~count the accessories~
October 13th, 2006
For years I named my shoes. I grew up in Hollywood, where shoes and hair are everything, so from the time I was old enough to do anything about it, I’ve never had fewer than 30 pairs.
The naming didn’t start until college–I stacked boxes to the top of my closet, inscribed with the names of the mood invoked by wearing them: Girl Scout (regulation, from the 40s), Fred Astaire (wingtips that squeaked when you walked), North Beach (black pointy flats), Blanche du Bois (pale pink silk mules), F. Scott (two-toned brown and cream, 20s), F. Nightingale (nurse’s white sensible heels, 40s), W.P.A. (black seam-toed oxfords), Theda Bara (Victorian black velvet slippers),Barbarella (gold lame boots), Lolita (boxy saddle shoes), Mrs. Robinson (fiercely pointed leopard heels, 50s).
My mom complained all throughout the time we lived together about my “costumes.” As though all clothes aren’t. This from a theater producer who sent her child to performing arts school and called her My Little Sarah Bernhardt. What did she expect?
By thirteen I had a job and spent all my money on second-hand clothes. We didn’t call them “vintage” then, and it was not cool. A year later Cyndi Lauper would come on the scene with Girls Just Want to Have Fun and change all that, but in these days a couple girls in my class mocked me pretty meanly.
My favorite thrift shop was church-owned, a tiny bungalow tucked under eucalyptus trees not far from Hollywood and Vine, where powdery old ladies donated their rhinestone clip-on earrings, pillbox hats and elbow-length gloves. You could basically shop in the closet of Norma Desmond–so perfect for a budding teen! It’s gone now, as is most of the Hollywood I grew up with, the glamorous decay replaced by a Disneyfied version of itself.
I planned my outfit the night before each school day. If the theme was orange, I would wear every orange thing I had: orange rodeo skirt with rickrack, orange 40s pj top dotted with sleeping kittens, orange cardigan, orange polka-dot scarf, orange plastic handbag in the shape of a basket, Lucille Ball orange lip stick, orange screw-back Lucite earrings with tiny sea horses embedded in them. If I didn’t have orange shoes, I’d spray paint some on my front lawn.
This prompted my mom to institute a Four Accessory Rule. Lipstick counted as one. Twenty years later she read a guide to nurturing your inner creative–The Artist’s Way–and apologized for trying to crush my spirit all those years. I confessed my willful disobedience in the name of self-expression: I had just crammed my handbag with the remaining items and dressed as I walked to school. Girls just wanna have f-un.