A REAL HAT TRICK
Bx. gal wearing new crown a day for a year
On May 20, Lee Kim forgot her friend Tracy’s birthday. But instead of sending a belated text message or Facebook post, the 43-year-old Bronx resident is making up for her blunder in the most public way possible — by wearing a different, elaborately constructed birthday crown every day for a full year.
“I got a Facebook notification telling me it was Tracy’s birthday, and I felt so terrible,” Kim told The Post while wearing an intricate butterfly-shaped headpiece. “So, I ran into the dollar store and got a bunch of pipe cleaners and made a birthday crown, and sent her a photo of me wearing it saying, ‘Happy Birthday, Tracy!’ ”
But that first day, as she and her brightly colored fascinator rode the subway from her Edgewater Park home to a design workshop in DUMBO, and, later, to a cocktail reception near City Hall, something incredible happened to Kim.
“Strangers would smile; people started talking to me,” she said. “I felt so happy wearing the birthday crown and thinking of my friend that I decided to keep doing it.”
Something about a woman in eccentric headgear encourages people to open up. As strangers have approached her on the subway and the street, she’s heard the life stories of an investment banker who lost her home in the recession, a filmmaker grieving over the suicide of a loved one and many others.
Every weekday morning, she fashions new headgear to wear during her job as an engineer at the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer in Midtown. In the evening, she often makes one for her 5-yearold daughter, Hannah, too. Kim documents each day’s look on Instagram under the handle @wearabletracy. Kim first met her pal Tracy Brandenburg, an anthropologist who splits her time between Tully, NY, and Stanford, Calif., about four years ago, at a design workshop. Brandenburg gave a talk about empathy, a word that Kim — who grew up in a small Korean village before moving to New York in 1996 — had never learned. At the time, Kim was reeling from a fallout with her parents. “Suddenly, I could put myself in my parents’ shoes and see me as they saw me,” she said of how she felt after the presentation. “I began to see that there’s no such thing as an absolute truth.”
“[Tracy] saved my life!” said Kim, adding that she and her parents have since reconciled.
Brandenburg is honored by her friend’s sartorial tribute. “We wake up to troubling news on a daily basis, but there is Lee, smiling with another beautiful Wearable Tracy and a story about how she touched the life of another person.”
For her “Wearable Tracy” hats, Kim has three rules: She must make a new one every day, she must wear it from 9 to 5, and she must tell anyone who stops her its origin story.
“It is a bit of a challenge because here’s this grown woman wearing something silly on her head,” Kim said on Wednesday. “Sometimes people laugh at me. My neighbors asked my husband, ‘Is she doing some kind of religious ritual with that thing on her head?’ ”
But she added, “It’s taught me so much about curiosity and openness. And it’s only Day 134.”