Dress: You should never spend a lot of money on fully-sequined dress. Sequined dresses are mostly made of plastic. They are hot. They are often uncomfortable (underarm sequin chafing is real). They usually shed, which is okay because by the end of the night, if it is a good night, you’ve probably sweated in it, and your options for getting it clean rarely get it really clean. Sequined dresses are as close as many of us get to an actual costume. You generally only have a sequined dress for one occasion, or one kind of occasion, and you wear it, because (I think) in the moment you are playing a character, you know, yourself, but FUN.
I love sequins. Love them. I have since childhood, when an overdose of old movie musicals and then-contemporary Diana Ross-forward content made me understand that I were going to live in the world, I needed a rainbow sequin tube top. Nana, for her part, was more than happy to oblige and ordered my best friend, Irish Name, and I matching rainbow sequin tube tops. We wore them until either puberty or until they wore out. I can’t remember
Since then the sequins have come in multiple flavors. I wore a sequin dress in my sister’s wedding, which in a humid, late summer, barely-post-hurricane Lowcountry kind felt like imagine chain mail felt when crusading knights got to the Mediterranean. I looked good though
This particular sequin dress came from a chain consignment store in a local shopping mall, a place I only visit when I’m going to pick up takeout. I paid about 11 dollars for it, which at the peak of the the upper edge of what this dress is worth. Remember how I talked about the shedding? Well it’s now ten days since New Year’s Eve and my house is infested with black sequins. They’re everywhere. Bathtub. Cabinets. Sofa cushions. Under the baseboards. It’s amazing that there are any sequins even left on the dress. You’re never going to be stealthy in sequins. If you ever decide to take up cat burglary after a gala, stick to a classic like gold lame.
Sweater: In the future, when you find me haggard, shivering over an oil can fire or searching for a seat in mess hall of the some once and future debtor’s prison, I’ll tell you a story about how, shortly after the peak of a global pandemic, when I was younger, but certainly old enough to know better, I spent about four months obsessing over a cashmere cardigan sweater with star-spangled shoulders. And while that sweater hardly unique or special or exceptional enough to warrant its I’ve paid less than this for rent price tag, I wanted it with such hunger and intensity. I wanted it the way I wanted cute boys in high school. It was an obliterating, sleep-disrupting infatuation. And as is/was/and if I don’t get my shit together, always in the case of me and obliterating infatuation, I succumbed to shameful, horrible irresponsible behavior, and I am a terrible person and I do not deserve my trespasses forgiven, blah blah, pray for us sinners, amen, and hit Buy Now.
That said, I do think the sweater has faint traces of magic to it. Or at least it feels like that to me when I wear it. Like, I can imbue clothes and jewelry and the material ways I present myself with supernatural qualities. It’s probably not a positive trait, but I’ve never been a person who has been able to convincingly transform—I don’t think I was even a very good actor when I was into that sort of thing—and I’ve always been impressed by and envious of shapeshifters. People that are able to be all sorts of things in slivers and subtleties and shades that get lost of my too-muchness. I just feel like a clumsy, overdone white elephant dragging around an overstuffed shopping cart of my whole history all the time. But there are flickers of moments when I can feel the crackle of what it must be like to be somebody else, a different kind of person, something weightless and anonymous, a clean sheet of white paper, a fresh haircut, an indifferent shrug, a little swagger, a little grace. Sometimes it’s sunlight on a cool day that gets me there. Sometimes it’s the soft cuff on the sleeve of a sweater I paid way too much money for.
Shoes: Speaking of transformations, in the Midlife Crisis Shoe-Buying Spree (ongoing, but significantly calmed down) these boots took top honors in the I am literally buying what my teenage self always wanted category a few years back. There are zippers and laces and probably a mixtape called OMFGoth Vol I secretly imbedded in the platform sole. I was not a Goth as a youngster– I’ve always been far too pink and mole-y to pull off dyed black hair—but my tastes and interests were certainly Goth-adjacent for a time. I’m not sure what, if anything, I owe to my inner black crushed velvet fifteen year old, but she went radiant the day I ordered these. I don’t wear them very often because when I do it sounds like I’m a drum majorette in a Christmas Parade.
Earrings: Giant peacock earrings made out of turquoise and hot pink rhinestones the color of the frozen yogurt joint in the Asheville Mall circa 1993. I bought these at a department store outlet that I love going to because I believe shopping is best when it’s a scavenger hunt or a quest and “did you see that this evening gown is $6?” and my friends largely hate because it gives them anxiety from chaotic merchandise and “thrift store fingers.” I don’t wear these earrings nearly as much as I should and they are absolutely fabulous. If you feel the same way and think you’d wear them more than I do, send me your best dirty limerick about rhinestone peacocks and I’ll drop them in the mail to you. This is a real offer.
The Outfit: Is there any night more anticlimactic than New Years Eve? Looking back over the full scope of my life, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a New Years Eve that actually deserved the sequins I wore to it. Although a few were silly and low key, no-expectations fun, once I stopped hoping someone would kiss me at midnight. It’s been a while since one of those even. Consider the last four years: 1) ohmygod my landlord is selling the house and my mortgage is almost certainly not going to get approved and I’m probably dying so I’ll stay home and cry while packing my record collection in anticipation of forthcoming homelessness (2020) 2) it’s cold and rainy and in the middle of a global pandemic and maybe we’ll never be able to leave the house again (2021) 3) It’s cold and rainy and we’ve all cancelled any plan to go out again because Omicron so we’re going to sit on Zoom and worry together (2022) 4) my cat died and I’m definitely sick and I’ve just had to cancel all my evening plans and I’m headed into elective surgery in ten days (2023). It all worked out. Kind of. Mostly. Sort of. But these have been inauspicious starts to what have been, broadly, a collection of disappointments.
2024 at least involved a several people coming by. We built a fire. We drank an expensive bottle of champagne that I did not pay for. We ate Indian takeout and talked about wars in other countries and how we were trying not to talk about the forthcoming election. I was having (still having now, actually) a teense of an anxiety attack about the collection of discombobulating pains that have not yet gone away, and the medical community’s broad increasingly broad consensus that I’m just anxious and hormonal and not really worth trying to riddle out. I’m tired of being worried and even more tired of being depressed. I’m actually pretty angry about it. Nothing that I’m throwing at it is working. And you can assume I’ve tried almost everything, save hexes, faith healers, and ketamine. And we’re heading into a year that I don’t feel super-hopeful about, on just about any level. I don’t feel super hopeful
Sometimes I forget for a minute, when I’m walking or running, when I’m out of context or in a new place, when I feel the sun on my face or wind breathing around the nape of my neck, and for a couple of seconds, I feel like I’m living in a different kind of life. I can sustain it for a few minutes, but it always fades. I am a very lucky person, in every way that counts. I stood on my deck of my house, both of which I love, but for some cosmetic details, and I looked out at the pond and the woods beyond and thought this life, objectively, is a pretty good one. And then I thought, what is wrong with me that I can’t seem to enjoy it?
I guess that’s as good as any a place to start 2024. After I finish picking up the sequins.1
Dress: Red Label, Clothes Mentor, Chapel Hill, Fall 2023
Sweater: Zadig&Voltaire, Fall 2022
Boots: Dr. Martin, Sinclair Platform Boots, Late 2021
Earrings: Betsey Johnson, Dillard’s Outlet, Asheville ( 2018ish?)
1 It is now January 21. I just found, like, four more sequins.
Tiny Commotions 