History has always been a little unfair to Betsy Ross.
Here is what we know. A man walked into her shop with a sketch on the back of a letter. The stars on the sketch had six points. He had a Thursday deadline. He was George Washington, so nobody was going to tell him the stars were wrong.
Nobody except Betsy Ross.
She looked at the sketch. She looked at George Washington. She picked up a piece of paper, folded it twice, made a single cut with her scissors, and unfolded a perfect five-pointed star onto her worktable.
“Yes,” she said. “I can make five-pointed stars.”
Washington stared at it.
“It’s geometry,” she said. “And practice.”
Betsy Ross and the Boss is the third book in the Patriotica Romance Series, and it is the book that finally gives America’s most hardworking founding mother her moment — a story of impossible deadlines, creative direction that needed significant improvement, and one woman who designed a circle of thirteen equal stars because a circle has no head and no tail, and that seemed appropriate given what they were declaring.
That line — a circle has no head and no tail — will make you feel something. It will make you feel something while you are laughing at a book called Betsy Ross and the Boss. This is entirely intentional.
The story is set in Betsy’s Philadelphia shop in 1777, across her worktable, in the quiet professional tension between a woman who is very good at her job and a man who is very important and has come to her because she is very good at her job. It is a love story told in the language of needle and thread, five-pointed stars, and the specific intimacy of two people who understand something together that they haven’t yet said out loud.
She made the flag by Wednesday. He asked for Thursday. She finished Wednesday because she was a professional and also because she had twelve other things to finish that week and the sooner Washington left the better.
Betsy Ross and the Boss includes the complete short patriotic romance story plus 100+ lined journal pages with prompts about creativity, deadlines, doing brilliant work, and making things that matter. Prompts like “The thing I made with my own hands that I’m most proud of is…” and “Behind every great thing there is someone who actually did the work — in my life that person is…”
This book makes the perfect funny gift for creative women, an ideal gag gift for anyone who has ever done brilliant work for someone with a very rough sketch and very little time, a great white elephant present, and a genuinely moving patriotic read wrapped inside a completely ridiculous premise.
Betsy Ross and the Boss is available now on Amazon. Part of the Patriotica Romance Series by Buck Freedman, available at PatrioticaBooks.com.
She turned a napkin sketch into a nation’s identity by Wednesday.
Most of us can’t finish a to-do list.