Tonight I watched a very pleasing movie in which Anthony Hopkins plays what would otherwise be my deceased stepfather were the character concerned not based on another real dead person. It was The Fastest Indian, and I had wanted to see it for a long time, not least because Indians are an integral part of my Ideal Man, the bench-pressing, PhD-in-theology-holding, sartorially scrupulous polyglot with a distaste for 'comic opera' matched only by his weakness for Sephardic love songs. Although I had in mind more the kind you can sit up on, and have me ride pillion.
That fact notwithstanding, we ate raviolis in a lovely intense red sauce and drank a deep Umbrian with an extremely sweet and fancy dog. All, I suppose, that was missing was the motorbike ride, but it is approximately one degree Fahrenheit outside, and thus prohibitive of fahren in anything without a roof and sides, and anyway even though I had wanted to buy one last year I didn't. And with platform shoes having once again gone the way of the seersucker suit, I suspect my chance of reaching the ground at stop signs has come and gone.
The only downside to the whole thing was having ruined a dress I have never worn. Somewhere near the 'vanity,' which is also the clothes-steaming zone when it needs to be, a tiny bottle of carrot oil had disgorged itself all over the floor. It being a long dress, I first dragged a bit of the ends in the oil unknowingly before lifting it into proper steaming position. Following that, and still not knowing what I had already done, I dropped it, halter back, ruching, tiers, and all, straight into the viscous orange puddle.
While on the one hand I am not the sort of girl who becomes unduly attached to material things, and have in fact rid myself of nearly all of them more than once and some of those times quite wittingly, in this case I am genuinely a bit distressed. Not only had I never worn it, not only did I feel I had an occasion that suited, but the dress alone was something. Firstly, it was satin, and secondly, it was olive drab. To me, that is akin to having an Amarone in one hand and six canelés in the other with a vat of almond cream on hand just in case, while one nice someone massages my feet and another pets my (silky when in its rare natural state) hair.However, the most egregiously grievous wrong of this entire bout of hideous misfortune is that the bloody thing fit! Normally I am reduced to tears in dressing rooms, save for those rare occasions when there is an exhusband around to ferry ever-smaller sizes back and forth so that I don't have to skulk to the rack in longjohns and choler, and to remind me soothingly that I'd be just fine in Laos.
But this dress wasn't like that. It wasn't one of the sort that make one feel guilty for never having topped 92 and usually hovering around 89. No poor tailor was ever going to be begged and bribed with chocolates to tear it apart and take five sizes off it. It fit, and as well succeeded in making me look nearly lady-shaped. The ruching around the hips even gave the clear suggestion that I had some.
It didn't use to be this way, you know. When I was in high school and college I could buy clothes and not have to donate blood plasma to pay my tailoring bills. Then, the weight of the average American increased, and kept increasing. And as clothes companies do not exist primarily to keep me looking nice, but rather to turn a profit, clothing sizes have increased to accommodate demand. US sizes are about six sizes larger than when an attempt at standardization began in the Forties and Fifties.
Another factor is 'vanity sizing,' and this area is problematic for me. I have empathy for someone not wanting to buy something labeled size 20, assuredly, but when a renamed 10 becomes a 5, and an 8 or 9 becomes a 3 (which used commonly to be the smallest size), what becomes of the 'real' 5s and 3s? Well, some, it seems, become Zeros, and others become Double Aughts in a fit of blazing, indecent numerical fatuity, while others just slide off the grid. There isn't a woman's line that offers pants to fit me, and while I've taken to wearing children's jeans, because I've taken to wearing jeans in the first place out of despair and necessity, there are times they won't do, and one can't very well pair a gabardine jacket and silk shirt with pink corduroy Winnie-the-Pooh pants. The alternative is no less unthinkable: I don't aspire to be a World-Historical Figure, surely, and I doubt Hegel would have even liked the dress, but as Mark Twain admitted, Naked people have little or no influence on society. They also get burned a lot while cooking.
2 comments:
perhaps you culd just buy a nice floral-patterned apron?
The world already has one 'Naked Chef,' and he, in all his lispy Blokiness and strident perkiness, is more than grating enough for both of us. Nakedness is as highly overrated as both Mr. Oliver himself, and the sort of gratuitous, cloying Male Cheesecake by which he promotes his 'Image.'
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