and pimples. But having these four at a Nigerian wedding suddenly signaled something. You were now a woman, or at least an “almost-woman,” and almost-women did not play games at weddings like flower girls, nor, like older children, did they sit down like guests. Almost-women and women at Nigerian weddings were there to serve. After the bride, it is difficult to say who is at the top of the Nigerian wedding hierarchy. It’s a tie between the parents of the couple and the highest-ranking politician on the guest list. But I am certain who is at the bottom: single women. Once you step into the hall and it is espied that the fourth finger of your left hand is tragically bare, you are marked as standby waitstaff should the hired waiters fail. Many a time, I have gone to a wedding, holding my invitation card like every other guest, only to be summoned to a serving spoon or a food tray. At one wedding, they were kind enough to provide aprons for us so we wouldn’t stain our wedding finery. At another, the hired catering company came an hour late. All the single women, wearing the bride’s aso-ebi, were rounded up by the bride’s brother and asked to set the reception tables. The brother of the bride walked among us like an overseer, barking orders, shouting, “Hurry up, the guests are waiting!” When I confronted him about his rudeness, he replied, “Don’t you want to support your friend?” To which I countered, “Does she not have any male friends? Does the groom not have male friends? Are they allergic to cutlery?” Then there comes the dreaded bouquet toss. Whoever invented this tradition certainly did it to shame single women. But at a Nigerian wedding, this practice has been heightened. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” is played, announcing that the ritual is about to begin. The emcee, usually a man, takes the mic. “Single ladies. Come to the dance floor now before I start calling you out.” Nigerians can be superstitious. We are always on the hunt for good fortune, and so we can attach cosmic significance to the markedly mundane. Catching the bouquet has come to symbolize catching your blessing, i.e., catching your husband. At one wedding, when the emcee noticed that the single women weren’t in the mood to play, he resorted to prophecy: “If you’re a single lady here and you don’t come out in the next ten seconds, you will never marry.” An elderly couple at my table with whom I had grown friendly turned to me with alarm. “Go. Didn’t you hear what he said? Just go.” I went. After all, I’m also a superstitious Nigerian, and I do want to get married. But the worst, the very worst, I witnessed, was when the emcee somehow contrived to get the names of some single women from their parents. “Kẹmi Ṣolankẹ,” he said into the mic. “Kẹmi Ṣolankẹ, come out. Your parents have told me they’re tired of having you at home. You’re eating too much. Come out so you can marry.” And on and on he went, down his long, humiliating list. So who is one rung above the single woman at a Nigerian wedding? Again, it’s a tie between the married woman and the single man. The married woman is on standby should the guest list run out of single women. The single man’s position is more ambiguous. After all, he is still a man, but why has he not begun procreating and peopling the Earth with more Nigerians? There is no public shaming of the single man like with single women and the bouquet toss. But I have observed many a hapless young gentleman cornered by an auntie and forced to explain his lone status. My friend Breis has a brilliant song on this theme. It is part of the infantilizing of young Nigerians by an older generation, keen to depict us as feckless and irresponsible in order to provide justification for why they are still in power, still desperately clinging on. At a wedding, when you see an older adult telling off a younger adult for not being married (a state of affairs that is frankly none of their business), it becomes clear why the law states that a citizen of Nigeria cannot run for president until he or she is 35 years old. A human being under 35 is obviously still a child. The single man also has tasks automatically assigned to him according to his gender. Not the female tasks of serving food and setting tables. He is required to prove his manliness by lifting anything that needs lifting, parking any car that needs parking, and throwing out any guest who needs throwing out. We joke that as a single person, the only way to enjoy a Nigerian wedding is to buy a ring and rent a spouse. But perhaps the only way to fully enjoy Nigeria is to be over 50, an age when you finally cross over into adulthood. Nigeria is run by old people with old ideas. In April, our current president called Nigerian youths “lazy.” He was a military dictator more than 30 years ago and rebranded himself as a democrat in his late 70s. As a young, presumably “not lazy” dictator, he wasn’t very successful, and as an old democrat, he is equally clueless. The revolution will happen when young Nigerians realize that we outnumber the old; that if we came together, we would be unstoppable. We wouldn’t need to fight for scraps from the table because we would own the table, and the kitchen, and the farm. Till then, we continue slumbering in our forced adolescence, serving tables at weddings, tweeting our individual impotence, scrambling for tossed bouquets. Chibundu Onuzo was born in 1991 in Lagos, Nigeria. Welcome to Lagos is her second novel and the first to be published in the United States. | | | | |  Illustration by Ghazaleh Rastgar | CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
This week in Los Angeles, I saw a woman with what looked like fake lips, fake nails, fake breasts, fake cheeks, and a fake Gucci bag walk into a tanning salon. She was carrying a book. It was a book on Buddhism and impermanence. This reminded me that we don’t know anyone else’s story based on appearance alone. I think it’s nice that we don’t know. Happy birthday, Cancer! Celebrate the not knowing. LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Allowing ourselves to contain multitudes is scary, because the human mind seeks to compartmentalize information into patterns. It’s more cognitively comfortable to slap a label on ourselves and say “I am that,” rather than look at a spectrum and say “I am that and that and that.” This month, revel in your own fragmentation wherever you can. The ability to acknowledge disparate facets at once is a form of wholeness. VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
You’ve probably heard the expression “Don’t go to the hardware store for milk.” This means don’t go to someone for the love, approval, or empathy that they literally don’t have to give. Sometimes, when I think I have ceased going to the hardware store for milk, I’m still going for almond milk. It’s like, I don’t think that I’m expecting anything, but I’m still expecting a little. This month, let’s work on expecting nothing from those who have nothing to give. LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
Truth is one, paths are many — anyone’s claims to possess the one and only way should be taken with a grain of salt. This is not just true of spirituality but also true of politics, love, art, money, and purpose. This is also true of you. SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
This month, live and let live. For your own sanity and the sanity of those around you — and to preserve the mystery of the universe, which we don’t always understand and definitely don’t control. When you settle into “Let live,” it’s actually a relief. But now for the hard part: how to live? SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
Assuming that astrology isn’t total bullshit, you, Sagittarius, probably have a lot of FOMO. This month, ask yourself if it’s really other lives, experiences, and places that you want, or is it the perceived qualities symbolized by those people, places, and things? Then ask yourself if there’s something you can do, a micro-movement rather than a total overhaul, to imbue your life with more of those qualities. CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
If perfection is the enemy of the good, then high expectations are the enemy of peace. This month, plan less and expect less, and be pleasantly surprised at every turn. AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
Go to a Goodwill store or another thrift store. Kook around the racks and put together two outfits that you would wear if all your ideas about yourself were different, or at least more open-ended. Wear each outfit twice: once in a public setting, where you know no one, like on a bus or city street. Then wear them each again at a place where you know people. Where is the perception of judgment more intense? Is the judgment real, or is it a projection? What evidence do you have to back your findings up? PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
Why are you reading this horoscope? If you’re looking for something to change outside of you, remember that we can’t control the universe and what we think will make us happy often ends up being not that great. But if you’re looking for something inside of you, allow me to say you’re on the right path. ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
Celebrate Shabbat four times this month by taking 24 hours off social media, and the Internet as a whole, every Friday at sunset to Saturday at sunset. If there is a God, it probably doesn’t care whether you are posting selfies or not. But your spirit could use a break. TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
What are your expectations about love — the way it is “supposed to” look, feel, sound, and present itself — and what formed those expectations? This month, when even the smallest kernel of an idea about love surfaces, ask yourself where it came from, how it serves you, and if it really feels like yours. GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
Have you ever felt like you might have a thinking problem? What if “Figure it out” was not necessary this month? What if you took a break from having to analyze anything? Would that be scary, exciting, or a little bit of both? Melissa Broder is the author of the novel The Pisces (Hogarth), out now!; four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016); and So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | |
![Real-estate developers may be trying — rather aggressively, lately — to cover up the inherent freakiness of Coney Island, [Corner of main drag by Nathan's, with the giant, brand new It’Sugar Store across the street] mashing it out with the stomp of some big-footed buildings by the shore. [Glass buildings along the shoreline] But don’t despair](https://media.lennyletter.com/photos/5b3639ef1f104600102413db/master/w_1120%2Cc_limit/1%20fricas%20Mr%20Coney%20Island.jpg)
![But my favorite contestant was Wilfredo. [Wilfredo, contestant in the talent competition, with his pants pulled up to his neck, a snaggletooth, and a bob] [Wilfredo: “People often ask me why I’m sexy. And the only answer is, it’s cuz I feel sexy. The more candles I have on my cake, the hotter I become. Some people say I’m like a young Che Guevara. What a range I’ve got, no problem!” He threw a rose into the audience and it hit me right in the face. [Me getting smacked in the face with a rose, sketchbook open on lap]](https://media.lennyletter.com/photos/5b363ba28fdfe50010c82fed/master/w_1120%2Cc_limit/5%20fricas%20Mr%20Coney%20Island.jpg)
![Contestant Darrell Thorne could have been a hitchhiker from outer space in the swimsuit competition, serving one body/two looks with intergalactic glamour. [Two drawings of Darrell Thorne, contestant in the swimsuit competition. One is the right side of his body, the other his left. Each side is made up as a different character. Glenn says: “Kelly Ripa told America he was amazing.”] And he is. Glenn Marla brought us back to Earth. [Close-up of Glenn: “Are we concerned that there’s a little bit of wig left on the stage?”]](https://media.lennyletter.com/photos/5b363bc0da43d80010f2139a/master/w_1120%2Cc_limit/7%20fricas%20Mr%20Coney%20Island.jpg)
![Next, we rode a roller coaster with Gigi Bonbon, reigning Miss Coney Island, who made a cameo bopping and bouncing around in a costume that was meant to look like the front seat of the Cyclone. [Drawing of Gigi Bonbon on stage] And then, after the audience cast their votes, Lee VaLone took the title, [Lee looking fabulous receiving crown and sash] like we all knew he would.](https://media.lennyletter.com/photos/5b363c22ee19120010b1830e/master/w_1120%2Cc_limit/8%20fricas%20Mr%20Coney%20Island.jpg)
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