SUNDAY SELFIE SERIES #63

Natasha Kamrani

SUNDAY SELFIE SERIES #63: The rapturous Natasha Kamrani. I don’t use the word rapturous lightly — it is much deserved, for Natasha is one of the most enthusiastically up for it people I have the pleasure to know. While she is a new friend to me, here’s what I know for sure — not only is she in possession of a keen and curious mind, she has a heart to match. She’s on my short list of those to call should trouble arise, and I know she’d be on my porch in a flash. I can think of no higher compliment for a person than true friend.

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1.What has humbled you more than anything else?

In the interest of word count, let’s just go with this simple truth: Parenting my teenagers and “parenting” my aging parents.

2.Do you feel like you’ve gotten a good education?

On paper, I’ve got all the formal educationey stuff—the high school diploma, an undergraduate degree and a law degree. But the learnings that have best served me in finding joy and purpose and doing all sorts of cool things is every single bit of it derived from the people I’ve had the good fortune to get to know along the way. By total luck of the draw, I was set up to understand just how much there is to gain from having weirdly broad networks of people in your life.

My mom is from the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, raised in a coal mining town.  My dad was raised in a small town in Iran.  They were married 50 years at the time of my dad’s death. I had to work hard growing up to make sense of all that my parents’ marriage meant in terms of culture and language and politics and belief systems.  

In addition to my extended family, I count so many friends and acquaintances among those from whom I’ve received a top flight education.  They include staunch leftists as well as born-again Christian conservatives.  Wealthy white entrepreneurs who work their asses off at stand up desks and low-income Black women who work their asses off just to get by.  Artists and authors and socialites and frat boys.  A law student with a side gig as a rodeo rider, a queer activist who can’t afford to transition, a naive politician, a pastor with a broken heart, and a young woman with a big vision.

Perhaps what best confirms that I’ve received a good education is that I know, with unshakeable conviction, that most of the wisest people walking our earth look least impressive on paper, both in terms of their resumes and, if they even have them, their bank statements.

3.Do you believe that forgiveness benefits the forgiver or the transgressor?

There’s Transgression with a capital T, but in my life right now—co-parenting two teenagers with my husband of a couple decades while looking after my elderly mother who moved in with us a few years ago—lowercase transgressions are the stuff of my daily life. 

Forgiveness happens quickly and almost imperceptibly by each one of us and it benefits the whole of us. There’s the quick temper that flairs when the teenager reports a scratch on the fender of the car WE’VE WORKED SO HARD TO PAY FOR, for instance. My husband and I pardon the scratch. The teenager excuses the parental temper flared too quickly or the voice raised louder than any scratch deserves. After the drama, my mother will passive aggressively weigh in with some commentary on my parenting.  

And I will continue to forgive her for always, always being so wrong.  

4.What is your proudest accomplishment?

Maybe that I have only ever needed to turn to my parents once, and then only very modestly, for financial support since I graduated from college?

Maybe that I married so insanely well that the hot guy from my 20s turned into the decent, kind gentle man of my 50s?

Maybe that my kids mostly seem like truly good people?

Maybe that the one time my name was on a ballot for public office I won?

Maybe that I just enrolled in DJ school as a gift to myself on the occasion of my 53rd birthday?

Maybe that I have so many answers to this question?

5.How would you like to live out your golden years?

Wearing a sequin caftan and a wig on a working farm (that I don’t work) with a bunch of retired drag queens and my second husband Bradley Cooper.  Alternatively, traveling the world with my husband, my sister, our kids, their partners and their kids.  And if this second scenario happens to include some drag queens someday, then all the better!

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