What to wear isn’t I question I’ve spent a lot of time pondering since I moved to this dusty room at the edge of town. People wear torn and shabby clothes and dressing up means putting on a clean t-shirt. I’ve got about three pairs of pants and five shirts that are in constant rotation, so I figured wearing better pants and shirt would be enough of an upgrade. That was until I saw the Bride and Groom going off to get married in City Hall in vintage ensembles with very well thought out accessories.
I settled on a dancing dress with a handkerchief hem and had struggled into it when I saw some of the other guests walking down the hill to The Barn. The woman on the left here is the bartender, but that wasn’t my first guess when I saw her long legs in striped stockings peaking out from the slits in her skirt. You can’t see from this photo, but she’s also wearing six-inch high white platform shoes. They were quite a sight when she was trying to load in ice on the wobbly stairs. When she was trying to keep the unruly crowd in her tent in line, she’d reach under the bar table and bring out her air rifle, which she fired at anything she fancied. It had a way of calming things down.
This was another wedding guest who made me re-think my look. She said she did some performances pieces with the erotic columnist Annie Sprinkle. During that, she got to know Annie’s corset maker and commissioned one for herself. This corset is a remarkable piece of engineering. The way it supports this woman’s considerable breasts presents them to the passersby as if they were on a shelf, ripe and ready.
So I ended up wearing the kind of pants you have to take to the dry cleaners and a shirt that needed the same kind of care. Still, I wasn’t part of the crowd and, soon after the wedding began, I could see the reasons why I never would be.