publisher profile

Nikki Hardin

Founder and Publisher of Skirt!. A native of Kentucky, I left home at 17 to elope with my high-school boyfriend. Twelve years later, divorced with three children and unskilled at almost everything, I started college at the age of 29. Earned a B.A. in literature from American University in 1976 and attended graduate school at the University of Virginia on a Governor’s Fellowship. I never completed my master’s degree, however,...

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The Lady Luck Issue

nikki

publisher@skirt.com

Dinner with Bill. I’m still not sure how I got included in former President Clinton’s dinner party at a local restaurant last month (maybe they confused me with someone else), but all I could think about that night was growing up and just getting by in a Kentucky town smaller than an eyelash. Back then, I dreamed about the wider world incessantly, but I couldn’t have imagined meeting a President, much less having dinner with him. It was a lucky fluke, like so much of my life. I’m grateful for having had a hard-luck life, short on money and full of wrong turns. To me, it’s the difference between doing all your driving on a straight stretch of interstate versus the back roads and blue highways. I broke down in a lot of strange places, but my scenery along the way was much more interesting. When I was a teenager, I wanted everything I didn’t have, but now I can’t imagine how hard it must be to find your passion and motivation when you don’t want for anything. A decade or so ago, I had
a lucky cancer, one that required no treatment other than surgery and had no lasting consequences. The enormity of that escape still overwhelms me. And when I was 50, I had a lucky idea. Skirt! happened at just the right time and in just the right place, but it could just as easily have gone under if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have friends who helped keep it afloat until it could swim on its own. It’s always easier to recognize how lucky I’ve been than to realize I can also be an instrument of luck in other people’s lives. I hope I have been. In fact, maybe President Clinton is thinking right now, “Gosh, how did a small-town guy from Hope, Arkansas, get so lucky to have dinner with a skirt from Skirt!?” It was my pleasure, Bill.