The first week of October, my wife was away with her sister visiting New York City, so I had the chance to squeeze in three days of dressing–and to try to squeeze into some new clothes. Looking at the calendar–my sister-in-law spending two more weeks with us, followed by six weeks of travel with my wife–my Dee time was going to be limited for the foreseeable future.
Day one was a visit to Refresh, a recently discovered thrift store that has casual clothes on the first floor and racks of formal dresses on the second floor. I don’t have an event that requires a formal dress, but I like trying them on. If I did find one I liked, they are reasonably priced. I wore the yellow print dress to the store and headed to the second floor.
I found a few dresses to try on. Many of the formal dresses are prom dresses, and I don’t exactly have the same physique as a teenage girl, so most are far too small for me. Looks can be deceiving, because what I thought might fit–and pulled from the clothes racks–usually didn’t. The short bright blue dress, which I loved, didn’t love me (too small to zip). The others didn’t zip either, except the orange strapless dress, which didn’t really do it for me.
In addition to the formal dresses, they have some wedding dresses, but unlike the last time I was at Refresh, none were a fit. I REALLY don’t have a need for a wedding dress, but they are also fun to try on.
In the end, I didn’t find anything, either upstairs or downstairs, and headed home.
Three days later, I had an errand to run; picking up a black juniors/prom dress I bought on line and shipped to Macy’s for pickup. I found the dress at the flagship Macy’s store in New York, then cyberstalked it until it went on sale for 30% off, when I swooped in and ordered it. I decided I could do the pickup as a guy–or I could suck it up (the order was in my guy name) and have Dee pick it up. I’ll give you a hint what I decided to do; I wore the green halter dress.The name on the order not matching my appearance was, once again, a non issue.
I wandered through Macy’s and a few other stores at the mall (like most malls these days, mostly empty on weekday afternoons), and made a brief stop at a White House Black Market near the mall, but again found nothing of interest. I then returned home and squeezed into my new black sparkly dress, hoping to eventually find a place to wear it.
Then on Friday, with my wife and sister-in-law, flying in later than day, I arranged a lunch with my friend Falon. We originally met when she was a sales angel at Nordstrom in 2016. She helped me find my style, gave me emotional support, and I in turn encouraged her to get her degree and eventually become a paralegal. She’s busy as a professional and a single mom, juggling all the balls, so we hadn’t gotten together for a while. We met for lunch, and I chose a favorite summer dress, one she hadn’t seen, because I wanted to look good for her. We caught up, and I was happy she looked happy, because she’s had a rougher life than me, and she deserves the happiness she’s found. We promised not to wait as long to get together again.
I got my fix in, squeezing in another three days of dressing, raising my tally between Atlantic City, New York, Philadelphia, and locally to twelve days out in three weeks. At least I had memories to sustain me during my soon to be dressing dry spell.
