After a day of great news -– Vanity Fair wants an interview with me, Holt Renfrew has agreed to take the line as well as ABC Home, and an Italian distributor wants to present Kahina Giving Beauty to thirty stores -- there is nothing more humbling than a trip on the red eye to Morocco on Royal Air Maroc. While I had a moment of self-glorification, imagining the minor celebrity I will receive at the hands of Vanity Fair, it quickly dissipated in row 24 of Flight 7481, stationed directly across from the bathroom. As usual, the plane is more than filled to capacity, with a baby on the lap of every other passenger, half of the women with their heads covered and the other half with their limbs barely so. The legroom of my tiny seat is occupied by a metal box holding I don’t know what, and the exterior metal flap keeps falling down at my feet. I suppose it is an initiation of sorts, an acclimatization to the country I am traveling to, full of smells and unfamiliar sites, and humanity rubbing up against itself, all the things I love about Morocco.
