So, the thing is… I am so PHAT!

One of the things I decided to give myself for this New Year is some new clothes.  Most of mine (that I can actually still wear) have paint on them or they are beginning to fall apart or they look like they belong in an episode of “Facts of Life” being worn by that character named Blair.  At any rate, I haven’t bought much besides workout gear for the past few (eight) years and frankly, if you wear workout clothes as much as I do, sooner or later, you’re going to have to get some exercise. 

Plus I’m turning forty in um, 25 days and I’ve decided I need to at least DRESS like a grown up.

I didn’t even know what the fashions are these days so, naturally, the first thing I did was consult my girlfriends.  I mentioned my quest to my friend Carolyn and she said, “Oh boy, you picked the wrong decade!”  I had no idea what she meant until I started looking on-line.

And I BURST out laughing! Have you SEEN what’s out there?  It’s the Seventies in Really High Heels. Lingerie for shirts and handkerchief hemlines –stuff Daisy Duke would have worn.  There’s this weird pirate/peasant/heroin addict vibe going and all the super models look like they are in the last stages of consumption. (Dave Barry once said that “the leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.”  Must be those shoes.) It’s awful.

Well, it’s awful for ME, anyway, because I didn’t look that great in the actual real seventies and I was FIVE when they started.  But now, you know, I’m five plus thirty-five (well, in 25 days) and I can’t find anything to wear!

I should mention here that I’m not that great a shopper.  I seem to be sort of influenced by mood or location… or my desire NOT to be shopping.  This past October, I met a few girlfriends in New York City for a weekend and we went shopping together. There’s something about New York City.  I can’t explain it but we went into this one store and I wandered through the shoes.  Suddenly, it made perfect sense to me that I should have the knee-high motorcycle boots with the spiked six-inch heels.  They’d be a perfect match for the rhinestone studded stovepipe jeans and the leather tunic I’d seen over in the Bondage section of the store.  There is just SUCH a demand for this look when you’re sitting in the carpool line. 

(And let’s not even talk about the fact that the only stovepipe anything I could wear would be, well, a STOVEPIPE.  But I digress.)

At any rate, I was disheartened by the fashions and about to give up when my friend Lisa took pity on me and we went shopping together.  Lisa is an artist and she dresses in these colorful and sort of trendy clothes and super chunky shoes.  I love her look because it has style but you can tell that if she needed to, she could rescue a kid from the top of a playscape.  Note: She DOESN’T look like she’s on her way to work out.  So any way, we went to the mall (hell on earth) and shopped for at least a million hours one day and I ended up with two pairs of pants (well, one pair in two different colors) and a very groovy shirt.

I was so proud of myself that I wore this outfit every day for two weeks.

Don’t look at me like that!  I washed it in between! 

I did!  And it’s not like I was EXERCISING in it!

Finally, after people at Ana’s school started giving me The Look, I went online (Amazon.com has an outlet store) and ordered some cheap but potentially hip clothes.  I even bought a pair of jeans.  You’ll laugh but I bought them at Oshkosh B’Gosh, where I’ve shopped for my kids’ clothes a million times without even noticing that they made clothing for adults.  The jeans LOOKED normal enough on-line.

They arrived and I put them on and they fit pretty well but they have these huge bell bottoms!  I feel so weird —kind of like a Clydesdale and kind of hip.  It’s probably more the former but I just can’t stop laughing at myself because I do sort of have this swagger now that I’ve entered the world of real fashion again.  To complete the look, I found a great price on some orthopedic shoes and now I got STYLE, honey.

I look PHAT.

(I’m resisting the urge to make a lot of jokes here at my own expense and it’s causing my brain to overheat.)

(Darn.  I just looked up “phat” in the Urban Dictionary and found this:  “Phat does mean Pretty Hot And Tempting, like the other definitions say. The problem with "phat" is that it is no longer in really. It has kind of phased out and is mostly used by wannabes, lowerclassmen in high school, or middle schoolers. It is now considered a slang faux pas. I wouldn't use it if I was you.”)

(Great, now I’m taking grammar advice from some kid named “Doobie Smokes You” who can’t even write a simple declarative sentence.  You see why all this horrible fashion and modern stuff is leading to the downfall of civilization as we know it?)

(Do NOT browse through the Urban Dictionary, by the way.  It will offend every mortal cell in your body, phat or not.)

Okay, okay, so my first pass at entering the new fashion millennium hasn’t exactly been a stellar success.  I’ve decided that I still need some new clothes and I’m willing to commit to a new diet and exercise regime in order not to look like a sausage in them.

Besides, you know what’s REALLY cute?  All the new workout clothes.

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(c) Barbara Cooper 2005