Good Lord. You go away for two weeks...
Daniel, you are not a Beatle and you never will be. Stop doing that ... thing... with your hair. Please.
All right. I admit to only seeing The Wine and the Are twice in the past three weeks or so. Of course, my faithful compatriots in all things Wine and Are have helped me catch up. I do wish, however, that I had seen Dru breaking into the Newman Suite at the GCAC and cutting up Carmen Mesta’s entire wardrobe. Unfortunately, she failed to cut up two of Carmen’s recent outfits which we think would have benefitted from an encounter with some sharp objects. The first was a men’s suit vest casually thrown over a floofy peasant blouse. The cumulative effect was to make Carmen suddenly bear an uncanny resemblance to a Medieval, cross-dressing serving wench. We half expected her to pick up a tray and start slinging mead in those lead-filled goblets they all drank out of back then.
Her second fashion disaster in as many days was her dress made out of my grandmother’s cordouroy couch fabric. In lovely 1970s brown, no less. When they tore the couch apart to make said dress, it seems they only had enough fabric left over to finish the dress half-way up her body. The rest of Carmen Mesta was covered by the sheer white inner draperies sometimes found behind the million-pound opaque hotel curtains such as those hanging in the Days Inn where I recently found myself. You know the ones. You never have a clue what time of day it is, as they block out the outside world so thoroughly. Perhaps that’s the point.
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Nick Newman, on the other hand, normally looks freshly polished and spit-shined (if you don’t look at him from the neck up). The other day, however, he looked like he had rolled himself into his suit bag, suit and all, and left the whole mess in the rain for a few days. I thought it couldn’t get worse than that until Neil walked into his office wearing a baby blue pull-over with huge white lapels sticking out of the collar. We were reminded of the covers of our mother’s 1980s knitting magazines. To add insult to injury, several people at Newman Enterprises commented on what a nice sweater it was! We at the Wine and the Are are all for fashion recycling, but this is too much. We were compelled to fill our glasses and press on.
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I will only mention Sharon’s fried egg-patterned dress here because under normal circumstances, I doubt very much that she’d be caught dead wearing it. I’m sure her impending divorce and sudden jumping-into-beditude with her estranged husband’s ex-stepfather have caused her to not look at what she is putting on her body. To complement this atrocious thing, she strung a bunch of over-ripe red grapes on some fishing line and hung it around her neck. Perhaps Jack enjoys grapes. We’ll never know.
There is only one wine for a fashion train-wreck like this.
Yes, you’re reading that label correctly: Cat’s Pee on a Gooseberry Bush. We at The Wine and the Are do not know what cat pee tastes like, and we’ve never had the opportunity to lick a gooseberry bush to find out. But the wine is very drinkable, and a portion of the sales price (at least in Canada) supports the SPCA.
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While I was going through Wine and Are withdrawal during our recent trip to Yellowknife, I went into an independent bookstore up there and asked for some work by a local writer. I was handed Richard Van Camp’s Angel Wing Splash Pattern, a collection of (what I would call) flash fiction and prose poetry set in the Northwest Territories. Van Camp is a member of the Dogrib Nation at Fort Smith, and his work is stellar. I recommend him highly.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
...and all fashion heck breaks loose
