Coming Up Roses
The Texas Rose Festival can’t be explained—only experienced. I think the same could be said about Tyler, Texas.
It’s a truth that should be universally acknowledged that all roads lead to Tyler, Texas. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who is from Tyler, a medium-sized East Texas town that seems like it shouldn’t have the cultural reach that it does.
World-class athletes Earl Campbell, Johnny Manziel, and Patrick Mahomes were all born in Tyler—and so was Brittany Mahomes, the newest member of Taylor Swift’s girl squad. Patrick “McDreamy” Dempsey bought a home on Lake Jacksonville just south of the city the year after Grey’s Anatomy debuted and was spotted at local establishments while splitting time between Texas and Malibu.
I was working outside The Abbey Bookshop one day when a young Danish tourist struck up a conversation with me, asking me what brought me to Paris and where I was from originally.
When I said I was from Texas, her face lit up. “Do you know of Tyler?” she asked me in halting English. My stomach bottomed out at such a surreal moment, to be halfway across the world talking to a Danish girl whose knowledge of America included the tiny town where my mom grew up.
The girl’s name was Josefine, and she explained she had been matched with an international pen pal from Tyler while in Denmark’s equivalent of high school. Josefine had even visited Tyler—and the Tyler Rose Museum, where costumes from the Texas Rose Festival are on display. I pulled up pictures to show her that I had participated in the very festival that her Scandinavian sensibilities found so strange.
The Texas Rose Festival is a debutante ball on steroids. To the traditional white dresses and patriarchal “coming out” to society as eligible to be married, add in an annual theme, Broadway designers, 50-plus costumes, innumerable parties, and a parade through town, and you end up with the Southern lovechild of the Met Gala and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
The Rose Festival was first organized in 1933 by the Tyler Garden Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and local rose growers, ostensibly to celebrate the town’s rose-growing industry. Today, 80% of the country’s roses are still grown or processed in Tyler, and the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden is the largest of its kind in the nation.
The Rose Festival, too, has bloomed into three days of events that draw thousands of people to the city each year. It’s the most fun you can have east of the Neches River—and a strong case for progressive tax rates.
A designer named Winn Morton inspired this ascension from just another deb ball to a singular sensation in a state already overrun with debutantes. He’d designed for the White House, Broadway, and the Ringling Brothers Circus before being hired to Tyler. He led the festival for 35 years before retiring in 2019—the year before it was my turn to participate—and passing away in 2022, beloved by the Tyler community.
A new designer, Jacob Climer, was brought in for the 2020 festival, amidst a prolific career designing at opera houses and theaters around the world. He represents a new era to the city’s old guard, for better or for worse. If they understand his aesthetic references to Vivienne Westwood or Charles James, they don’t care. They’re more concerned with the number of “showstoppers” among the line-up of dresses—a standard that often requires feats of engineering, like a “sunshine” costume that glows in the dark when the theatre lights dim, or a “spider” whose train transforms into a web that rises behind her like a dark halo.
There’s a not-altogether-flattering country song about the festival called “Rose Queen” by William Clark Green. The girl from the most well-regarded Tyler family (and with the most money) is asked to be the Rose Queen. My stepdad’s sister was queen in 1997, and his brother married the queen he escorted in ’84.
Sometimes, there’s a crisis of politics, when two or more girls could feasibly be queen, so in the last few years, they’ve added the position of Princess of the Rose Festival to the court to keep the peace. The selection of the queen is at the discretion of the Texas Rose Festival, just one of the organizations that puts on the weekend, each responsible for one of the major events. The Order of the Rose helms the ball on the final evening, where every girl and her escort are presented to society. (My stepdad Evans is in line for the presidency of the Order of the Rose.) That night, everyone is so relieved the weekend is over that the band plays and the liquor flows late into the night, the threat of a hangover less devastating now that the weekend is over.
My mother was a lady-in-waiting in 1989; my great-grandmother, in 1937. My mom’s sisters are identical twins, and much to their chagrin, their costumes were Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum because their festival was wonderland-themed. When I visited Tyler as a child, I loved looking through years of festival portraits, hung in the Rose Museum or the country club. It’s a very unique legacy to have and to explain, one that has mystified me since I was a little girl.
The girls who didn’t grow up in Tyler, like me, are called duchesses instead of ladies-in-waiting. My year’s theme was “Secrets of the Garden,” and my title was the Duchess of the Energy Capital (a nickname for Houston, since no two girls from the same city can have the same title).
Because of the pandemic, the 2020 court was pushed back a year, so Queen Anna Grace of the House of Hallmark became the longest reigning queen in festival history. The only other time that the festival was called off was during World War II.
The year before, and for many more before that, I had vehemently refused my spot as a duchess, despite growing up attending festivals and marveling at all of the niche lore. When I started college at UT, I succumbed to familial pressure to pledge a sorority, but I’d chafed against the rush process, and I feared that the same social elite who made me feel so insecure at school would be my peers in the court. I hadn’t gone to the same small selection of Christian camps or private schools that gave these girls a shared history and vocabulary.
“It’s just not my scene,” I would say to shut down the conversation with my mom, and she couldn’t really disagree with me.
But after losing a year of college to the pandemic, I was itching to meet new people to make up for the friendships I had expected to find in class or around campus. At my mom and Evans’ engagement party in February 2021, with all of our closest friends and family gathered, I thought to myself that I had missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to celebrate together with my chosen family, to honor my mom, and, yes, to dress like a princess in a custom-made gown.
I knew my mom was willing to cash in stock to pay for my gown, a financial decision that seemed absurd to me, for otherwise living frugally as a scholarship student in a single-parent household. My grandfather had agreed long ago to help with other costs, and my new step-grandmother offered to serve as my “sponsor,” a Tyler figure who could vouch for me as an out-of-town girl. Our families shared a long history that included the festival: Evans’ dad presented my mom at her ball, and my new step-siblings and cousins had all been in it, too. I knew it would have been important to Mom and Evans that I had been able to do it—if I had realized in time that it could be important to me.
A few weeks later, my mom texted me from Tyler, where she was visiting Evans; they were still dating long distance while my brother was finishing high school in Houston. “Apparently there’s still time to sign up for Rose Festival,” she joked, because she thought I was still set against it.
“Wait, really? I’ve been thinking about this,” I texted back. She called me immediately—to make sure I wasn’t the one joking now—but could barely speak from her excitement and shock.
Within half an hour of admitting my change of heart to my mom, my grandmother had marshaled the festival director to bring costume sketches to her house, and the family friend who’d built my mom’s lady-in-waiting costume (and eventually her wedding dress) had agreed to come out of retirement to make mine.
Out of three or four options—the leftovers from before the pandemic, when the rest of the duchesses had chosen their costumes—I picked the “watering can.” The concept was so wild that it had luckily been passed over by the entire rest of the court, but I loved it.
Most people think “My Little Teapot” when I start to explain my costume, but it ended up looking more like a Bob Mackie design for Cher. I had a real aluminum watering can mounted at an angle two feet above my head, with silver and blue beads that cascaded down over my hair to mimic water. The dress was in two pieces: a shimmering silver skirt with a long, skinny train, and a one-sleeved bodice that continued the blue beading diagonally across my chest.
I can only hope I’ll feel this pretty again on my wedding day, if I someday get married. I clattered a little when I walked as the strings of beads shook against each other. I was working on about three hours of sleep per night, and I almost blacked out more than once because the headpiece was so heavy, secured to my head with nothing more than bobby pins and prayer.
It was worth it for the memories with my favorite people, who were so generous with their love and support that weekend and always. I even made it into the Sunday print edition of the New York Times. The article about the festival turned out to be a helpful resource while I was living abroad, trying to explain the sheer scale and earnestness to Europeans who often didn’t have a regular debutante ball for reference.
“The Texas Rose Festival can’t be explained—only experienced,” my mother likes to say. I think the same could be said about Tyler, Texas.
There are two country clubs in Tyler. A family belongs either to Willowbrook or Hollytree and has for generations. There are two public high schools. When my mom was growing up, all the white children went to Robert E. Lee, and all the Black kids went to John Tyler, now called just Tyler High. Lee has also been renamed, and the mascot is no longer the Rebel. The old guard didn’t like this much, as one can easily imagine.
The architecture of the city is wealth, and I’m uncomfortable with it, even as I benefit from it. But my mom loves being back in her hometown, and I love that for her. When I visit Tyler now, I search for places where I might fit in. I see her in a new way in this place, as a born-and-bred socialite that I didn’t recognize from our years in Houston.
There were entire years of high school after my parents divorced when I didn’t know how my mom was going to pay rent, despite her assurances that we would find ways to make things work. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19 because I knew we couldn’t afford for me to get a car. I don’t feel like I had a precarious childhood; I always knew there would be food on the table, but I grew up with a hyperawareness of money. Maybe being the eldest daughter had something to do with it.
So when my mom finally moved back to Tyler, with a new house and new husband, I was happy for her and her new quality of life—she deserves happiness more than anyone I know—but I couldn’t pretend to speak the language of luxury, especially when I was living off of a scholarship stipend in a college house where only one of our appliances at a time worked reliably, and there were holes in our floors and windows.
I found out only this year that she had been “devastated” when I originally turned down my spot as a duchess. I guess I’m grateful that she didn’t let on how much it really meant to her until after I made up my own mind. My brother knows that he’ll be an escort in his junior year. He’s always been a natural in social situations, so he’s looking forward to it, I think. (During my festival, he charmed his way into an interview on local television the morning of the parade, defending me with his characteristic eloquence when the newscaster tried to make a joke about how unusual my costume was.)
But having a daughter as a duchess is a different thing entirely. Even my middle name hearkens to our Tyler history: It’s my mom’s maiden name, and it adorned my grandfather’s insurance business until he sold it and retired when I was a teenager. He only had daughters, so it feels fitting that his name will live on with me, and in my cousin’s middle name, too.
More than a name, my mom and I share a face. Our eyes are the same light blue; our brows and noses have the same angles. I think she’d always imagined looking out onto the parade floats and recognizing her face staring back at her, waving across the years.
If home is where the heart is, my mom is my heart, my face, my history. Tyler is where my mom grew up, but it is not my home. I’ll always be the duchess to her lady-in-waiting.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
There is a famous quote about storytelling that’s often attributed to Tolstoy: “All literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” I hope you agree that this was one a hell of a story.
I wanted the essay to be titled “Only Good Enough Once,” a lyric from “Rose Queen.” My mom cautioned me that readers might not understand the reference if they haven’t heard the song. There was something in this phrase, however, that I wanted to convey—a sense of uneasiness and insecurity that colored my experience of the Rose Festival, as the stranger coming to town and stepping into my family history in a new way.
Ultimately I think my mom was right about the title. I considered “By Any Other Name” for its more implicit reference to both roses and family, but I think “Coming Up Roses” perhaps better represents another important theme of my experience: It went better than I could have ever imagined. My costume was a crowd favorite, despite being chosen last—and I’m saying this not only out of strong personal bias, but also a good amount of field research. To land in the hallowed pages of the Sunday Times was just the cherry on top. (The aluminum can on top? Nope, too much.) And there’s also the echo of the phrase “coming out” to society, which alludes to the origin of deb balls.
To backtrack a bit, “Coming Up Roses” is also the name of a great song from one of my favorite movies. Not enough people are giving Keira Knightley her flowers for Begin Again. Not only does she prove to the haters that she can do more than mouth act in period pieces, she holds her own singing opposite such pop stars as Adam Levine and Hailee Steinfeld. Please watch this movie—especially if you have any musical sensibility—so we can share in its rare joy.
It would feel particularly Marie Antoinette-ish (actually a costume at this year’s festival, “The History of Film”) to write about this privileged experience without addressing the extreme tragedy in the Middle East. I’ve been loath to post or repost anything on Instagram because the platform facilitates little to no nuance, which I think is paramount to any conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict. I don’t have any answers, nor did you likely come to my newsletter expecting any. I hope we all can continue to oppose and grieve for injustice worldwide. I stand with Jews against antisemitism, and I wish freedom for Palestine. I think these positions must not be mutually exclusive. Please feel free to send me any resources you’ve found helpful to make sense of the media storm; I feel uneducated about the history of the region, and I’d like to work to remedy this.
I’ll leave you with this poem that felt especially convicting this week: