Dressing the part

I've never met my editor, Michelle, but I’ve heard she has great shoes. Lots of the Simon Pulse Ro-Com authors are based in New York City, and I picture them all doing lunch with Michelle every Friday, wearing designer pantsuits and great shoes. Micol brings her dog in a purse.

It’s probably just as well that I live in Alabama and can’t do lunch in NYC, because I don’t have great shoes. Or if I did, I wouldn’t know it. They would have been an accidental purchase at DSW.

Actually I thought myself quite the fashion plate in high school in the 80s. A typical outfit would be an oversized Generra shirt from the boy’s department, oversized Esprit pants tucked into one pair of socks that matched the color in the shirt and a second pair of socks that matched the color in the pants, white Converse high-top tennis shoes decorated in Crayola marker, one very large dangly earring that matched the color in the shirt, and another large dangly earring from a different pair that matched nothing at all. If it was below 50 degrees (typically for one week in January), I might wear my denim trenchcoat.

In my 20s in grad school, I didn’t have the money to keep up with fashion, but I thought I knew what was going on because I taught college English to 18-year-olds, which kept me withit. Any time I wanted to get back in the fashion game, I was back in like that. *snap* Then came one fateful day when, armed with my 27th birthday money from Granddaddy, I wandered into The Buckle at the mall. The Buckle is a juniors store that happened to be run that day by a gorgeous and sophisticated 15-year-old named Beige. Much to my chagrin and certainly to Beige’s, I found that I had lost it. I did NOT know what was going on fashion-wise. I had no idea what shirts went with what pants anymore, and forget the shoes. Since then, I have included a character named Beige in several of my novels. Actually I wanted my pen name to be Beige Racy but my agent wouldn’t let me.

Nowadays I have the money to keep up with fashion, but it’s a lost cause. I watch What Not to Wear and look for those “pieces” when I “build a wardrobe,” but it’s difficult when you’re five-foot-two. For some reason, the petites department is geared toward the elderly. Tall people get INC and Juicy. Short people get Sag Harbor and Koret. In addition, whenever I do go shopping, I now have a five-year-old boy pulling on me. Occasionally he detaches himself in order to entertain the other shoppers with a Taylor Hicks-like dance in the aisles, punctuated with a move or two he picked up from That’s So Raven. This is distracting. So my wardrobe is made up mostly of things that grabbed my attention as I whisked by. Things that have birds embroidered on them, or things that are shiny or sparkly. I have the fashion sense of a crow.

How about you? Are you a fashionista or a fashion disaster, & how has this changed for you over the years?

And, Simon Pulse Ro-Com authors: Are you really going to lunch without me? *sob*