The first time I got married, it was in a synagogue. I wore a fabulous raw silk cocktail dress from Valentina. It was ivory, cost $400, and had pockets. The second time I got married, it was in a courtroom. I wore a fabulous hand-painted cotton dress from Valentina. It was yellow, cost $265, and had pockets. The third time I got married, it was in our parlor. I wore the 528s and, over a spandex tank top, a white hand-embroidered dress shirt my father bought sometime during his two-year stint as a U.S. Army chaplain in Okinawa (1955-57). It was my “something old.” Gene wore jeans (our “something blue”) and a white T-shirt he’d picked up at the Ravenswood Winery in Sonoma Valley a month prior – our “something new.” The borrowed thing was my mother’s gold chain with the Mobius Strip Shema on it.
The next day, Black Friday, Mom & Debby wanted to go shopping. Mom wanted to go to the Land’s End Inlet. Debby wanted to go there and to the mall. I told them they were insane.
We went to the Inlet. I got the yellow hat and grey nightie. Then, after dropping Mom off at home so she could nap, we went to Bayshore Mall so Debby could find something – I forgot what – she had been instructed to bring back for my niece Elizabeth. There are two stores I love at Bayshore. One is Williams-Sonoma.
The other is Lise & Kato’s. Or, as I call it, “Lise & Kato’s: My favorite place to get in trouble.” I used to buy more clothes there – one nice thing a season to wear to work. But a few years ago I figured out something and had to stop. When I was 14, my dear friend Joe signed my high school yearbook: “To a rose in the vegetable garden of life.” Vegetables working in semi-corporate settings can wear funky arty clothes to work because they’re vegetables. Roses cannot. Dressing more like a vegetable at work doesn’t make me any less of a rose. But it does help me look a little more like I’m in the right garden.
Anyway, Debby and I wandered in there. By the time it was over, I had spent on one outfit what I usually spend on three. It is my absolute favorite work outfit. It straddles the vegetable/rose dividing line, but it works. (I got the Roots sweater at the outlet in Edmonton this past summer.) I wear it with boots, or, lately a pair of Naot Mambo shoes. They’re new. Mom moved here in October and when Debby arrived from Canada for Thanksgiving, she had on the Mambos. I ordered a pair the next day. That woman is a bad influence.
After work, I changed into the 528s and a shirt I bought to wear to a Superbowl party last year. I couldn’t bring myself to buy an official Packer’s shirt because I knew I’d never wear it again. Then I remembered Brew City, which specializes in Milwaukee and Wisconsin themed clothes. Problem solved.
Clinton Kelly would probably have a heart attack and beg someone to tear his eyeballs from his head over today’s hoodie. The safety pins hanging from the strings! The faded logo in the back!
“Why would anyone leave their house wearing their grandmother’s 40-year-old hoodie?” my inner Clinton Kelly is shrieking. His eyes are squeezed shut and his fingers are in his ears. He is yelling “LALALALALALALALA.”
He misses the answer. I’m leaving the house because my dog needs a walk.
You look much taller hanging on the back of your door. P.S. I have a pair of Naots for you I picked up at my favorite resale last week. They are size 38, basic dark beige, probably a “legacy” model, you know – the kind you have to lace by hand? They are just too small for me and I know you are about one EU size below me, though we wear the same size in Merrill Primo Chills, which might be due to the furry linings. Not sure. Anyway, they cost me $3.99 and they’re all yours.
That is amazing! I hope they fit. We should invite Phil when we meet to exchange them, and he should bring you something to wear because I have the shirt I got him at the Ramble back in October. So I can give him the shirt, you can give me the shoes and he can give you something to wear.