Well, maybe I’ll buy just one.I found out that Parke, my friend in Florida who wants me to bring a dress
when I visit, plans to take me to a Company Christmas Dinner at a Very Good French
Restaurant. If he loses enough weight to fit into it, he plans to wear his tuxedo.
In that situation, I’m not
sure I can pull off my plan to wear a table cloth tied with a flight attendant’s
scarf instead of buying a dress.
No matter how good the quality of
the table cloth, I’m afraid sitting there in a Very Good French Restaurant, I would
look like a woman in a table cloth sitting at a table that already had a cloth.
This isn’t the first time
I’ve had to get a new costume because of Parke. When he bought a sailboat I had to
get boat shoes so I wouldn’t mess up the deck with my plain old people shoes. When he
started planning ski trips, I drew the line. It wasn’t just the costume I wasn’t
interested in; it was the inevitable problem of trying to fit broken arms and legs into
the costume.
But back to the dress. Maybe I
wouldn’t mind if buying a dress were simple, but you have to decide — long,
short, knee-length? Fitted or loose? Princess line, dropped waist or natural waistline?
That’s the dress I’m talking about here, not me. My natural waistline dropped a
long time ago.
Which is exactly why a salesperson
is bound to suggest what my grandmother Pennington called a “foundation garment”
back in her retail days. Foundation garments, as I recall them, were an assemblage of
elastic and metal stays that made all our grandmothers look rigid from the hip to about
the shoulder when they dressed for church.
Later, Maidenform and the others
switched to rubber and lace and saleswomen called these garments “tummy
control.”
I don’t recall exactly when
the business got crazy, but we ended up with things to squeeze your fanny and, if you were
skinny, things to pad your fanny. We had bras to create cleavage, bras to push you into a
“wonder” look and bras to make you look smaller.
It all turned the female body into
a kind of living sculpture. And it definitely hasn’t gone away, which is another
reason not to buy a dress. The salewoman will suggest something like “a little nip of
latex” underneath so the dress will “hang better.”
Still, I guess I’ll buy a
dress to wear with a little nip of latex under it, go to Florida and enjoy the French
restaurant, which will make the latex nip even sharper.
I asked Parke if they wore black
in Florida. “Of course,” he said. What color did I think a tuxedo was. See,
Parke sometimes is a little bit rich, and no rich person would ever wear any tuxedo that
was anything but black.
Do not for one minute suppose that
just because I buy a dress and, maybe an underlying little nip, to visit a friend who is a
little bit rich sometimes, that I will be enticed to stay around indefinitely, wearing
boat shoes and ski jackets and riding britches and golf shorts and tennis skirts.
Because Iknow it wouldn’t be
long before that little bit of latex nipped me one too many times and I’d be on the
next plane home. |
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