Shop Talk

When I am in Boston, I shop. It is not that I am lacking for the exact same stores at home, but I am usually in Boston during holiday sales and there is no sales tax on clothing. So even though I end up purchasing additional luggage to lug the items back across the country, in my mind the thrill of acquiring masses of clothes in a short period makes the new luggage (which rarely seems to be on sale at the same time as the clothing) seem like a savvy investment, rather than an economic anomaly.


Of course, shopping while on vacation is a bad idea for so many reasons, most obviously because time away from my real life means I am not experiencing my real life. Halter tops, sequined headbands, platform wedges, all things I would never be caught dead in back home look charmingly exotic. Yes, I think, looking at the people around me at leisure in their leisure garb, maybe I am a hat person. Why not an embellished top? Look how cute that woman looks with that flower barrette. Maybe I have an inner Rachel Zoe clamoring to express herself.


Another challenge is that my real life is in a completely different culture and climate as my leisure shopping outings. The Boston sale racks in late December boast amazing deals on wool jackets and wool sweaters and wool dresses and wool scarves and wool coats. Not only do I live in a place where it rarely dips below 70 degrees farenheit, but I am exceedingly warm blooded. I don't need much of a prompt to share the story of how I spent an entire New York winter with just a cotton cardigan. Of course, I had a closet full of coats and cashmere sweaters and scarves--I was a sale hoarder back then, too--but buying clothes and wearing clothes are two completely different issues. In fact, one of my few memories of college involves buying a Claude Montana taffeta wrap top at John Wanamaker in Philadelphia because it was marked down more than $1250 dollars! I don't know what business I had as an 18-year-old freshman spending $150 on a couture top that I literally never took the tags off of, but I think many of my thrifty sisters out there might understand the excitement of that score.


This past week, the urge to splurge was back, but in a modified "I have kids and a mortgage" way. I was sifting through the sales racks at Saks and found a Tory Burch dress that was in a decidedly un-Tory-like print (a good thing) and made in my favorite indestructible silk fabric, the type that looks and feels like 1970s double-knit polyester, but really is pure silk. It was a size too small, and, truthfully, I never wear dresses (although I had bought two the day before). But it was more than $200 off and maybe I could wear a Spanx and start rotating silk dresses into my wardrobe for work. In the old days, I would have grabbed it and bought it without even trying it on--what a deal!--but now that I am an adult with an occasional handle on my impulse-control issues, I used a self-talk strategy that I vaguely recall hearing about at a continuing-education seminar, and reminded myself that if I suddenly wore a silk dress to work, rumors would fly that I am job-hunting (which I am not), which would make me anxious and cause me to overeat, resulting in me having even less of a chance of squeezing into the Tory. The dress stayed on the rack. 


Earlier in the day, I was shopping at one of my favorite stores, Anthropologie. My husband recently read me a passage from an hysterically snarky book about my demographic sisters and brothers describing Anthropologie's offerings as looking vintage but being brand-spanking new; looking handmade, but being mass produced; and, best of all, giving the shopper the feeling that has searched through an estate sale, but without the annoyance of not having one's size in stock. People like me apparently love this aesthetic and I have to say the writer totally nailed me on this one.   


Anyway, I was busy pulling all sorts of delicate asymmetrical cardigans and funky patterned A-line skirts off the shelf when a salesperson introduced herself as the personal shopper and began advising me on how to wear a dress I was studying backwards for a chic-er effect. Typically, salespeople avoid me like the plague because, despite having a lovely engagement ring and a relatively significant purse, I also tend to be texting with one hand while attempting to balance a cup of coffee with my other hand. I think salespeople don't want to be responsible for cleaning up the mess they fear I will inevitably make. And I can't say I blame them. I still cringe at the memory of adjusting an enormous Coach purse on my shoulder at a Crate and Barrel and accidentally knocking over a display of wine glasses.  


So, this very thin and effortlessly accessorized woman continued to offer me advice, even after I shuffled into the dressing room. Anthropologie has the annoying practice of writing the shopper's own name on the fitting room door in dry marker. I will admit to giving false names in the past and then not being able to figure out which room was mine. This stunt also backfires for me at Starbucks, and at Radio Shack, when I make up a random zip code when they ask to input one into their system. Now, if the personal shopper had gotten any read at all on my aesthetic by the way I was dressed and groomed that day, she would have known that any suggestion of adding a shrug or belt to a potential outfit would be enough for me to put a kibosh on the purchase. Of course, if I were to imagine myself as a shrug person or someone with belts hanging on the back of my closet door, I very well might have scooped up the cream-colored wool dress that I would never wear because it is not dark, it is wool, and it is a dress. But I can be a contrarian at times, especially if in order to try anything on I have to first peel of various layers of cardigans and jackets and heavy leather boots. My rule is I have to have at least three items to try on to make it worth disrobing. I had at least a half a dozen items, all utterly incompatible with my real life and, even on sale, not exactly free. So I have to thank the personal shopper for her words of wisdom; she saved me from myself.  

Unplanned Parenthood

When my practical and low-key sister-in-law was pregnant with my
first nephew, I prided myself in making edgy (at least by mid 1990s standards)
baby shower selections. I was in the midst of my hipster days, and rejected the
Babies R’Us  registry and went rogue at Barneys. Or, rather, at the annual
Barneys Warehouse Sale (I was a thrifty hipster), back in the days when it was
held once a year in New York only.
            
We knew my brother and wife were having a boy, and we were
reportedly all sturdy newborns, so I carefully studied the infant selections,
looking for items that the parents would not buy on their own, so as to make the
gift that much more special. My brother and sister-in-law are down-to-earth
folks in a small New England town—but, I posited, maybe they wanted their
offspring to be super stylin’! The name they had chosen for their son began with
a “T,” so I hit the jackpot with a small linen throw pillow with a
hand-stenciled “t” in a funky font. In another bin, I spotted a pair of bright,
bright red linen overalls—hey, clowns always look stylish—which got me thinking
“what baby doesn’t look good in bright, bright red?” True, at that point I had
never been within 15 feet of a baby, but I could just imagine how red would
bring out the ruddiness—or highlight the eczema--of a winter New England baby.

Fast forward six years and I am pregnant with my own child. Although
I still had no practical experience with babies, I had a Vision as to how the
early years of child rearing would go. Homemade organic babyfood, stylish burp
cloths, a casual-but-chic wardrobe, no television, classic picture books,
gender-neutral toys….

Yes, my destiny was to be Progressive-But-Nonjudgmental-Mom,
spreading edified fairness and self-important self-deprecation throughout the
Mommy World in my Left-Leaning City. I stocked up on primary colored blocks,
organic cotton swaddle blankets, handknit-by-local artisan infant caps… Ah, yes,
while my newborn slept, I could see a future full of just a few well-chosen
European wooden toys (made from reclaimed lumber and carved by rehabilitating
prisoners, of course), singing nursery rhymes in harmony with my Oilily-clad
toddler, delighting for hours in contemplating flowers in the garden, having
picnics in the park (organic finger foods for him, wine and a pesto panini for
me).

Whenever my son showed the slightest interest in anything—Look! He 
pointed in the general direction of a tree! He loves nature! —I would become
inspired to load up on items to stimulate this apparent interest. OK, the dream
of a minimalist childhood was coming to an end…. But who knew there were so many
awesome things to buy a child?? I would bid furiously on Ebay for things I
remotely recalled liking from my own childhood, though at the time it didn’t
occur to me that if I had any memory of it, I was probably playing with the toy
a lot older than infancy… I distinctly remember bidding more than $50 for a
copied VHS tape (yes, this was a bygone era) of the 1970s special “Really
Rosie.” Had I not been so hormonally driven (and, to be honest, a naturally
competitive person), I might have calculated that I was well into double digits
when Really Rosie was released. Of course, by the time my daughter was old
enough to like Really Rosie, I had long since lost the tape and ended up
re-bidding on Ebay for the DVD (but paid less than half for it this time around.
The fervor around second children is much more subdued…..).

Pretty quickly, my parenting style began morphing with my personal
style. If an unblemished burp cloth wasn’t available at the time of an outing,
what’s wrong with tucking the stained corner under my baby’s bottom? Why not
have the news on while I feed him? After all, he was in my stomach during the
2000 presidential election and was exposed to so much cable news my husband and
I joked that he might think Chris Matthews was his father. And, seriously, how
annoying (and disturbing) are those nursery rhyme songs anyway? Humpty Dumpty’s
mortal injury, Jack Sprat’s wife’s body image issues, and the cultish possible
pedophile Pied Piper? And my husband can only make it through the first line of
Twinkle, Twinkle before resorting to humming. So why not sing songs we actually
know and can sing without our blood-pressure spiking? Bob Dylan anti-war songs.
Pearl Jam. The entire score of Rent. And my son turned out to have an affinity
for all things Power Rangers. Sock puppets remained ignored; books with peaceful
pictures stayed unread; videos of Caillou and Curious George, unwatched. So,
rather than amassing more animal puzzles and mini gardening tools, we did what
any Type A parents might do for their first (and at that point, only) child:
when in Tokyo, we spent an entire day at  (sigh) the Bandai museum carefully
examining exhibits chronicling decades worth of Power Rangers. He liked the
color blue, which represented the “blue” ranger, so every article of clothing,
plate, cup and toothbrush was blue. Yes, we occasionally tried to inject other
influences: stuffed dogs, a mobile from MOMA, a Disney video… but we usually
followed his lead and let him express himself this way. He is his own person,
and our job is to guide him to incorporate his interests into his ever-widening
horizons.

Right after my son was born, an elderly neighbor arrived with a beautifully
wrapped box from Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks was right next to Barneys in our
neighborhood. She was a very kind person who said she had selected this outfit
for my son because it was the type of thing she knew I wouldn’t buy myself. I
opened the box and took out a precious, and undoubtedly tremendously expensive,
sailor suit, complete with jaunty hat. Now I am no more a Saks’-sailor-suit kind
of mom than my sister-in-law is a Barneys-red-overalls kind of mom. Alas, it
seems we all like to project our own Vision onto a baby… and it is the child’s
job to prove us all wrong.


     

Supermarket Hits and Missus

     I have grocery shopping down to a science. And I pay for groceries by credit card. I have a system for food shopping that ensures I always have the necessities stocked (olive oil, Honey Nut Cheerios, diet Hansen's ginger ale), but leaves room for me to exercise my creative spirit. Trust me, feeding your inner artiste at the grocery store does not lend itself to budgeting. Impulse buys like venison or steel cut oatmeal do not seem to go on sale with any regularilty. So I email myself a grocery list and add items by re-forwarding the message to myself with the added items. As an aside, not only is it fun to get so much email (even if they are from me), but attempting to decode the final list on my Blackberry with all of those forwarding headers embedded in the text while pushing a shopping cart requires superior multitasking skills. 

     I have described my modus operandi for grocery acquisition to give a sense of how such a precise and complex system cannot include an option for "estimate price and go to ATM machine." Did George Bush (the senior) estimate the cost of pork rinds and take out cash to buy them at the grocery store? Of course not, he let the scanner do its magic and the snack got paid in some way that did not seem to involve cash. Ok, I don't have an entourage to buy me things... but maybe someday... Anyway, although George H.W. Bush was bewildered by the modernity of a scanner back in the 1980s, I embrace this wonderful machine and how it levels the playing field for cashiers throughout the supermarket industry. Gone is the need to ask the customer where an item was found so the cashier could go check the price. Just scan the items and move along. It;'s a beautiful thing.     So, except for one time in recent memory--an attempt to locate rice cakes in a local market in Phoenix (don't ask)--I can find my way around virtually any chain market in any major, left-leaning metropolitan area in the US. I'm that good. So I do not need to enlist the help of stock people, managers, or deli counter workers. If I am craving a quick hit of prepared sushi, I avoid having to converse with the market's resident sushi chef and go with whatever is already displayed. Don't bother me when I am in my element. 
     So you can imagine my frustration when the Grande Finale of the shopping experience--the Check Out--is marred by the cashier's inevitable awkward attempt at interpersonal relations. The cashier has undoubtedly heard me mutter about how slow the line is, sigh loudly, say (to no one in particular) that a new lane should be opened, and curse at the woman in front of me paying by check. Do I seem like someone who then wants to have the pronounciation of my name clarified? It never fails that the crackerjack cashier looks at my credit card and asks me: "Do you need help out, Mrs.--is that Le-veeeeen or Le-viiiiine?" First of all, unless you are going to announce my name at the Academy Awards or present me with a Nobel Prize, do you think I care how you pronounce my name? Let's have a little less chatting and a little more scanning.. And--and this is the killer--why does the cashier assume I am a "Mrs."? Did he google me on his Sidekick when he was pretending to look up the code for eggplants? 
     This attempt at connecting with customers was undoubtedly forced on cashiers during a mandatory staff training, but I am not there to be profiled, I am there to buy paprika and cottage cheese. It drives me batty not only because of the sheer irritation factor, but also because there is no equivalent for "Missus" for the Misters of the world. Until there is a term that identifies a male's marital status, let's just keep it all neutral. Ms., Mr., or how about "Hey, you?" It irks me so much that it almost makes me want to remain anonymous by paying cash... almost.