Boy did I have a day yesterday. It was one of those days when my more creative and artistic side shows I guess you'd say.
CC and I didn't have much planned for this weekend. She wanted to see the new Antonio Bandaras movie Take The Lead but that was it. My mother called her Saturday to say that she was taking my nieces out dress shopping and that she was welcome to join them. She wasn't sure if she wanted to go shopping or not and was I going to go with them and, well it was pretty fuzzy there for a while. Important Rule: Never ask my wife to make a decision when she's on allergy medicine. :-)
Anyway, Sunday rolls around and we're just goofing off, watching TV and playing with the dogs when the phone rings. The girls want to know if we're going to go shopping with them. They're planning to go to a place called The Dress Barn and we can meet them there. Problem is, no one seems to know where this place really is. So before setting out, we had to look it up in the phone book and map it out on Yahoo. No big deal.
Now, if you've ever been clothes shopping with a woman you know it can really be an adventure; a long, slow-moving adventure that takes up the entire day and leaves you wondering what you did to deserve such punishment :-) Afterall, most stores do not go out of their way to make shopping easier and they certainly don't provide any sort of distractions to all the husbands and boyfriends who get dragged along. You never see, for example, women's clothing next to electronics or sporting goods or hardware which are sections that men wouldn't mind browsing while waiting for their spouse.
Knowing this, I like to speed things up by taking a much more aggressive position when I'm out shopping. I don't just stand around or wander, I actually dig into the racks, pull things out, make suggestions, and so forth. It moves things along and you finish faster plus you actually get to voice your opinion of something before it even gets tried on. Let's face it, sometimes you just KNOW that a blouse or dress is going to look hideous on someone before it leaves the rack. You just shake your head and wonder who on earth would wear something so awful.
Getting back to the story, there we were, in The Dress Barn, shopping for Easter dresses. No, make that dresses for Easter. They weren't looking for those frilly sort of dresses some folks wear that have been called Easter dresses.
So there we are, me, my wife, my mother and my sister's three girls, all in their teens, shopping for dresses. Not the way most guys prefer to spend a Sunday. But I wasn't going to just sit there and let them browse. Nope, not going to happen. We were shopping, that's sort of like being on a mission, sort of like combat. We weren't taking prisoners and we were getting the hell out of there as soon as possible with everyone (but me) dressed fabulous. :-)
You've just got to picture this in your mind. The setting is the women's clothing department of any store. Make that, any upscale store, Walmart just won't do for this one. Now, five women, three of them clearly in their teens and clearly related. And me. Short, white guy in jeans, a World Baseball Classic baseball hat and an Ichiro Suzuki baseball jersey (which looks like this).
Keep in mind, I'm not just waiting and watching. I'm grabbing things off the racks, holding them up, occasionally issuing orders like, "Take this, wear it with this, go!" Keep in mind, I'm also the only MALE in the store at this point and I am getting a LOT of looks from the other customers. From time to time a niece would show up with a potential dress and ask what I thought and I'd just say something like, "No! Absolutely not. That dress is too plain. The colors are too pastel and washed out. You need BOLD colors! Something that's THERE! These pastels just don't go with your hair and skin tones. It'll look too bland."
After a little bit of browsing, and letting them try things on their own, I got even MORE aggressive and one by one, started working with them. We started with simple questions like, "What color do you like?" and based on that, we went through the racks trying to find things that would work.
During all of this, I'm also helping my wife find a blouse to go with a skirt she has (she just had NOTHING in her closet that would go with it) and we also picked up a khaki blazer that just looks SUPER with every brown skirt she has in her wardrobe. She's really happy about that too.
Do you have that image now? That's how I spent a good chunk of Sunday. The girls look great though and so does CC. Everyone got new clothes and, I don't think they were the only ones listening to me as I went through the store. I noticed, from time to time, other women putting dresses back on the rack or picking up outfits I'd put together that had been rejected. At one point I was urging the use of a shrug with several of the dresses because there was some concern that the arm openings came down a little low. Well, wearing a shrug would cover that. Problem solved. Apparently that was a problem for some of the other shoppers too because I noticed more than one grabbing a shrug to wear with the dress. Funny thing is, I don't much care for shrugs usually. They just happened to work in this case.
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Two hours later we finished shopping and were back at the apartment. We had just enough time to grab something to eat before heading over to the movie theater. We saw Take The Lead and there again, I swear I was the only guy there. That's actually NOT true. There were at least two other guys sitting towards the back with their wives but you could tell that this was a film more for women.
Was it the best movie ever made? No, but it should have gotten better reviews than it did. As is usually the case, stories where the people are generally nice and the ending is generally happy tend not to get good reviews. Critics seem to like their films with more edge. Me, I liked it. The characters were likeable, the dancing was great and let's face it, Antonio Bandaras is super charming. You can't help but like him and what his character is trying to do.
Ok, so maybe it didn't depict thug life in urban high schools quite harshly enough. So what? Maybe the girls were a little TOO pretty and the guys a little too noble at times. Again, so what? What's wrong with a movie populated with decent people for a change?
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Just a little side note here. My sister was in the hospital Sunday. She had pnumonia a few weeks back and has been getting better but over the weekend she started sliding back. Last I heard they said she was actually getting over the pnumonia and thought maybe something else was causing problems; maybe a reaction to some medication or just a really bad allergy to something in the air. They wanted to keep her overnight to run tests, that sort of thing. Probably no big deal but these days, better to be safe than sorry.
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