Montage

I've actually also finished Faith, and pictures will be forthcoming--I love it. I love it so that I wanted to wear it out to dinner (hole in the wall (er, house) Italian restaurant called Laico's) last night, and ransacked my closet trying to find the right thing to pair it with.

See, like others, I find that it is a little cropped. I saw that other people found that, but always thought it looked so nice on them that I didn't want to do anything differently. And it does indeed look nice, but I have discovered their issue--it's hard to find something to wear with a cropped fitted cardigan.

A dress, obviously. But most of my dresses are drapey jersey dresses, and that doesn't really work. Or they're slinky, and that really doesn't work. (You change the word order, and the emphasis changes. Love that). I have some A-line dresses, and they're perfect, but they all have bows. That pouff out the back of the sweater and make me look like a hunchback. With a really low hunch.

I found one dress that worked--a jersey dress, but cut like an A-line, and paired with tights and boots I felt very Anthropology-y, and while it wasn't quite what I'd envisioned, it worked.

So I wore the outfit to work, and went to lunch with my friend Mary. Heading back from eating some arrepas and picking up her drycleaning, we walked through a cloud of toxic fumes (I really have no idea what, some chemical was being pumped out onto the sidewalk). I held my breath, but Mary didn't in time, and just about blacked out. We found a bench and we sat there and she put her head between her knees, and eventually we made it back to the office (she's fine now. But yikes).

At about four o'clock, I went to the bathroom--and gasped, because I had some kind of yellowish stain on the back of my dress! From the bench, is my only guess. I rinsed it and scrubbed at it, but it would not come out.

I ran to Mary for advice, and she offered up her drycleaning. We closed ourselves away in an empty office. I tried on her pants (whoa, too tight), I tried on a dress (whoa, too short), I tried on the skirt she was wearing at the time (that fit, but with the cropped-ness of the sweater, I needed to wear my stained dress under the skirt to act as a shirt, and that made the skirt pouff weirdly and just didn't work.) We went through the whole dressing room montage that is in every romantic comedy from Runaway Bride to Last Chance Harvey, but unlike those, there was no dingdingding! this is the one! moment, and at the end of it, I was sitting in a dress that was not only stained, but also wet from trying to remove the stain.

I thought about begging Dave to go home and change before going to dinner, but the thing was, I still really wanted to wear the sweater, and as I'd spent a lot of time discovering that morning, I had no other dresses to wear the sweater with! Not to mention he probably wouldn't go for it, but would only say something along the lines of "you can't even see it," and "it's not a fancy restaurant, no one will care. And it will be dark," as though the second did not directly contradict the first. (Also--you could see it. Really a lot. And it looked like poop.)

We got to the restaurant, it was moderately dark--not to mention hilarious. It was packed with friends waving their unlit cigars and glasses of wine around, arguing loudly about politics in the 50s. So truly, no one was going to notice my dress. We had a delicious meal, very hearty and warm--and halfway through, warmed by the wine and the food, I took off my sweater. Our very nice waiter brought me a glass of seltzer, to put on the spots of red sauce I had presumably splashed on my sweater--thoughtful fellow indeed. Since the sweater was in fact fine, I put it on my dress.

The seltzer, combined with the oxyclean soak You're A Good Man, Dave gave my dress when we got home, did the trick, and the stain is out.

I can wear Faith again.


*Edited to add an entirely unrelated thing: This morning, I narrowly avoided getting shat on. It landed between my legs, but amazingly enough nothing got on me. My question is this: naturally, my first reaction was yay! lucky me! But was that in fact not lucky, since supposedly getting shat on is indeed lucky, and I narrowly missed it, so does that mean I'll have a bad luck day? And coincidentally, Dave narrowly missed having a remote hit him in the head on his way to work this morning (some crazy person threw it out a window from high above)--his luck, I think, is inarguably good, since I don't think having a remote fall on your head from great heights is ever considered a positive event.