etiquette « ann rosenquist fee

I don’t know how to tell you this but there’s no such thing as “no dress code.” There’s always a dress code. It’s just whether you follow the public one or the one in your head.

I got my first tattoo as protection against ending up with a boring job. I was really afraid of that. At the time, which was the mid-1990s, I was unsure about what kind of work I could get with my lit crit degree. I worried that someday I might feel desperate and apply for a soulkilling job. “Soulkilling” as in a job that would require me to wear a navy suit and nude hose. The best strategy I could come up with to insure against that was a tattoo on my ankle. I got a detail from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Superinsurance, right? What kind of businessy-business would hire a person who had this kind of transgression showing through her hose?

A few years later, even though I was safe in the nonprofit sector, everybody in every possible workplace in the world had a tattoo so I thought I should take it a little further. Just in case a bank presidency opened up and I forgot my values and applied for the job. I went to Cactus Tattoo and had my tiny Isis covered up with a large Jane Avril as she appeared on an 1893 poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, ecstatic, mid-sway, wearing a snake.

Jane Avril was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. She was the only one allowed to wear red underwear instead of the standard requisite white. I don’t know if she ever wore a snake to work. If she did, I can’t imagine anyone said a word.

The Hierophant says write the code for what you want, then dress accordingly. Do that today. Do that right now.

The Hierophant is sponsored by Southern Minnesota’s reigning etiquette consultant Deenna Latus. Check out Deenna’s Etiquette and More page, and see if there’s anything you need, like a refresher course on how to eat soup during a business lunch or when it’s truly necessary to wear nude hose.

Tomorrow: The Lovers.

First, it was a funny thing Claudia said we should do. Take the pages of a charm book and wear them like a garment, like an evening gown. Then we’d always know the right thing to say. Whether or not to say it would be a different issue. Either way, a dress like this would be handy.

We did some test shots.

We got serious. We shot and shot and shot.

We made more clothes from things that had been ruined or just abandoned.

I think the coffee napkin Tarot lipstick corset was my best.

We also made lingerie from film spool tape, a skirt from grocery bags, paper umbrella hair charms. We shot with junky pearls and teacups. We shot in a housedress my friend Mike’s mom wore when she was alive and had a tiny waist. See this? I’m sucking it in. Like anybody with good manners, I am not complaining.

We borrowed an antique linen apron my friend Amy had hanging in her kitchen. Amy is so ready to sell that house. She keeps having garage sales. I think she’s finally sold the baby clothes (never worn), or given them away. I’m not sure if the apron was a part of all that. We used it.

We shot and shot.

Mostly we were silent, but sometimes we talked about people’s bullshit or the value of restraint. The value of knowing the right thing to say and sometimes saying it and sometimes not. In which case, in the jar it goes. Then what? Then you find other things. At one point Claudia got out a laundry basket. Not a pretty wicker one. It was the real-deal white plastic truth.

We’re shooting again in a few weeks. Let me know if you need me to take anything, like if there’s anything you need to say, or not say, or if you have trash or secrets that would make good clothes. I’d love to wear them. It’s alright if they look better on me than they did in your junk pile or inside your head. I was blessed with the natural ability to look pleased about being stuck in a jar. Claudia was blessed with the natural ability to see things not visible to the normal naked eye, pull them through her lens and make them real. Give us your stuff. We’ll make it pretty, or we’ll find the most charming tactful tasteful way to show you that it’s not.