Let’s Play Dress Up

Every day I wear long underwear and jeans, a turtleneck and a hoodie.

For an important Zoom meeting a few days ago, I put on a green tweed jacket over v-neck black sweater. Then I put on a pair of gold hoop earrings. It was the most dressed up I’ve been in months. I so impressed myself, I took a picture. I looked pretty decent. Like how I used to look before I spent my days at dog parks and Zoom meetings.

I tried wearing dress pants to the symphony a few weeks ago. Because of the pandemic, the symphony is really the only inside thing we do. We have to show our ID and vaccine record and be masked the entire time. So many people have stopped attending that there are always empty seats we can move to so we aren’t too close to anyone else, you know, like someone wearing a surgical mask with giant gaps on the sides. (Yes, I am that intense.) Anyway, the symphony seems reasonably safe to me although as the pandemic continues, my sense of panic about Covid exposure seems ever closer to the surface. You’d think I would have developed a thicker skin by now.

But about the dress pants. I tried them on and then couldn’t rip them off fast enough. I wanted to burn them. Carry that pair and the dozen other pair of black dress pants I own out to the backyard and pour gasoline on the whole pile and strike a match.

I hung them back in the closet, along with the fiction that I would wear them again when all of this cloistering dies down. My favorite grey suit is also hanging in the closet. When I reached for the green tweed jacket, I saw that my grey suit had a layer of dust on the shoulders. Jesus. Burial suit.

The clothes that were part of my identity – the dress pants, the blazers, including my favorite black washed wool jacket with black leather trim which I used to call my war clothes, the skirts, my heels – they’ve become memorabilia. Is that a pandemic thing or an old lady thing? I don’t know.

What I do know is that my actual wardrobe could fit in a backpack.

Except for my boots. I have a vast collection of boots. They go so well with jeans, don’t you know.