Stream of Conscience
Vogue, February 22, 2005
Robert Sullivan
Stately, strong-voiced Paul Hewson, a.k.a. Bono, descended from the stairhead toward the beginning of an Irish day -- bearing not his sunglasses, amazingly, but his thick, strong-gripped hand, extended in gracious welcome. With Ali Hewson, his wife, working at her desk, with his daughter about to sit down to piano lessons, in a house that feels vast and yet warm only partly because of the fireplace that is crackling, he intones, in a somewhat gravelly but still immediately recognizable rock-star voice, "Come and have a look."
At which point, grabbing coat, he walks, semi-solemnically, down his stairs, out onto the terrace of the Hewson's little guest house, a terrace that sits high over the Irish Sea, that looks east toward Europe and, to be metaphoric about it, the world, which is what Bono, as is well known, is always looking at. He strolls relaxedly through his little guest house, its bathroom wall decorated with host-sanctioned graffiti, scribblings of the likes of Brian Eno, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie and Michael Stipe -- Stipe having mischievously signed in a corner, along, as his host gleefully notes, Bono's crack.
Out on the sea-facing terrace, Bono offers the complete ocean vista and points out the sights in the half-moon bay, including the nearby home of the Edge, a.k.a. U2's guitarist, and a mile or so away, a little Martello tower. A Martello tower, as any fan of obscure Irish literary landmarks will tell you, is a small military turret, one of dozens built along the Irish Coast from 1804 to 1815 to defend the country against a Napoleonic invasion. Since abandoned by the military, they have tended to be inhabited by Irish artists and writers and musicians -- a group including Bono himself, not to mention the writer whose writings haunt Dublin and Ireland and all things written about them for better if not worse: James Joyce. "When I owned one, I went and read all about them, 'cause I wanted to know all about them," says Bono in an excited version of his Dublin brogue. "And I went inside Joyce's tower. And I saw Joyce's guitar!"
Yes, it's true: James Joyce had hoped to be a singer, a tenor, a rock star of sorts, and today, as Bono heads back to the house, as he walks his way back up the green hill to find his wife and set off in the family car and peregrinate the hills of Ireland, Bono is hoping to be in fashion. And his wife wants to be in fashion, too, the implication of their desire being that Ali and Bono are about to take a trip to the country to thank the man whose home inspired the launch of their new fashion line, this home being a manor house on a 5,000-acre estate beautiful enough to inspire a thousand designers, a place called Luggala. "It's the artistic epicenter" is how Bono describes Luggala. Bono and Ali's new line, called Edun, is designed by Rogan Gregory, and on Edun's behalf they are about to transport a very old bottle of very find Armagnac, in thanks for the inspiration to the lord of Luggala, a man named Garech Browne.
Behind every strong, smart, quick-witted mother and wife who has, aside from raising four children, run campaigns against British nuclear-reprocessing plants and driven ambulances to Chernobyl, is a rock star. Or at least alongside her, which is where Bono is today. Bono leaves the Maserati in the suburban Dublin driveway and shrinks into the passenger seat of the toy-infiltrated station wagon. In addition to two teenage daughters, the Hewsons have two even younger sons. Ali is wearing Rogan jeans under a blue slip by Yohji Yamamoto, a simple black Prada sweater, and a black Prada coat. Bono is wearing jeans, an earthy green-and-black sweater by Lainey Keogh, the Irish designer and brothel creepers, the crepe-soled black suede boots. And then, at last, sunglasses.
"Ready, B?" Ali asks Bono. "Yes," Bono says, and the two are off on their accidentally peripatetic journal into the Wicklow Mountains. "Wicklow's the Garden of Eden, isn't it? Sorry, I mean it's the garden of Ireland," says Ali, tongue slipping on account of maybe too much fashion excitement.
But as the motorways of dear old dirty Dublin fade in the rearview mirror, as the lowlands become uplands and the great gray woolly clouds kaleidoscope the sun across the hills, a mention of Eden seems apropos: It rains, it drizzles, and the sun breaks through paradisically gold, all in the space of a few minutes.
"We get four seasons in one day," says Ali.
"It's so inspiring and so beautiful," says Bono, leaning back in his seat, completely relaxed-seeming.
Like the warrior who never gives up, or at least like a bard who won't stop singing, Bono is back. There's the new CD, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, another home run for U2, fueled by the Edge's still-searing guitar and Bono's autobiographical hymns to his late father. There are the U2 iPod commercials, which are to music what the Sarah Jessica Parker Gap ads are to fashion. And this time Bono is working the entirely new (to him) field of fashion to prove a point about the possibilities of leveling the lopsided trading situation of the world. He's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2003) by helping cancel Third World debt, and he's criticized the Bush administration for its lack of alacrity with regard to African aid. He's used his rock 'n' roll pulpit to grab evangelical Americans by the lapels of their Sunday best and force them to see what's going on. Now he's combining his homeworked savvy about the financial situation of the developing world with his supreme rock star-status to sell a clothing line made in factories in Africa and Peru -- a practice of what he's been preaching. Today he's driving into the hills, but in a recent meeting in New York with a fashion executive he was overhead to say, "Politics isn't sexy. Fashion is sexy."
And it's a mom-and-pop fashion label. Ali Hewson is the Penelope to his Ulysses, the less-seen strategist who, as opposed to "International Rock Star," signs "Mother" on her passport on purpose. Ali Hewson may not be a household name in America, and she may, impressively, mostly shy away from the limelight everywhere, but she is known in Ireland, at least, as an activist in her own right, if not the linchpin in the Bono operation. She has worked to shut down an English nuclear-reprocessing center that contaminates the Irish Sea. A film that she narrated, Chernobyl Heart, about Chernobyl's lingering human devastation, won an Oscar last year. ("Bono woke me up and said, 'You've won an Oscar,'" she recalls, "and then later I said, 'Wait a minute, does this mean I won an Oscar before you?'") Once the name Ali Hewson surfaced in the papers as a candidate for the Irish presidency, and the name was taken very seriously. In the case of Edun, she's the one talking to the business people every day, calling Bono in when necessary. "Ali's very good with the dog whistle," says Bono.
Naturally, Edun is no Britney Spears-wear. It's the opposite of the typical celebrity clothing line, in fact -- a celebration of craftsmanship and organic farming and absolute uncelebrity-ness. It is a company that creates clothes based on a simple but globally unpracticed concept: fair trade. An apparel factory in Tunisia, another in Peru, and a plan that uses capitalism but flips capitalism on its head -- a plan that starts with what the factory makes and then takes that to the world, rather than planning to find the cheapest factory in the world and move on when another factory charges less. "People are saying, 'Can you help us get globalized?'" says Ali. "They want to be globalized."
"They are against the abuses of it," says Bono, "and they are suffering the abuses of it. But trade is good."
Meanwhile, Rogan is not the typical designer. Rogan Gregory is a creator of street-smart fashions that are still somehow natural clothes -- high-end and high-concept pieces that thrive in the streets of the Lower East Side but seem rooted in something by a forest-based indie rock band. As it happened, Rogan and his team, before Ali and Bono ever happened into their lives, were already looking for a new way to do business and had just produced a certified organic cotton label called Loomstate. "I look at what people do best," says Rogan, sitting in his Tribeca studio one recent winter morning, "and work from there."
"It's about redesigning the design process," says Scott Hahn, Rogan's business partner.
"The conscious-commerce model, that's the way we do things," Rogan continues. "People can like it or not. That's our mission, to find sustainable models of doing things -- that just goes without saying."
The genius part of the Hewson-Rogan partnership is all about serendipity, because when Ali was out looking for a designer who might be able to help her and her husband design a fashion label, they found a designer who was already thinking along their lines. "There was definitely an alignment," Rogan says.
Cut to the Rogan showroom, two years ago. See Ali enter, on a tip from U2's stylist, Sharon Blankson, who is with her that morning. See Ali's eyes light up in the Tribeca showroom, which is as much a gallery as a showroom, with found-object sculpture by Rogan, things that look like Andy Goldsworthy let loose in an abandoned Home Depot. Imagine the other side of the room, where Rogan and Scott Hahn are a little freaked out, since Ali was her usual unannounced and unrecognizable (in the United States, anyway) self. Rogan is thinking, Who is this person?
The last thing that happens in this silent, Tribeca-situated style-related pantomime is that Ali freaks out -- internally, of course -- when she discovers that they have a line that's all organic cotton. "I thought, Oh, my God!" she remembers. "Alarm bells were ringing, and I though, Maybe we're too late. Maybe the horse has left this stable." She left the shop, troubled.
"So we rang them up the next day," Ali continues, "and Sharon explained to them what it was about. And they were very open."
Ali brought Bono the second time. He loved the operation, loved the clothes, and expresses that love in a way that means the fashion writers and fashion publicists of the world now have to worry about their jobs: "It completely made a lot of sense to me because I love middle America. I love the West. I love the Midwest. I love to travel. I love travel, concrete, the road -- you know, Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles. So I'm in a designers' showroom where I feel for the first time a new American aesthetic that's a development from casual and workwear. You can see the aesthetic, and it's clear. It's travel. It's the real America. And you can see it's got the aesthetic, but it's looking for a philosophy. And they're starting to wonder. Can they make organic jeans? They want to do that. They're already there. So when we walk in the room, we say that's what we'd like to do -- you know, it was the easiest conversation of our life."
All that was left was for Ali and Bono and Rogan and his team to meet in Ireland a few months later, which they did at the Clarence Hotel, the old Dublin inn that was once a dowdy place for priests and punks, until Bono and the Edge bought it and made it into the coolest place for priests and punks in all Dublin, a lap of luxury on the Liffey. Ali was happy with the chemistry. "There were similar spirits, and our desires -- well, I mean, we're worlds apart in a lot of ways. We're two people coming from Ireland, and two guys, two New York designers -- but there is a lot of common ground."
"Common values," says Bono.
Over the course of a few days, they hammered out a business deal and then were left only with the not-so-small detail: Rogan had to come up with some clothes.
"And I was like, OK, well, which direction are we going with the designs?" Rogan remembers.
So they took him for a drive into the hills, the same drive they are on today in their family car -- the drive out of Dublin and up, up into the Wicklow Mountains, the drive from Dublin gray, from ticky-tacky roadside development, to euphoric green. "Nature is my religion," Rogan says, "and it helps me a lot from a design standpoint to have some landscape to latch onto."
The name Edun, by the way, is nude spelled backward. Nude being the name of the Dublin organic-food chain in which the Hewsons have a share. The name was Ali's idea, and Rogan agreed, which settled it. This is not to imply that Bono is laissez-faire about all this, despite the fact that Ali is so thoroughly involved. On the contrary, says Rogan.
"Bono's inspiring," says Rogan.
"And what he really recognizes is that the biggest scale that you can get requires the simplest idea," Hahn says.
"And he has this ability to connect with people," says Rogan. "It's kind of amazing. You can't even get down the street and he's talking to everyone and asking them questions. I know how this sounds, but that's what he does. He really makes you feel good about yourself."
Team Edun is already receiving good orders and good vibes. "I like the idea that the clothes are being developed for the greater good," says Julie Hilhart, fashion director of Barneys. "And I also like the clothes. They're very stylish. They're things you want to wear." "They're not in-your-face" is how Michael Fink, senior fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, describes Edun. "They're instant best friends. They look great, feel great, and the cause is great."
Rogan has never appealed to a very wide audience, and Bono wants to change all that, for his and his wife's sake, for the sake of the factories, for the sake of Rogan.
"We want to give Rogan a hit single," Bono keeps saying. Another thing Bono is saying lately is this -- "Shopping is politics."
So off into the hills, into the Wicklow Mountains, where on this Irish winter afternoon, Mrs. and Mr. Bono have just entered Roundstone, the highest village in Ireland, a geography of rolling green that is as subtly beautiful as it is iconic, a landscape that naturally blew Rogan, who had never been to Ireland, completely away. "I couldn't believe it," he recalled shortly after returning. Ali and Bono sit for lunch in the Roundstone Inn, the bartender waving them in semi-nonchalantly, a patron choking discreetly on his Guinness. Ali takes the soup, Bono the stew. The fan who screws up the courage to approach is greeted cordially by the husband and wife -- they act like the world's most gracious celebrities, if not Ireland's, and they are certainly among Erin's most fashionable.
"Ali's seen probably as one of Ireland's most stylish women," says Ali's friend Mariand Whisker, a former L.A.-based designer who recently returned to Ireland to create phantasmagorical Indian-influenced fashions in the Irish capital city near the Artic, "but in a very unique way, in that she knows what she wants to wear -- it's her own style. It's not a designer kind of style. That's why I love working with her. Nobody says, 'Oh, she's wearing a Mariad Whisker.' I mean, my collections don't bear any resemblance to anything that's going on in fashion."
"They know exactly what they want, and they are quite focused in their desire. They aren't excessive or OTT" -- that's over-the-top, if you don't speak fashion. "They are subtle," says Lainey Keough, whose little shop on Dawson Street in Dublin is one of the epicenters of Irish fashion -- which, like Rogan, is earthy, somehow steeped in nature.
Ali and Bono met in school -- she was twelve, he was thirteen -- but didn't begin dating until three years later. Her mother, she recalled over coffee in the Roundstone Inn, made nearly all her clothes, with the exception of the gabardine. "Gabardine trousers used to be sent to me from my auntie's relatives in America, and any mom thought they were the height of fashion, so I was made to wear them, and even I knew they weren't cool, but I knew there were no alternatives," says Ali.
"When I met her," says Bono, "she was wearing those and a tartan kilt. The tartan thing was what got my---"
"Got your blood pressure---" Ali interjects.
"My sense of mischief aroused. I remember the gabardine pants, and I remember all the clothes that you made and your mother made. And I remember this girl who was so beautiful and so completely unaware of it. I mean, she used to wear Wellington boots and gabardine, and there was just no vanity. And I thought that this was just the most attractive person I'd ever seen, a completely unself-conscious beauty. Pretty sexy making your own clothes, I think."
"My mother made them," says Ali. "She still would. She'd make all our kids' clothes if they let her."
"I mean, I always that that Ali had a very creative sense of style -- she never looked like anyone else. I thought that she leapfrogged fashion. And you know I have a lot of girlfriends."
"That's girl hyphen friends -- did you get that?" Ali says, Penelope-like, like the one who, while beating off the suitors at home, doesn't need an oracle to know what's going on out on the road with wandering rock stars.
"And Ali's the easiest to buy for," Bono continues.
For his part, Bono the Teenager was wearing a black jumper with colored stripes that his mother made and something like the mullet that he was known for in the Eighties, which when Bono and Ali first went to Africa, kids in Africa actually made fun of, as Bono noted in his recent speech to the British Labour Party. It was Ali and Bono's first trip to that continent, which they took just after he recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas�" with Band Aid, the first celebrity African famine-relief effort, in 1984. Bono and Ali worked for two months with an Irish charity in Ethiopia, a place where children were left at the gates of the camps, the parents desperately hoping someone might take the babies in. "I think the legs were just cut from underneath of us by what we saw," says Ali, "and that dragged us out of our teenage years and our early 20s and a lot of innocence and to a shocking reality of what life is like for two-thirds of the world."
When they got back they began to recognize the structural aspect to poverty: that poverty proceeds not merely from natural calamity, but from calamitous political leadership and corrupt trade relationships. "We don't let the poorest of the poor keep their products on our shelves," Bono says, "and with old debts that we're holding over their heads, we're making them slaves. So you start to go, 'Oh, wow, while you're passing the plate at your Sunday service, your government is demanding more money from them than you are giving.' When you hear that, you're absolutely insane."
Nobody preaches against economic inequality like Bono. No one understands the rhetorical winds of the media better, and as he ends the story of his and Ali's economic self-education, Bono points out that the engine of American charity needs to be tweaked, despite the common Cyclopean American perception. "We realized that outside of charity, outside of justice, there's good old American trade, commerce. And this new idea of conscious commerce -- well that finally is the only thing that's going to fix this problem long term. 'Cause you can fix the bad trade agreements -- we're working on that. And you can increase aid. And by the way, the United States is number 20 on the list of richest countries in per capita giving to the poorest of the poor -- i.e., you're at the bottom of the class. And the reason no one knows that is you can always say you're giving more than anyone else, and you are giving more than anyone else, but not per capita. It's just because you're a bigger country. If we use Europe as a comparison to America, then you're in the dust. But the point is, in the end, America does have a clue about how to rid the world of extreme poverty."
"If you have it made in Africa," says Ali, managing to get in a word -- and pointing out to her husband that it is about time to leave the Roundstone Inn, to get back on the road to Luggala -- "you create trade there, you can create jobs there."
Thus Edun. Thus a factory in Peru and Tunisia that is busy filling the initial orders. Thus colors in the fabrics made in Peru that are, like the fabric, organic, using natural dyes -- coffee, blue corn, gardenias. Thus Edun's CEO, Richard Cervera, an entrepreneur brought in by Ali and Bono, has already hired someone to represent the Hewsons in Peru and also to look for new ways to bring economic prosperity to a town and to small organic farmers, for new ways to open other old factories, to create jobs through trade. The Hewsons see the possibilities of social transformations in trade but see also the beauty of compassion as a selling point, as a plug, as a pitch that sails nicely through the marketplace and attracts the customer that Edun hopes to attract.
"It's making people aware of the story of clothes," says Ali. "Do you really want to put on something that's made ---"
"With despair," Bono interjects.
"By somebody who's distressed," says Ali. "It's like that movie Like Water for Chocolate, where they're making the food, and if the cook is unhappy and sad, then everyone is feeling unhappy and sad, and if the cook is feeling sexy then everyone feels sexy. There's an essence along with them, I suppose, and these clothes will have a good story."
Likewise, the aesthetic of the clothes matches the idea of the clothes. "It's back to nature," says Ali exuberantly. "It's about easy, easy sexuality. This is really about quiet, confident but sexy clothes. Sure. Just sure. In fact, my own personal feeling about clothes is -- well, it's been a kind of angst-ridden experience. But as I get older and more sure of myself and more mature, now I know what I'm going to wear -- I don't have to listen to fashion, in a sense. I know who I am, so clothes have started to become who I am."
"Yeah, you're not who you wear. It's more like why you wear," says Bono. "And of course it's very revealing as to why people choose certain things whether it's fit or labels. But I think we have this idea that we're going to make people label aware. Which is aware of what's on the label: Where it was made, who made it, how it's made."
They are getting back in the family car now -- thanks to the bartender, and a big wave to the little pack of nine- and ten-year-old boys who realize it's Bono that they've seen on their way home from school.
"There is a story to every piece of clothing that we wear," says Bono as they start out of town, the last few miles to Luggala. "In the past people haven't wanted to know that story. That's about to change. The same as it changed with the cans of beans in the supermarket. People are not going to buy a tin of beans with a load of preservatives if they can buy another one. And if it's 2 cents or 20 cents more expensive then that's how people will feel more luxurious in the future. And by the way, this is significant in cultural terms, because this is the end of the Sixties idea that revolution is around the corner. People now know it's not. It's in their kitchen. It's in their footsteps, in the choices that they make to buy this and not that."
"But also, the most important thing is that the clothes be desirable in themselves," says Ali as they are driving again deep into the natural vista, into the hedgerow-patterned hills, which nest a white, sugar-coated peak, off toward the ethereal home of Garech Browne.
"Or else, all bets are off," says Bono.
Wandering rock star and wondering rock-star spouse -- a betting fashion reporter would put his money on Ali Hewson to know where she's going, on the road to Luggala or anywhere else. Today, however, there is a slight complication, in that, unbeknownst to them, someone has spun the road sign -- as a prank -- so that they are heading in the wrong direction.
"We're going into the Sally Gap," says Bono, referring to this vast, ancient mountain pass, a huge granitic high-altitude plateau surrounded by the peaks of Kippure, Djounce, Tonduff, and Corrig. Bono says this in a way that, as he quickly notes, is accidentally lyrical. "Ah, I've got to write that song."
Then, trouble. "These trees don't look right," says Ali.
In the next minute the Sally Gap, to their consternation, does not appear. More wandering, a brief stop at Powerscourt, a waterfall that is mystical in the mist-thick air.
"Just to interrupt," says Bono, "I think we're going the wrong way."
"I do too," says Ali.
For the next 20 or so minutes, the Hewsons are officially lost, but impressively for the fashion partnership, not to mention the marital one, no arguments. "We gave up shouting years ago," says Ali.
"I have a habit of getting lost," says Bono.
"This is what we always used to do before the kids, take little trips. I hope we'll be doing this when we're old," says Ali.
Not that they have not had their share of adventures as parents: Ali recalls being in war-torn Sarajevo for a U2 concert during New Year's. "She's been shot at," the husband says of his wife.
"There was shooting in Sarajevo. There were minefields in the Saharan deserts. There was shooting in El Salvador, come to think of it," she says.
Eventually, they call the pub -- "Yeah, this is Bono. Em, we seem to be lost" -- so that in a minute they are at the gate of Luggala, about to descend through the secret-seeming gates, just as they did when they last took Rogan back to Irish nature for inspiration. ("Bono said, 'There's this guy, Garech Browne, and he hangs out here at this inn, and let's see if he's here,' and he was," recalls Rogan, still sounding amazed.)
"Wait till you see this place," Bono says today.
Garech Browne, lord of Luggala, though more accurately the son of Ooonagh Guinness, and hair to the Guinness fortune and, significantly to Bono and all Irish musicians, the founder of Claddagh Records, which, in Browne's Dublin flat, helped invent modern Ireland by recording the traditional music and musicians of the past, not to mention writers the likes of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Robert Graves. In his apartment in Dublin, Garech Browne hosted the first meetings of the Chieftains.
"We have to tell Garech that this place has become our epicenter," Bono says as they drive down for their thank-you visit to Luggala, bottle of 1947 Armagnac in the backseat.
They descend from the gates at the edge of the valley, down through the hills, down the little back road, into the Valley of Glendalough, the site of the ancient ruins of the monastery of Saint Kevin, who when in the midst of prayer, watched a bird build a nest in his hand and, conscientiously, held still until the egg hatched. (In a poem concerning Saint Kevin, Seamus Heaney, another friend of Bono's, wrote, "Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river, To labour and not to seek reward, he prays.") At the head of the long blue lake, in the small flatland framed by tall cliffs, Bono and Ali drive slowly up to the 1780s Gothic Revival home. See Garech Browne's 1953 Rolls-Royce. See the specially bred Japanese sika deer. See a mist descending on the lake.
Bono remembers Rogan's first reaction to it all. "He was photographing ---" Bono begins.
"Everything," Ali says.
"I was saying, 'These trees! These trees!'" Rogan confirms. "I wasn't expecting it, but that's exactly where the aesthetic came from."
At the door today now stands Browne himself: gray ponytail, soft and wizard-like silver beard, a blazer that's a green from a Yeats poem. "It's Guatemalan," Browne says of the jacket. They sit before the large fire, facing Browne and the Lucian Freud portrait of Browne, glasses of champagne served off silver trays, mysteriously refilling -- shades of Lotus Eaters. They talk of Garech's wife, Princess Purna Harshad, the daughter of the maharaja of Morvi of India; of Garech's mother, Oonagh Guinness; of the Seychelles; of a poem written at Glendalough: "[M]otionless and gray, the huge cliff hangs upside down in the mirror of the lake; water, mountain and forest held in lasting embrace." They remember the Irish piper Seamus Ennis, whose hands, not coincidentally, are cast in bronze and sitting before Browne, a shining relic of Irish musicianship at which Bono marvels. On an old recording, they listen to a piper play a beautiful air.
Eventually, Ali and Bono present Browne with the Armagnac, and at some point, Bono tells Garech the reason they dropped in. "Look, we just wanted you to know that your place has turned out to be our inspiration," Bono says.
Browne nods, pleased-looking, and points to the bottle of Armagnac, the gift. "You must have some," he says.
"Oh no, we have to get going," says Ali.
More protest until at last, the Armagnac opens. "Oh, we must," says Browne.
The last time they were there with Rogan, Ali and Bono stayed into the evening, but now they have to get home. Back into the car, in the dark, waving goodbye to Browne beneath the cloud-draped stars, on the winding road out, Bono slumps again in the front seat. "Makes you want to grab the kids and stay for the week," he says. They talk a little in the dark night driving, seemingly happy with the day. "See, the thing about us," Bono says, "is that we like each other. It's almost the biggest thing you can say."
Toward the end of the drive, Bono will decide not to stop for another pint, will decide to go home to the kids, and Ali will drop him off at home, driving herself into Dublin, heading to stop in on her friend Mariad Whisker, the designer. The lights of the city will approach, the dark, dirty waters of the Liffey will come into sight, as she stops at the Clarence. For now, though, Ali drives the car around the winding curves, never flinching in the oncoming headlights, and responds quickly. "Yes," she says.
hehe, at least this is keeping me occupied or I'd be bored out of my gourd.
I think it's awesome! I won't need to look anywhere else for pictures 
Thank you! 
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