Dress: My mother called me about six weeks back and told me that she was considering bringing back the semi-formal holiday cocktail. A staple of my college years, the holiday cocktail got launched around the time Mom and my stepfather got hitched and moved into a house that could accommodate a super-sized Christmas tree. They hired a bartender and invited their friends. I wore my prom dress and enjoyed the general laissez-faire attitude toward my drinking around adults, although technically I was about eight weeks from 21 proper. My sister invited a couple of friends. They flitted around in sequin column dresses and elaborate updos, looking in every meaningfully way more grown-up and sophisticated than I did, despite being fourteen years old. I was charged with providing musical accompaniment, a nice background loop of Christmas piano standards and whatever I could sneak in without anyone else noticing. And if you’re wondering what really takes the “We Three Kings”/ “Smells Like Teen Spirit”/”Oh Holy Night” medley to the next level, it’s a soupçon of “Number of the Beast.”
The party tradition continued through the early 2000s. Long enough for me to invest in a couple new dresses work in the critical Vince Guaraldi/White Stripes/”Thong Song” mash-up, and for me to fall all the way down the front stairs after sneaking out to smoke a joint in the driveway. That’s when I learned the critical lesson that it’s always a good idea to have a spare pair of sneakers around for the moment the party starts to get real. I recommend Vans, if you’re wearing a floor-length taffeta. Greater stability than Chuck Taylors and the thicker sole gives you a whisper of height and some wiggle room with the longer hem.
Anyway, the holiday cocktail mostly got exchanged for a work party and then the work party mostly got scrapped because schedules and employee childcare and eventually Covid. So it’s been a while since one of these. Long enough that the piano is now at my house in Carrboro, which means no one has to tolerate my “Good King Wenceslas”/ Outkast medley this season except for the cats. Long enough that, despite having a closet full of formalwear (this is not an exaggeration), I talked myself into buying a new dress for the occasion.
It’s a v-neck, striped sequin situation. Definitely the kind of dress I, as a very young sparkle-obsessed child in the disco-era, believed I would be wearing every night on a lighted, raised dance floor. The color palette is teal, purple, gold, royal blue. When I tried to describe it to my sister, she said it sounded like a Mardi Gras float, and I thought that sounded like a compliment.
Shoes: These are the last surviving pair of stiletto heels in my closet. They are red suede, purchased a decade back off a clearance rack at a department store outlet for roughly the same price as one month of a streaming service. I suspect I will wear them for approximately thirty minutes and twenty nine of those thirty minutes I will imagine that I am a medieval monk with a whip and a pain fetish. On the bonus, fashion self-flagellation makes my legs look fantastic.
Earrings: These also came from Minx in Asheville. I bought them back in summer 2022, when I took a long, circuit through downtown on lunch break. I bought a Harry Crews novel at Malaprops and then wandered down the hill to a then-new vintage store that had the dazzling gall to charge $200 per for 1980s-era plaid zip up K-Mart house dresses favored by an entire generation of country grannies (including my own great-grandmother). I wanted to be mad about it, but the store was full of borderline awful, rich millennials in luxury neutrals that smelled like tech money talking about how much more authentic things were in Asheville. And how the simple folkoric realness of the Appalachians was such an inspiration in thinking about intentionality or whatever. And I was like, please, please rip off these tourists. Rip them off so hard that you can actually pay rent.
Anyway, I was still fired up with righteous indignation when I got to Minx, where as usual could not escape without the most over the top earrings on display.
Outfit: I’ve been a little depressed this holiday season, for both the wide variety of reasons a middle aged person living in the world circa 2023 might as well as the nonspecific, non-reasons by which your unglamorous chronic depression operates. I spent about twenty-four hours before the party worried that I might not be able to emerge out of the gloom for long enough to inhabit the dress. The risks of crying in public while wearing sparkles and that much eye make-up cannot be overstated. Especially when “the public” includes clients, the parents of your childhood best friends, and two of your actual, current best friends who have been generously putting up with your shit for way too long. Nobody want to be confronted with a Tammy Faye-teared sad clown coming out of the powder room, and when they go to comfort her, learn that what has triggered a bout of operatic weeping is not, say, the climate or war or terminal illness, but a completely anticipated rejection email from a literary journal (one of dozens) that hit mid-existential crisis. Truly a category five in this little teapot, short and stout. How embarrassing.
But hey, you know what? I held it together. I didn’t cry in the bathroom. I didn’t trip over my high heels and drown in humiliation. We’ll reassess the role gin and tonic played in all that in the cold light of a sober/semi-sober January. But for now, I’ll mark this as a success.
Dress: Julia Jordan Rainbow Sequin Fit and Flair Cocktail Dress, Nordstrom
Shoes: Dillards Outlet, Asheville, last months of the Obama Administration
Shrug: Thrift shop, pre-Covid
Earrings: Minx, Asheville, Summer 2022
Tiny Commotions 