"THE DRESS" - 051615

No, no, no, not “The Dress” as in the dress the captured all of that ridiculous attention on the social medias about what color it was – MY dress.  The fabulous one that I wore to a meet-and-greet last night in Oakland, CA, U.S.A., hometown of Dwayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Tone! fame, which happened to be one of my FAVORITE bands in college – real BANDS, back when musicians still played instruments. 

"The Revival" - My Favorite Album - 1990

It all started on Mother's Day, when i got drunk on "comfortable food" in the City with my sister-friend Mia and her mother. 

We were in Hayes Valley and after brunch did some poking around in some of the boutiques, and i tried on a really lovely dress that ended up showing quite a bit of side-boob.  And, had i been shopping by myself, i would have seen side-boob, and very quickly and without making a scene, put it right back on the rack, knowing that i would never, ever, ever have the nerve to wear a dress that showed side-boob, given a lot of factors, including my non-existent reputation and aging A-cups. Seriously, the only people who are really allowed to do side-boob with out seeming like a desperate, needy, or otherwise aging slut are Kim Kardashian.

So i bought the dress and when i got home, feeling ridiculously silly for spending nearly $70 on a dress that I knew would be a lounge-around-the-house-when-i-want-to-feel-particularly-sexy-dress (the material is impossibly soft, too!), I put the dress on and not an hour later, "POP" the right spaghetti strap came loose!  My lucky day!  Except I live in Oakland and the store is in SF and its a 7 day, no money back, exchange-only policy.  And i don't like SF. 

I started plotting a trip to the City some time during the week so that I could exchange the dress and find redemption for that $70 spent hastily, in a delicious moment of "Yeah, yeah, I can rock this!  No problemo!"  When later that day I received an invitation to attend a networking event (which are NOT my favorite excruciatingly painful things to do, ever) I thought how serendipitous it was that perhaps this presented the perfect opportunity for me to find just the right dress to wear for an occasion where i may be hob-nobbing with some of Black Oakland's movers-and-shakers! Crisis = Opportunity. Right there. Bam.

And then, the just-right dress appeared to me like a mirage out of the clear blue horizon, on an impossibly beautiful day, driving down a desert highway, on the road to nowhere.  I tried it on and fell in love instantly.  A daring choice, yes, because this particular dress would require that i go bra-less...yikes!  However, unlike the side-boob dress, my ta-ta's in THIS dress were tastefully displayed and not the least bit conspicuous - no side boob, no nipple, allllll goooood.:o)

The dress was an even exchange, and I left the store happy and excited that my mission had been successfully accomplished, bouncing all the way to my car, when out of nowhere, my glee and joy were dashed by the thought that i had nobody at home to play dress-up with and take the pictures!  And what happens when a single women who's roomate-shutterbug-Sun is away at his father's house and photos of a fabulous dress must be taken?  Determination.  That's what happens.  Yeah.  

This is me looking kind of like a forest gnome.

 This is me looking like a forest gnome and figuring out how how i might take a selfie without the camera directly in front of my face.

This is me looking even more like a forest gnome, but I wanted to get a photo of the shoes I chose to wear.  There was a rather large selection, and the selection process only took trying on each pair twice, getting up on a chair in my bedroom so that I could try and catch a look at how the unique hemline (short in front, long in back) looked with each pair of shoes, cursing in my head all the while “Goddammit Somebody Get Me a Full Length Mirror!!!”

Ignore the laundry in the back because apparently I did. 

That’s when I decided i needed to take advantage of the real reason I took the mirror down in the first place, which was to get a better look at the dress from that unique hemline, which had required all of the shoe fitting and re-fitting.  This photo is probably the best result of that particular effort:

 Then I got so excited at seeing half the result of my creation, I got a bit greedy (well who wouldn't?) and tried to capture the entire result, which was a mistake.  I don’t really know what was going on in my mind here, except to say that my yoga training was starting to kick in at the same time I was trying to fit entire my body into the mirror, and the way the dress actually LOOKED on my body - quite frankly, the way my body LOOKED in general -  became irrelevant.  And the result of not planning that look out in its entirety is what you see below, the second photo looking slightly more constipated than the first.

Determination, ppl. That's what it's all about.

And so, lastnight after all of those shenanigans and before hitting the town, I decided to share on social media my most favorite shot of the dress, in its MOST fabulousness, surprisingly without me anywhere in the shot, or the dress:

FRONT OF AWESOME DRESS I WORE TO MEET-N-GREET

And while I was really, really, really hoping to get that ONE FABULOUS SHOT with Dwayne Wiggins for my blog, I got two shitty ones instead.  He was pretty patient, until the 5^th or so shot in, when he started walking away, saying “Now that’s the shot, right there.” 

It obviously wasn’t the shot.