Monkey Business
A hometown girl gives kids street cred
with help from a fuzzy little ape.
WRITTEN BY LYNNE KONSTANTIN
Above: Appaman's iconic
puffy jacket has been seen
on Gwyneth Paltrow's and
Sarah Jessica Parker's kids.
P 1 2 •
OCTOBER 2009 •
IN platinum
In 1998, Lynn Husum was living in
Guatemala, volunteering as a nurse
practitioner in a village where she
had sheets for walls, scorpions as
steady companions and she assisted
women squatting in labor by
crouching beneath them with paper
towel and catching their babies.
Today, she supervises super-hip
7-year-olds busting out the robot at
photo shoots in New York's Lower
East Side. And making kids' cloth-
ing with her husband for the wildly
successful company they own,
Appaman.
Husum, nee Topf, grew up in
Huntington Woods with her par-
ents, Mary and Jeff; she went to
Camp Seagull, she was bat mitzvah
at Temple Emanu-El in Oak Park.
When she was 21, she watched as
her grandfather, Sam Topf, stood
by Mikhail Gorbachev's side to
receive an honorary doctorate from
the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology in gratitude for his
philanthropic work. And taking a
break from studying communica-
tions at the University of Michigan,
Husum left for a semester in Spain,
where she met a nurse and decided
that's what she wanted to do.
So upon graduation, Husum
headed to Vanderbilt School of
Nursing in Nashville, where she
earned a master's degree in nurs-
ing. "I never worked in a hos-
pital; always private practice,"
\ says Husum. She stayed on in
Nashville, which she loved,
for three years, interning as
a general family nurse prac-
titioner. "I was a Jewish
girl in Nashville — it was
so random," she says.
"There's a very big
Jewish community;
people are very wel-
coming. It's a very
cool community."
Following her
stay in Nashville,
Husum headed to
Angola, Guatemala, "the most
tame" of the relief-project locations
offered to her. The day she arrived
in Guatemala, she met Harald
Husum, a Norwegian graphic
designer who was backpacking
through Central America and
Africa for eight months and staying
at her hostel. They were inseparable
the next week until he continued
on to Africa.
Husum went on to her job at
a clinic in a Mayan village in the
Guatemalan jungle. "The villag-
ers would drink their own version
of moonshine and get into fights,"
Husum says, "so I had to sew up a
lot of machete wounds." She also
delivered over a dozen babies. Once
a week, she and her colleagues
would travel in a dugout canoe,
hike two hours to remote villages
and administer medical care, vac-
cinations and whatever else was
needed. "We were like the circus
coming to town," Husum says.
"Growing up privileged, then
traveling to places like these, you
realize how much you've been
given. I wanted to give back, but
I also was getting this incredible
experience. It was so foreign, but so
fun. And exhausting. I don't think I
could have done it for an extended
length of time."
During her nine-month stay, she
and Harald wrote letters. When he
returned to Norway, they planned
to meet for a weekend in Belgium.
"My parents were like, Are you
crazy? You don't even know this
guy!' I was so nervous — I hadn't
even spoken to him on the phone,"
she says. "I was thinking, 'He's too
cool for me, it's not going to work.'
So I hid in the airport so I could
watch him. He walked off the
airplane straight into a glass wall.
I thought, 'Oh my God, this is
perfect!' " She came home for a few
weeks, then moved to Norway.
While she worked for a human-
rights organization, the pair
saved every dime they made, then
embarked on an eight-month trek
through Asia. Harald proposed in a
flea-bag hotel in Bangkok. "I called
my mom on May 1, and we were
married in August," says Husum of
her Orchard Lake Country Club
wedding in 2000. "We had been
living on $40 a day, and coming
back to the world of weddings was
so surreal. So my mom planned the
whole thing, which made all of us
happy. She was amazing."
After their wedding, the couple
moved to New York, where Husum
got a job as a nurse practitioner.
When Harald lost his job as an
art director at a trade magazine,
he hit the pavement and received
not a single call. "His resume was
filled with Norwegian schools and
everyone wanted RISD [Rhode
Island School of Design]." Over
brunch at a Polish diner in the East
Village, the couple joked about how
funny it would be to see kids wear-
ing Led Zeppelin T-shirts. "It's so
commonplace now, but back then
it was unheard of," says Husum.
Adds Harald, "I've always been into
T-shirts, so we came up with the
idea of making very edgy T-shirts
that I would like to wear, just mak-
ing them really small for a baby."
So Husum took three months off
of work, they headed out for one
last trip before they had kids, and
as soon as they got back, "we hit
the ground running." They bought
plain white onesies, dyed them with
Rit Dye from Rite Aid in their
washing machine and hung them
from fishing wire around their
Brooklyn apartment. "We did it all
wrong," says Husum. "We had no
idea what we were doing."
Harald set out selling their
onesies emplazoned with images
of Frank Zappa and Blondie
from door to door — "this tall
Norwegian man selling baby
clothes," says Husum — but they
soon decided to put Harald's