Exotic Dresser, I Am Not

By Kay H. Wilson

I have always been a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl but have often dreamed of being more exotic in my clothing choices. I would love for the house dress (implications: frumpy, dowdy, boring, etc.) I wear at home to transform into a vaguely mysterious caftan of African or maybe South American descent (implications: exotic, mysterious, world traveler, sophisticated) when I step into public view.

The closest I can manage to exotic on a daily basis is ankle bracelets — though I did once let my manicurist paint my toe nails TWO colors. My mother long dead, she can’t think me trashy any more because of ankle bracelets, so I finally bought myself one when I was 50. Such freedom.

I have had several since, mostly made by my friend, Annie. I tried an ear cuff but it kept falling off; I have fat ear lobes and I could never find just the right spot to hang it. And toe rings were just short of disaster, my metal allergy causing me to scratch my toe in public. “No, I don’t have athlete’s foot,” I would frustratingly tell those folks looking at me aghast.

I got my ears pierced in high school and kept the fact hidden from my mom by wearing a head scarf. She let me think I was getting away with something for a few days then came in and yanked the scarf off. Usually being pretty liberal about letting me “experience” teen-age hood in any way I chose, she was livid about pierced ears – the one thing I guess she still thought of as slutty.

Well, karma was quick — it often is, isn’t it? My fat-anyway ear lobes swelled up, itched like the dickens and got and stayed infected; so no exotic, dangly ear rings for this girl.

I see women dressed in out-of-the-ordinary garb and I just know they have been to far flung corners of the world, sipping powerful native drinks in dark dives in steamy locales reading Gibran in his native tongue, with probably camels or goats wandering the dirt paths of the marketplace.

Me, I’ve been to nearly all the Mexican border towns and to Vancouver, British Columbia. But if I could dress myself exotically, you might think I’d traded shots with the female lead in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” before we went to Paris to listen to poets reading verse on the Left Bank then off to Kenya for a camel-back picture safari and drinks and serious discussion with Isak Dineson’s literary descendents.

Ah, but here I sit in my red house dress, sweating (not perspiring) from the heat, sipping cheap port and reading romance novels.

Yours in hope and cynicism

The Compassionate Curmudgeon

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