Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown Read online

  “Did we catch you at a bad time?” Jennifer asked as I stood in the doorway with peanut-butter-soiled fingers.

  “No,” I hastily replied, “come on in.” In retrospect, I should have said, “Yes,” and slammed the door on them.

  “This is Stan,” Jennifer announced as they walked in.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said staring down at my shorts.

  We walked back into the family room, and I sat there as composed as I possibly could, sneaking licks of my fingers to get the peanut butter out of my fingernails. I sat on the edge of the couch, crossing my legs and sitting up as straight as I could. Stanley was even more gorgeous clean than he was on the soccer field. He had these piercing blue eyes that could have been mistaken for being colored contacts. I got the chance to get a peek every time he moved the hair out of his eyes.

  “Crackers?” I offered, handing him the box.

  “Got a game in a little,” he said, looking over at the television watching Luke Spencer duke it out with one of the Cassadines. “Actually,” he said, looking over at Jennifer, “we really can’t stay long.”

  My heart dropped.

  “We just came over to say hi,” Jennifer said. “We were passing your house, so I thought we’d stop,” she lied.

  Two minutes later, they were gone. An hour later, Jennifer called me.

  “Were you wearing your father’s underwear?” she screamed into the phone.

  “No, it’s my own,” I told her.

  “Why were you wearing boxer shorts? He thought you were a weirdo!”

  “Well, why did you come over without calling first?”

  “Because I didn’t expect you to be wearing your father’s underwear!”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘She’s a chubby weirdo!’ Who wears their father’s underwear?”

  Teenage girls can be so vicious with the truth, can’t they? Jennifer, though, was one of my best friends, and for that reason had a right to tell me the truth. In return, a couple of years later, I told her the truth when she asked me what I really thought of her nose job.

  “He’s actually dating Robin Zinman,” she lied.

  “OK,” I told her nonchalantly.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t care,” I told her as I hung up the phone.

  I threw off the boxer shorts and put on some regular shorts, then shoved the Jane Fonda Workout tape into the VCR.

  A few weeks later, Laner confused my boxer shorts with my dad’s boxer shorts and put them in his drawer. When I saw my dad wearing my underwear, I didn’t bother saying anything. I could have teased him and said, “What father wears his daughter’s underwear?” But he wouldn’t have thought that was funny. I would never wear boxer shorts again, even when the craze hit the sorority circuit across America. It was like Einstein regretting having helped invent the atomic bomb.

  Every now and then as the years go by, I’ll be out with my parents at the beach or on a hot summer day, and lo and behold, there’s some girl wearing a GAMMA GIRLS KICK BUTT! pair of boxer shorts. I’m telling you now, I could win the Nobel Peace Prize and when reporters ask my parents how they feel, I’ll bet you anything they’ll say, “We’re proud about this, but did you know that our daughter was the first young girl to wear boxer shorts?”

  “Look, Dean. She’s wearing boxer shorts, and you started that!” my mother will shout with glee, pointing at the college coed.

  “That’s right, you did,” my dad will proudly say. “Remember how she used to steal my underwear, Arlene?”

  “I sure do,” Arlene will say boastfully

  “Who knew she was such a trendsetter?” my father will announce.

  I want to tell them both to shut up, but I really don’t have the right. I mean, let’s face the facts: I did start the trend. Proud as they could be, smiles bright and fulfilled, my parents will stand there and watch in awe at the contribution their daughter added to this world until the sorority girl has turned a corner and left their sight.

  “Who knew?” my dad will say with a sigh.

  “It’s really something,” my mother will agree.

  Years later, I did eventually end up dating Stanley Denton.

  “Why were you wearing your father’s underwear?” he teased.

  “Teenage angst,” I told him.

  Oh, How I Wannabe You

  s the start of the tenth grade rolled around, my body had started to “wean out the baby fat,” as my mother put it. I was sitting at home watching MTV in my fifteenth year of life when a woman came on the screen who changed my outlook on fashion forever.

  Teased blond hair wrapped in what seemed to be the bottom ribbing of the half sweatshirt she was wearing. Long pearls snapped against her shiny BOY TOY belt buckle as she shimmied back and forth. She wore a short black crinoline skirt over a pair of biking shorts and black boots. In short, she was awe-inspiring, and the whole thing was giving me the shivers. In the two minutes that I watched the video, she spoke to me as being exactly who I wanted to be. She was cutting edge, sexy, playful, feminine yet one of the guys, tough, independent, and radical all rolled into one. I had to look exactly like her. I needed to be her twin, and thank my lucky star, I kind of looked like her already ... at least I thought so. When I asked Amy Chaikin about this possible switched-at-birth phenomenon, she said as tenderly as she could, “Well, you both have blond hair.”

  The most important thing was this: I had to get this look down before anyone else found out about her. Chances were, no other girl at school would have seen the magnificence like I did. No one in suburban Philadelphia had the keen fashion eye that I did and could pick up on this singer’s obvious up-to-the-minute air of aptness. As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror showering half a bottle of my mother’s V05 hairspray onto my head and teasing the matted locks with my brother’s comb, I thought to myself, If anyone accuses me of copying, I’ll deny it to the end.

  “You look like that singer on MTV!” Greg Garron shouted the second I walked into homeroom that Monday morning.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked with the straightest look I could manage as I nervously scratched my face. I immediately regretted it since I might have smudged the fake mole I’d created from mascara that morning.

  “You do! You do! You look like Madonna!” Debbie Franklin joined in.

  “Who is Madonna?” I asked nervously as I fiddled with the silver bracelets I’d spent all Sunday night creating out of some silver wire from the hardware store.

  “That singer,” Debbie said, “on MTV”

  “I don’t have MTV,” I lied as I ran my hands through my teased coif and straightened the do-rag tied around it.

  As I sat in my seat and listened to that morning’s roll call, I could feel the eyes of my peers upon me like vultures circling my combination chair/desk, getting ready to attack at any moment. How could they have all found out about her in one weekend?

  “Adena Halpern?” Ms. Greaser, the homeroom teacher, asked taking roll call.

  “You mean Madena?” Greg Garron snickered.

  The crowd went into hysterics. I was mortified.

  I went into the bathroom before first period and wiped the faux mole off my face. Maybe it was a little too much.

  It was my first lesson in perpetrating a look: Never go for the entire look head-on, just go for little nuances of it.

  The next day I arrived in class, my hair was still disheveled, since that was the part I liked the best, but I eighty-sixed the mole, the wire bracelets (which were poking into my skin anyway and I was afraid they would slit my wrists), and I wore a pair of Girbaud neon-orange parachute pants with my blue-and-white-striped Vans sneakers. I knew I looked like the bastard child of Madonna and Bozo the Clown, but I was my own person, not a carbon copy of someone else.

  I’ve seen Madonna through almost every stage of her material life. When Madonna cut the do-rag and went like a virgin, I was enthralled. Not only wa
s I like a virgin, I was a virgin, and the bustier I found at Screaming Mimi’s gave me the figure that would soon make me otherwise. When she affixed a long faux ponytail and played Truth or Dare, I took the dare and sadly got that ponytail stuck in some subway doors. The last I saw of my faux mane, it was kind of waving good-bye as it flapped in the wind when the subway took off and made its way toward Grand Central Station.

  I did skip the geisha look, and when Madonna came out with the sex book, I skipped that look too.

  These days, Madonna has been more apt to wear tailored suits, which really aren’t my thing, so I’ve sort of broken off from her, but I’m always on the lookout for her new styles. Just last week I saw this paparazzi photo of her coming off a plane in a multicolored orange, green, and yellow three-quarter-sleeve sweater matched with an orange scarf. I’ve been looking everywhere, but I can’t seem to find anything that looks remotely like it. If you see something like it, could you call me?

  Madonna is, was, and will always be the queen bee to my wannabe.

  The Impossible Dream

  knew exactly what I wanted to wear for my senior prom, and nothing was going to stop me. What I wanted was very simple: a black strapless top with a knee-length crinoline poufy bottom. In the late eighties, with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper as our teenage fashion idols, how hard was that going to be to find?

  Amy Chaikin already had her prom dress: a feminine white strapless, tight-lace, floor-length gown that she’d matched with some white gloves and a white sash she’d tied around her neck. When I started on the quest with Julie Pelagatti, the first dress she tried on was the one she got: a gold lamé strapless that sprouted hoards of stiff fabric in shades of gold and white on the bottom of the floor-length gown, making her look like a gold mermaid. Personally, I didn’t like the dress, but conceeded the point when Julie said, “I want my prom dress to reflect who I was in my senior year of high school.” Looking back, both dresses reflected who my friends were at the time. For Amy it was her ethereal nature, always looking on the bright side of everything. For Julie, her dress was a shining example of someone who was nothing like everyone else and didn’t care what anyone else thought. I, on the other hand, wanted to look like everyone else, but with a bit of myself thrown in for good measure. That’s why I thought my idea of the black strapless with the crinoline was perfect.

  With my two best friends set and ready to go, I still had my own dream to conquer. I searched everywhere, all the department stores in my neighborhood, except of course John Wanamaker‘s, which I hated and was positive they wouldn’t have had anything cool in there anyway. I checked all the boutiques in downtown Philadelphia. Zilch. I went to visit my brother Michael at college in Washington, D.C. Zip. My cousin Michele and I took a day trip to New York City. Not even close.

  Was I asking for such an impossible notion? All I wanted was a simple black strapless dress with a knee-length crinoline bottom ! They had gold mermaid dresses out there, but God forbid a simple black strapless with a knee-length crinoline bottom!

  “Look, I know you’ve got your heart set on one thing,” my mother announced one day as I got home from school, “but I found a backup just in case.”

  “Oh, Dean,” Laner said, “you are going to love it!”

  Like a curtain unveiling a priceless work of art, Arlene slowly hiked the Saks Fifth Avenue chocolate-brown plastic covering over the hanger of the dress to reveal a Victor Costa blue-and-white polka-dot strapless tea-length dress with a blue-and-white ribbon tied around the bodice. My mom and I were big Victor Costa fans; he was a designer for the masses who knocked off some of the hottest dresses around. When Ivana Trump, a personal icon of Arlene‘s, announced that she in fact wore Victor Costa dresses on occasion, Arlene knew she had concrete evidence that he was one of the most important designers (or redesigners, as it were) of the time.

  “I couldn’t resist,” she said, taking it off the hanger and placing it against my body. “If you don’t like it, Gladys at Saks (Arlene’s favorite saleslady of the time) said we could return it.”

  I put the dress on and modeled in front of the mirror.

  “It’s stunning,” my mom gasped.

  “Princess Diana, look out!” Laner cried out

  I liked It; I kind of really, really liked it.

  “You don’t like it,” my mother sighed.

  “She hates it,” Laner sighed.

  “No, I like it,” I sighed.

  “But you have a dream,” my mom said, frowning at Laner, who in turn threw her arms in the air in exasperation at me.

  The dress went back into the chocolate-brown plastic wrap curtain and stayed m my mothers closet for a week until she finally took it back to Gladys at Saks, much to the chagrin of Gladys, who was sure the next time she saw it, I would have been wearing it in my prom picture.

  “She has a dream,” my mother said, handing the dress to the dejected Gladys who, in turn, handed my mother a return slip.

  After two months, with the exception of—blech—John Wanamaker‘s, I had exhausted my search through the entire East Coast of the United States of America. I was done.

  I gathered my mother, Laner, Amy Chaikin, and Julie Pelagatti, those closest to me who had tried their best in helping me see the dream come alive.

  “Ladies,” I said taking a deep breath, “1 regret to announce that I will not be attending Harriton High School’s 1987 senior class prom due to the fact that I have nothing to wear.”

  Some were not strong enough to take the news.

  “OH, FOR CHRISSAKES! SHE’S GONE OFF HER ROCKER!” my mother shouted, storming out of the room.

  I looked at those who had the strength to stay, sighed, and picked up the phone to call my date and tell him.

  “What if you made the dress?” Laner wondered aloud.

  I put the phone down, smacked my head and yelled, “Eureka!” I was going to make the dress! How hard could it be?

  “Mom!” I screamed, “I’m going to make the dress!”

  “I’m calling Gladys to save the Victor Costa just in case,” she shouted from the other room.

  “FORGET IT!” I screamed back at her. “I AM NOT WEARING THAT STUPID BLUE POLKA-DOT THING!”

  “YOU’LL BE SORRY!” she screamed back.

  “I HAVE A DREAM!” I shouted in teenage defiance.

  “FINE! GO LIVE YOUR DREAM!” she shouted back, and then into the phone, “HEY, GLADYS? FORGET I CALLED! MY DAUGHTER IS A LUNATIC!” Then she hung up.

  I didn’t speak to my mother for the rest of the day.

  For the next week, Amy, Julie, and I combed the stores, trying to find the right parts for my dress. Again, there was trouble. We found the crinoline, but the crinoline was see-through, so we bought two and figured we’d put one over the other. When Laner saw that it was still see-through, she went out and bought me a black slip to go underneath. I had the bottom taken care of.

  It was becoming a bit more difficult to find the top, though, and the search was wearing on my army.

  “I have finals to study for,” Amy said when I asked her to come with me to Delaware for the day.

  “I’m looking for some gold hoop earrings to go with my dress,” Julie said.

  “Wax buildup,” Laner said, pointing at the pristine floor.

  I knew I had reached madness, but I was determined that if I never saw my classmates again, the last time they’d ever see me, they’d see the prettiest, most fashionable, and original-looking girl at the prom. I was this close, and even though all of my supporters had fallen by the wayside, I was still marching on.

  I decided to head to South Street, a place I had already checked, but figured it was worth one more go.

  South Street in Philadelphia was, in the late eighties, the shopping zenith for up-to-date funky duds. If they didn’t have what I needed, then I was done. There was one place I hadn’t tried on South Street—a thrift store whose name I forget. The store isn’t there anymore, but I’m sure you could figure out where it was. The
joint smelled so bad, demolition couldn’t have fumigated it.

  South Street might have been funky, but this thrift store smelled too funky. The stench of mothballs, combined with a particular armpit fume meant I had only a short amount of time before I’d start to gag, so I sucked in my breath and searched quickly. As luck would have it, the third dress I saw had the exact top I had envisioned—a velvet bodice that curved around the boob area, which could give my flat chest area a nice line. It was a little damaged and worn-looking, but I was at my wits’ end. I didn’t even bother to try it on and quickly paid the three dollars for the dress, declining a bag and leaving with the dress in hand. Driving home, I had to stop at the dry cleaner’s and leave it there to be deodorized. When I arrived at my house, I passed my mom on the way up the stairs.

  “Found the top portion,” I bragged.

  “And the dream deepens into reality,” she said with a wince.

  Two days later I got the dress back, clean and de-fumed. With one day left before the prom, I had no time to think of anything else.

  With scissors in hand I went thread by thread as I detached the bodice portion in order to fasten it to my crinolines. An hour later, I was ready. It was then that it occurred to me: The bodice had a grooved edge and the crinolines had an elastic waist. I had no idea how to sew it, and we didn’t own a sewing machine, but I was committed to seeing this through. Visions of Molly Ringwald putting together her prom dress in Pretty in Pink, a film I’d seen the year before, danced through my head. I worked through the night, meticulously sewing each strand as delicately as I could. By 4:00 a.m., my eyes started to give out, so I drank a six-pack of Coke to see me through. By 5:30 a.m., prom day, I was finished.

  As hard as I’d tried, my sewing was not perfect. In fact, it was dreadful. When I put the finished dress on a hanger to get a better look at the whole creation, my heart dropped. The dress was awful. It looked like a third-grader sewed the thing together, as jagged lines of thread zigzagged through the middle of the dress. The bodice was too old and shabby-looking, and the crinolines weren’t as poufy as I wished they would have been, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could never tell anyone how I really felt. I had no one to blame but myself, so I’d have to lie and act like I thought it was the prettiest dress I’d ever seen, even prettier than that Victor Costa blue-and-white polka-dot number. I tried to convince myself that maybe I could construe it as being punk-looking, but it was a stretch, even for the punk look. I had been so dramatic about the whole thing, had made such a big deal over it. I felt like I had failed. I had no choice but to put on a brave face and go with it.