April is the pearlest month day seven: The Pearl Sessions

Apr7

The Pearl Sessions, released in 2012, is a compilation featuring alternate takes of the songs from Janis Joplin’s 1971 album Pearl plus conversations between Janis and producer Paul Rothchild.

I mined the audio trying to find something that felt Frye, some moment in the give-and-take as Paul and Janis crafted an era-defining sound, something that felt the same as, say, The Frye discussing the downfalls and/or rewards of joining every other southern Minnesota bar band in covering “Angel From Montgomery.” Nothing. There’s a lot of “this is the last time I’m doing this so don’t miss the f*king cue,” that kind of thing, and that’s not really how The Frye interacts.

Which, incidentally, makes for challenges with the upcoming performance of Joe’s one-act bar band operetta, The Best of Hank and Rita. Personally I’m not accustomed to talking into the mic between songs and I’m also not accustomed to slinging barbs his way. Fingers crossed, though, aided by a great script and songs plus the natural blessing of my own bitchy resting face, I’m hoping to pull it off. Stay tuned. Stay tuned to Joe’s site and Rural America Contemporary Art, in particular, for announcements and special invite-only invitations.

But BACK TO MY PEARLS and Pearl. The album includes Janis’ only number-one single, “Me and Bobby McGee,” which The Frye gets asked to play pretty often. And why not. It’s a great tune and it feels as good to hear as it does to sing. The thing, though, is that I’ve gone down the road of singing “Me and Bobby McGee” in front of an audience, and as much as I sound exactly and I mean EXACTLY like Janis when I sing it in the privacy of my own laundry room or whatever, I don’t quite nail it in public. I know because I’ve listened to the game tapes, flinched, deleted. So, The Frye honors the request but we do it with Joe on lead while I give a nod to Janis’ inimitable style with harmony that’s hoarse enough to keep the purists from getting angry at us.

Similarly, here is a nod.

I don’t own a feather boa or an amazing tiny couch but I do have this fringe and the faux suede bell-bottom-sleeved thing that feels very Janis, especially if I were to put it on to sing alone in my laundry room. If.

And a sincere, if marginal, happy birthday to Joe.

Tomorrow: AWP in Minneapolis begins. Writerpearls!

April is the pearlest month day six: Trashy eye is the new smoky eye

Apr6

Here’s one for fans of logic.

Given:

(i) Successful pearl-wearing is about contrast.

(ii) The most immediate opportunities for contrast are up in the face. Pearls cling to the neck in an entitled kind of way and sort of gleam upward, so you can wear all the menswear you want but if your face is just as prissy as the pearls there’s really no hope.

(iii) Basic rule of style: Eyes OR lips. Not both. You don’t accentuate both.

(iv) Midlife mouth is kind of downturning. Right? Kind of. Mine is. My kid told me recently, just as a service, that I had a mild case of bitchy resting face. It was sweet. It was like he was letting me off the hook, letting me know he knew I wasn’t an actual bitch and also that I wasn’t alone. So, I’m fine with this, I mean it just is what it is, but given the choice between eyes and lips, I’m going with eyes.

Ergo, my most potent and efficient opportunity for successful pearl-wearing is to contrast the pearls with the eyes.

Here are my pearls next to a regular conventional smoky eye, as worn by the cover of my latest issue of W magazine.

Here are the pearls vis-a-vis the trashiest eye I could make with my Too Faced Cat Eyes nine-shadow kit.

Please understand this is not a precise and witty version of an over-smoky eye. This is not one of those. This is for real, i.e., this is the method-acting version of a trashy eye. I used my fingers, no brushes. I wiped stuff off and started over right on top of it, no makeup remover. I did not flick off any clumps. The bloodshot was probably there to begin with, a little, but no doubt it helped to stick a dirty finger inside the lower lid and rub some black powder around. And behold! You can’t tell me this doesn’t look great with the pearls. You can’t tell me this is not the most exciting tension you’ve ever seen between an eyeball and a neckpiece.

It could only be better if the pupils were dilated, raising questions of sobriety. Right?!?! AMAZINGLY, today is my biannual appointment at Mankato Clinic Opthamology to check for diabetic retinopathy. That means dilation drops and at least three hours of huge pupils. You guys. Usually I have a little tiny bit of worry that Dr. Graham might find an offending blood vessel (he hasn’t yet, and all is well). Today I’m just worried I’ll be too blinded by the dilation to drive myself somewhere with an appropriate audience for the world premiere of this groundbreaking piece of performance art.

Tomorrow: A special birthday hello to a friend who otherwise might not read a blog about pearls so I have to do something.

April is the pearlest month day five: A holiday miracle at MVAC Thrift

Apr5

You can fight springtime pastels for so long, maybe well into your thirties, but ultimately they drift back and here you are, a non-ironic adult facing spring and you have to deal. It’s possible to do this with integrity. For instance, if you’re seeking something pastel while also in the midst of a challenge to find a good way to wear peals, so you also need something that’s the opposite of prissy, you might shop menswear. If you’re a small-framed person, that could mean the boy’s section of MVAC Thrift. If you’re lucky, so very very lucky, a horse will beckon.

“Here is your shirt!”

I don’t know why I even tried with the others. The sherbet hue is IT.

I didn’t iron it but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious.

Happy Easter.

Tomorrow: Trashy eye is the new smoky eye if you reinforce with pearls.

April is the pearlest month day four: #wearthepearls is the other (warmer) #freethenipple

Apr4

You guys are onto #freethenipple, right?

The 2014 film:

Inspired by true events, Free The Nipple follows a group of young women who take to the streets of New York City topless, to protest the archaic censorship laws in the United States. Activist Liv and With set out to start a movement and change the system through publicity stunts and graffiti installations while armed with First Amendment lawyers. The film explores the contradictions in our media-dominated society, where acts of violence and killing are glorified, while images of a woman’s body are censored by the FCC and the MPAA. What is more obscene: Violence or a Nipple?

And the ensuing movement, which got some attention this week after women in Iceland took it up as backlash against the backlash that hit a #freethenipple-promoting teenager:

As Iceland has no laws against bared breasts in public, many young women plan to go topless to pools this summer, like the group at Laugardalslaug in Reykjavík. Images pouring in from the campaign are aimed at normalizing the exposure of the female breast as a non-sexual act and securing for women the world over ownership over their own bodies. This debate is closely related to how women express themselves physically, sexually, exercise their reproductive freedoms, their right to move through public places unmolested and other feminist concerns. The fight for the right to choice, to freedom, to bodily autonomy must go on, in the East, the West, everywhere, until it is won for all people of this planet (Shambhavi Saxena, Youth Kiawaaz)

Great stuff. What I like best about the whole thing are those amazing hot-pink capes. And the hats!

hoods

One might think they’d rob the intended focal point of its attention-getting properties, but no, all that gleaming hot pink really works. It offsets the twin points of slightly darker and different-shaped skin like you wouldn’t believe, which kind of makes you realize, wow, you can wear nipples with ANYTHING.

Which, you know, back to the pearls. Like nipples suddenly too prurient for daily display, pearls showed up for many of us sometime in the teenage years along with the message that they had great value and should probably only come out on special occasions. But, like, what occasions? Like religious holidays? Like guest towels in the bathroom? Neither gift came with specific practical instructions as to how to do anything except just, like, have them.

I suspect I’m not alone in thinking #freethenipple is great but not something in which I want to directly participate. I offer instead, to those who stand with me at the socioeconomic intersection of “owns pearls but doesn’t wear them out” and “owns nipples but doesn’t wear those out either, but thinks #freethenipple is a fine idea,” a more understated and weatherproof alternative:

#wearthepearls

Here is their logo:

I don’t have ours yet. Now accepting submissions. Submissions may be in the form of typography and design, or an actual outfit. Outfits will be reviewed in person beginning tonight at Wine Cafe where The Frye plays the early show, 5-7 p.m., and then I’ll personally hang around to review and discuss logo submissions, tagline options, and what color capes we should get for group-running in slow motion down Riverfront.

Tomorrow: Do we take a break on Easter? No. Are you kidding me, the high holiday of prissy daytime formalwear? NO.

April is the pearlest month day three: Let me try to cool down your face a bit

Apr3

And now today let us glorify Yvonne Elliman, the predisco mezzo-soprano who defined the role of Mary Magdalene in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

She sang the role on the 1970 concept album, in the original Broadway cast, and in the 1973 film. Then she had a chart-topper with the 1977 Saturday Night Fever single “If I Can’t Have You.” A remarkable voice, an admirable career. What I’d like to focus on, though, is how she worked the sternum.

Sometimes vis-a-vis neckware.

I can see as well as anybody that there are no pearls here. Clearly these photos weren’t shot in April and Yyonne wasn’t yet at the point in her life where she was like, geez, I should probably wear those pearls I have, that one piece of real jewelry, that simple classic luxury that’s sitting in my dresser drawer while I ponder maturity and mortality.

If she had, and if she’d stuck with her signature plunging v-necks and great skin and superhero arms-out poses, I suspect it would have worked like crazy because of the contrast. Right?! The impossibly potent daintyness of the pearls up against all that silky-looking power.

Thus here in day three I think we are onto something.

Big thanks to Yvonne for taking it as far as she did, and I will now take it from here, specifically tonight at Indian Island Winery where The Frye plays 5:30-8:30 p.m. including our annual one-song tribute to Jesus Christ Superstar with Joe Tougas as Jesus, Judas, Apostles and Peter, and Ann Fee as Mary Magdaelene, Apostles, and Woman. After that one song my plan is to Yvonne Elliman the living hell out of the whole show by virtue of this.

My most sternum-baring disco shirt, previously made decent with a few stitches mid-sternum but NOT ANY MORE. Here is my deepest-plunging shirt, previously made decent by a few stitches I put in to keep things closed mid-sternum but those days are over.

Here is my deepest-plunging shirt, initially made decent by a few stitches I added to keep things closed mid-sternum but those days are gone.

And some of this.

JoAnn Fabrics. This isn’t even the whole display.

Ultimately coming together with less sinew than Yvonne and probably just my arms hanging down like usual, but still, I think it’ll be an improvement for me. My day-one 1950s aesthetic didn’t really knock me out, and neither did the day-two 1650s look, and so let’s see where DIY 1977 takes things. We have to move on. I’ll tweet it over on @ARosenquistFee, successful or not. Come see. I have 27 days to go and I just think we have to move on.

Oh and P.S., Alyssa? Erin? Other pearl-denying friends: I trust you’ve lifted your strand from its shameful spot in your dresser drawer and placed it top-of-dresser, at least, and you’re letting it stare you down. Let it rest there and breathe. Baby steps. You and the pearls will want to rest up for what’s to come.

Tomorrow: #wearthepearls is just like #freethenipple except EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE.

April is the pearlest month day two: Alms for the pearled

Apr2

So guess what “Maundy” of Maundy Thursday means.

Maundy (noun)

1. The ceremony of washing the feet of the poor, especially commemorating Jesus’ washing of His disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday.

2. Also called maundy money, money distributed as alms in conjunction with the ceremony of maundy or on Maundy Thursday.

Number one would be tough to render in pearl-wearing unless I were to do the act while wearing pearls. Or maybe wear them on my ankle in a symbolic way, to draw the eye footward and kind of start the conversation.

Johannes Vermeer. "Diana and Her Companions." Circa 1650. No pearls but you can see that they would really work.

Johannes Vermeer. “Diana and Her Companions” circa 1650. No pearls here but you can see that they’re implied.

Neither of those are practical today given previous commitments and given that I just learned I don’t have the golden ratio of my neck being twice the circumference of my ankle, if that’s one of those.

However! I have a scheduling confluence that allows me to nail number two. Just nail it. It so happens that I have a meeting with the head of the Mankato Area Foundation. We will be talking, so to speak, essentially, about the distribution of alms in the form of private funding opportunities for regional arts organizations. Right?!?! Also, she’s known for successful pearl-wearing. Revered. For real. Last week I had a conversation with a third party about how in the world that Mankato Area Foundation woman does it with the pearls.

So basically I have an excellent set of determining factors for a great day two: A sense of purpose, a sister in the struggle, some drapey-drapey Vermeer. Surely we can do this.

“We” as in I know you’re thinking about your own pearls. I know you are. Already on day one I heard from two friends who were like “I can’t do it either, my pearls are in their little velvet envelope in a dresser drawer.” I get it. And in full disclosure, my day one didn’t feel triumphant or stylistically interesting, it just felt like, you know, as Erin put it, *pearls.*

But they were nice to touch every time I reached up to see if I was still doing this, which made for a new body language move I hadn’t thought of before. Kind of like whipping on and off your reading glasses. I don’t know the exact signals or implications it conveyed. That is beyond the scope of this research. I can’t even think about it right now because I have to go re-enact a Vermeer tableau and talk about alms for the arts.

I don’t have time to deal with your specific issues either but you should probably go get the velvet envelope of pearls out of your dresser. Go get it and we’ll check back tomorrow.

GO GET IT.

Tomorrow: Sternum as counterpoint.

April is the pearlest month day one: I get that it’s April Fool’s Day but no you guys this is real

Apr1

At this point things look almost exactly how I figured they should and I will be damned if my own pearls are going to stand in the way of total completion.

How I thought things should look was: tall hair, high shoes, big purse, pearls. A strand of pearls every day like no big deal. Like, oh what, am I wearing actual pearls? I didn’t notice. They must just seem like part of me. I barely noticed I was so effortlessly pearled.

I feel like the other trappings of mature adulthood are on track just the way my preteen imagination foretold.

Tall hair. Tall like a twist cone pointing up to high heaven.

Here is my all-season lineup of Gene Simmons hooves.

Ideally the insides would smell of mint gum and perfume and cigarettes like my mom’s did but you can’t always have it all.

Here is the purse! Even more mature: A briefcase. Ideally the inside would smell of mint gum, perfume, and cigarettes like my mom’s purse but you can’t always have it all.

But.

On and off I’ve searched “how to wear pearls,” “how to wear pearls casually,” “how to wear pearls without looking like a 1950s homemaker.” Et cetera. The results are no help. The results show new pieces of jewelry a person could buy, like, contemporary settings of the objects called pearls. Pearls in rings that span all your knuckles. Pearls intermingled on a strand with sea glass, chunks of wood, plastic babies. That is not what I’m asking to see. What I’m asking is how to wear the actual pearls I already possess, on my own personal neck as-is.

Pair this bleak quest with the fact that I already dislike this time of year. The damp chill and the dirty snow. My dirty coat and my dirty car and my front-yard fountain knocked over from a wind storm, a while back when it felt like warmth was coming but then no it wasn’t.

Really sorry, neighbors.

And then it ice-rained and now the base is frozen into the mud and the plant corpses I never raked away last fall and it looks so stupid and I feel bad for my neighbors having to look at this but there is nothing I can do about it until April is done.

Couple days later and still frozen. Really sorry.

I can’t make spring go away any faster and I can’t move my birdbath so I’m just going to deal with the pearls. Thirty days. Thirty days in a row, I’m wearing these pearls no matter what.

The look for day one is called Hey Pearls I Got Your 1950s Homemaker Right Here.

Tomorrow: Nothing says “pearls” like Maundy Thursday!

March Style: Rebuttal

Mar1

My style column in the March 2015 Mankato Magazine calls out Grant Pladsen and Rhett Waldock for wardrobe-related failure to lift us out of winter.

I’m so sorry but it was true. The boys looked perfectly stylish and put-together the day I took their photo, without permission and on moments’ notice, but stylish was not what I was after. I was after explosions of color to warm our eyeballs and lift our wintry spirits.

I haven’t known Rhett for very long but I’ve known Grant just about forever. Like, since he asked to be driven home from a sleepover due to stomach discomfort. Sweet kid. Explained the situation and apologized for the inconvenience with so much eloquence, it was kind of startling. Grant’s been a well-put-together gent of substance since middle school. So if you’re not into color but rather you’re into neutrals and naturalness and casual post-preppy ease, you can feel free to toss my column aside and embrace Grant Pladsen as your new style icon.

“My style paradigm? Stolen. Or actually borrowed. This is Rhett’s.”

The pants too. “Sometimes I accidentally dry his stuff and then it’s too small and it’s mine.”

Now here is color. Color! Possible that I missed this the day I shot the incriminating photo. Doesn’t matter. This street-level pop of green wouldn’t have made Grant a fashion icon for that particular piece. However, this 2% whimsy in an otherwise conservative ensemble is noted and admired, especially because it’s mostly only visible to Grant himself and even he has to work for it by looking down and making sure his pants are out of the way. But then: Green! Hello.

I also appreciate that Grant lets his hair be his hair and that is that.

Also, I enjoy his art. The knife. The knife is Grant’s. Much like the small slice of whimsy on the shoes, you gotta work for this. It requires a little bit of thought to delight in the sad-face knife.

Thought, pauses, quietude, a shrunken cotton shirt, neutrality — these are your alternatives. Alternatives to screamy showy color signaling a kind of panic that winter won’t end. It always ends. My Mankato Magazine piece kind of suggests otherwise, and I’m sorry, you guys, I didn’t mean to incite panic. Everybody just calm down. Everybody put on some borrowed pants and whimsyshoes and patience and grace and trust that the soft browns and greens of spring will follow.

Black Friday with The Dan and a box fan

Nov28

It’s Black Friday! The day we celebrate the Steely Dan tune commemorating a failed ploy to corner the gold market on the New York Stock Exchange. That was in 1869, the epic crash that was the original “Black Friday.”

In 1975, Steely Dan released “Black Friday” on Katy Lied, the band’s third album and the first one they made with mostly session musicians. That was because the real band quit because they were so tired of Walter Becker’s and Donald Fagen’s obsession with perfection. I mean my God you guys. Forty takes, or something like that, that’s what they made everybody do.

Steely Dan’s defectors went off to join the Doobie Brothers, and Walter and Donald got what they wanted out of the session musicians, so everything pretty much worked out and both bands served me really well through some preteen years when I was learning how to sew.

If you’ve never pinned together fabric on the basement floor, kneeling on a cardboard grid that’s made exactly for cutting out fabric, with a horn section in the background on the basement radio, and your whole family is upstairs, and nobody’s bothering you because you’re working on a 4H project so this is SERIOUS and you need some ALONE TIME to plan this thing, you should. I mean you should.

Push it to perfection, Becker and Fagen used to say, and then go past perfection. Past it. I didn’t know any of that when I was listening to the radio in the basement, but I think it’s something you can feel. I’m sure I felt it. I am sure it accounted for my ambitious if also unsuccessful techniques in terms of pleating, hand-sewing, iron-on crystals. Visions that transcended the Butterick pattern envelope and floated out behind me, as if with a fan, as if with a box fan brought down to the basement just to see.

I mean, if you were to hold up the fabric. Just to see.

Just to enjoy something while it’s a pinned-together possibility, not yet a failed ploy or an epic crash. Not yet a thing for your mom to come downstairs and fix.

You can probably get Katy Lied right now at TuneTown, which is having a big-deal Black Friday sale. You can borrow my cardboard grid if you want. I can’t loan you my box fan because I might sometimes still use it.

Read last year’s Black Friday post, a Steely Dan/Mall of America mashup, here. And the year before that, a Steely Dan/Front Street mashup, here. You guys I just really love Steely Dan.

Thrift-Shop Your Way to Moral High Ground with the Seven Deadly Sins

Nov6

I’ll say this first and I’ll be really clear about it. I have no problem with virtue. In regular life I’m virtuous as a routine and I appreciate it in other people as well. Right now, for instance, I’m drinking coffee with coconut oil and I tipped the barista a dollar, and it was a paper dollar, not a bunch of change. I’m doing all this before 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. Do you see what I’m saying? Temperance, charity, diligence. Those are three of the seven official virtues and I’m not even thinking about it.

But it’s not as if I have some kind of hyper-virtue problem, like I need you to join me in condemning bad behavior so we both know that’s not how we operate. For example. I’m not inviting you to freak out at the news that a bunch of French women were killing their infants and hiding the corpses in plastic bags in the foundation of the house. Women, plural. Like it was a thing in that particular town. A thing to do.

This was a landing-page story a while ago on CNN.com, and you have to assume it got that placement because CNN knows people like to read that kind of thing and say, oh my God, who would do that? Who would do that? In this way, the reader makes clear that they wouldn’t do it. They can’t even comprehend. They can’t even. To read a thing like that, your silent reading voice taking on a shocked tone, and then to tell other people about the story you just read, in a shocked tone, you can feel ok then because everyone understands you wouldn’t do a thing like that. It’s understood.

I’m not asking you to do anything like that. I also don’t need you to do the opposite, to join in doing bad things with me so I’ll feel better about myself. As stated, I’m comfortable with virtue. What I’m trying to propose here, what I feel strongly about and want to share with you, is that when the seven deadly sins are applied with intention, when they’re committed in the interest of successful thrift shopping, virtue results. Virtue and great style. Which, together, are wicked hot.

Postulate 1: Avarice is next to thriftiness.

(Avarice means greed. I had to look it up.) Without this, you can’t even walk into the Goodwill. You’re not ready. You might as well go to Nordstrom where you can afford only one thing, or two if they’re on clearance, because who cares. If that satisfies you, if that’s who you are, then you’re not right for the Goodwill. No, for proper thrifting you need to crave luxuries beyond your means. You need to want what you can’t afford in quantities your closet can’t accommodate. You must desire quality and quantities only available to a person of your means via the Goodwill. Once that’s your mindset, once you yield to that, you may enter.

Postulate 2: Lust trumps whatever makes your ass look fat.

When you move through the Goodwill guided by lust, you choose your try-ons based on texture-color-fringe-vibe. Your choices may or may not be advisable for your bust size, hip-waist ratio, day job, whatever. Don’t waver. Don’t give thought to those rules or you’ll never ever dress any more interestingly than you’re dressed this second. You’ll just keep wearing boring flattering things versus things that give you pleasure. On the other hand, if you buy what you want and wear it like you mean it, it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t, whether it matches or fits or anything else. If you shop from lust, you’ll look good because you’ll feel pleased and triumphant and oblivious to your ass size. Your posture will improve. If people think it’s some kind of feminist or postfeminist rejection of fashion industry edicts, whatever-whatever, that’s fine. Let them think that. Lust has a long history of working better when it’s secret.

Postulate 3: Slothfulness actually equals efficiency.

There are no escalators at the Goodwill. There are no separate levels or rooms of alcoves, no one-brand-of-belt-here and another-brand-of-belt-over-there. Everything is exactly right in front of you, all things of one kind are grouped together, often quite close. Often color coded, which makes it so easy. Very little effort is required to yield an impressive variety of head-to-toe outfit items, all of which are within swatting distance of each other if you were to spread your arms and twirl in the Women’s half of the store, giddy with the lack of exertion required to knock over shoes and a bag and a scarf and a dress from the Quality Clothing rack. And due to this, due to everything being literally within arm’s reach, you can look at just about everything on every rack in the time it would take you to locate each of the separate belt alcoves at an energy-sucking lust-stifling upscale department store.

Postulate 4: Envy is dirty, but useful.

This is stuff from other people you’re buying, used clothes with perfume and deodorant still clinging to the insides. Not fresh fabric that smells like a store. This stuff has lived. It’s been places. It’s possible that you’re drawn to a piece because of who wears that kind of thing. You know damn well who wears wrap dresses, and it’s never been you. And by God starting today it’s going to be you. Wrap up in her life, her smell. She gave it up for some reason. Possibly for you. Go ahead and buy it, be that woman, and if you like the smell don’t have it dry cleaned right away. (This is lust and envy working together. Are you seeing this synergy? OH WAIT I think I mean sinergy. Oh my God.) If you stay focused, stay with the fragrance and the possibility of a new-to-you life, you can pull this off. You just might be mistaken for a wrap-dress woman. Ultimately with all the right accessories and a hand-crafted messenger bag and whatnot, but right now just take it one piece at a time.

Postulate 5: Gluttony benefits the greater good.

In the situation of Goodwill, it’s most logical to buy overstuffed bags full of clothing in order to 1) limit the amount of times you need to get in your car to travel to the store within a given period; 2) give discarded clothing an appreciative home; and 3) usually, if it’s indeed a Goodwill or Salvation Army or something like that, help fund social services for people in need. Do you see this? The more excessive your binge, the greater the goodness. Yield to the bag sale. Yield and feel your carbon footprint shrink, your karma improve and the operating budgets of your local nonprofits swell as you load your trunk with one, maybe two, reused grocery sacks of goodness.

Postulate 6: Pride spreads the love.

Get home and dump it all out on the floor and know that you are fabulous. Thrifty, efficient, not beholden to restrictive style conventions. And it’s not enough to know this for yourself, you have to tell people. You have to. No $2.99 platform boots, no bag-sale velvet blazer realizes its full emotional or fashion value until somebody compliments you and you go, oh my God I know, these were $2.99! The praise, then, goes beyond the superficial. It’s not about the boots. It’s about the fact that you did this. You’re not just wearing this stuff, you accomplished it, you in the smart smart thrifty hot smart boots. When you share your pride undiluted, it helps ignite avarice and envy in others, and then voila. A self-sustaining cycle is established.

Postulate 7: Wrath is inevitable.

It’s included. It just is, and you can’t avoid it even if you think you can because everything looked great in the store. That’s just part of the cycle you’re now trapped inside. It’s a particular risk in places without a try-on room. Wrath happens, right away or eventually, because you start wearing this stuff, these bold choices, and you realize you were frenzied. You were high on texture and color, high on your own brain imagining yourself as some kind of wrap-dress wearer. So you made some choices that turn out to be not the best. Honestly, to be honest, they look really bad on you. Worse than a lot of things you already own, in fact, the stuff you thought you were replacing. And now here they are in your house, in the closet or still on your bedroom floor or whatever, looking back at you in a mocking way, as if you were ever, ever, ever going to be that woman or anything like her. Ever. And since you are a buyer of full bags at the Goodwill Thrift, really full bags to be efficient, it’s not like you can go back tomorrow to give back these few items and try again. You can’t. It would be awkward, it would be a failure. These things have to stay in your possession until you can justify another trip. And based on when Goodwill turns over their inventory, and based on the fact that you went through just about every hanger on every single rack on that last trip, you are stuck, stuck with this load of ill-fitting off-brand crap and you can’t even think about passing it off to anyone else, because you already know no friend wants any of this. If you’d had a friend along with you, in fact, she would have saved you from yourself, she would have said, um, I don’t think that works for you. But you didn’t ask. This is your doing, your stash, your closet for a good six weeks. So I hope you’re happy.

Frustrating, yes. But it’s wrath that completes the cycle and sends us back to the beginning. One by one, the mistakes go into a small shopping bag and then later a larger bag, then two, and then they sit there on the floor of the closet for a while, and at some point the bags make it out to the car. When that happens, it’s time. Time to want what you can’t afford, want what feels good to touch, want it all within reach, want to dress like-look like-be like someone else, want more and more and more, want the world to know. Time to take your bag of bad choices to the Goodwill — the source, the mandala, the mountain — and deliver them to the back door, where offerings are accepted between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., and then walk back around to the entry and begin anew.