Back in the day, when the family still owned the store, all of us grandchildren were expected to be the sort of walking advertising you just can't buy. We were all clotheshorses, and we came from a family of clotheshorses, and the family business was clothing. There were tailors and ladies dressmakers and milliners up in the branches of our family tree, and that was that. There was no questioning the edict. We were to dress well whenever we appeared in public.
This was particularly difficult for me, because I used to ride my bike twenty miles a day after school, and longer on the weekends, and it was cutoffs and tank tops on my bike. Daddy hated me to come to the store dressed like that, and, thirsty or not, it was in through the back door, and back out. No witnesses.

And then, too, it was the 60s, and I was in the first incarnation of my hippydippy dress: granny boots, maxi skirts, ponchos, crocheted things. Whenever I appeared like that, my mother and father would look at me and announce with scorn, that I was wearing a (what sounded to me like) lopsedeckle, which, they assured me, was Yiddish for "shapeless horse blanket."

Of course, my mother also swore to me that "keebebe und katchka feeder" meant pot roast. It does not. It means horse shit and duck feet, or something like that. But she always said that was what was for dinner on nights she made pot roast (which I thoroughly disliked) so, pot roast it was.

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot lately about lopsedeckles, and how the current trend towards sweater coats seems to epitomize the image. They only look good on Uma Thurman, or Gwynneth Paltrow or any other excessively willowy thing. On short, plump secretaries, they look like, well, like a horse blanket. Especially when they are made of some lumpy acrylic yarn, and they either need to be washed or have been over-(machine)-washed and dried, been sat on for hours and gotten miserably stretched out over the ass.

While I'm on the subject of acrylic, this fake fur thing has got to stop, and now. Real fur does not get matted, or nappy, doesn't look grimy and lasts and lasts and lasts. Fake fur cuffs and collars get ratty looking after the first wash, and go down hill from there.

But I digress. Because I've been thinking about the infamous lopsedeckles of my youth, and I wanted to write about them for you, I hopped on board the internets and did a quick search of Yiddish terms. Even allowing for the spelling variations (Yiddish being basically an onomatopeoic language) there is no lopesedeckle.

There is, however, this:

"Leibtzudekel - Sleeveless shirt (like bib) with fringes, worn by orthodox Jews"

That has to be it, yeah? But there must have been some sort of slang usage, because, well, because my mother and father never would have condemned me for looking like an orthodox yeshiva boy, would they?

Miss JoJo graduated from puppy school last night, and although she was smart enough to carry her biscuit back to her place in line before she ate it, she was hardly the valedictorian. True to herself, though, she was voted Friendliest Dog, or, as I like to call her, Miss Congeniality.

What a hoot.
In other bubbles of non-information that are rumbling around in my head, today is my cousin's birthday. He's a still photographer for major motion pictures, and thanks to him, I am three degrees of Kevin Bacon. This is good bar conversation fodder.

The Bob has signed a contract with XM Radio to host a show starting in March 06. This means I now have to get xm radio in my car or house or some damn place.

I have yet another new addiction now that ANTM is over for the season, (NIK WUZ ROBBED!!) and that is Project Runway. I somehow missed it last year, so I don't understand why I'm supposed to hate Daniel so much. Since he seems to be a neurotic mess with sloppy hair and meticulous tailoring skills, I, of course, love him and want him to win. And, seriously, what's up with the bitch who won't share her closest space?

Look, I know I have a problem with internet surfing in that I do way, way, way too much of it. I follow random link to random link all over the information superhighway, and usually end up on some one-lane dirt road to nowhere because I took an off ramp after seeing an interesting billboard...

Very often I bookmark those lost little dead ends. Sometimes I link to them. Sometimes they go to the mental graveyard that such detritus deserves.

And then, once in a while, I find something truly wonderful. And that is why I need your help, dear readers. Because I found a truly wonderful site and didn't bookmark it. Although I have a shoe addiction, when it comes to purses, I tend to schlep the same one ratty leather bag around until even I realize that it is a disgrace. And the site I stumbled over was a purse designer.

More acurately, it was a pair of purse designers. I think they were English. I think that they both had names that started with an H and that their company and thus their site was both of their names. They had reasonably priced goods that were stylish and trendy. There was a hobo bag in particular that made my shriveled little heart go pitterpat. I think it was in a metallic burgundy leather.

Now, I can write a search string like nobody, and I found a 1983 article on AIDS from Rolling Stone and a source for a copy and the author's name and another article citing the first one, all within five minutes of my boss requesting it thus: "Sometime in the early 80s there was a story about AIDS in Rolling Stone. It may have been a cover story. I think they used the phrase gay plague."

Yet, no matter how I search, no matter what string I put together, I cannot find this website again. I have searched for photos of metallic leather hobo purses. I have ransacked the lists of British designers. I have gone through Google like Sherman through Georgia. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Goose eggs.

I'm asking for help* here. Please?

* I erase my histories and caches with obsessive regularity, so don't suggest that. Plus, I stumbled across this a month ago or more. I've checked all the links on Manolo's Shoe Blog, and the purse blogs. I'm just stumped.

I was in fourth grade when John F. Kennedy was assasinated. We had come in from lunch, and I was staring out the window at the Catholic School across the street and saw someone come out and lower the flag to half-staff. I asked Mrs. McSweeney who had died, because we had learned flag etiquette and knew that was what the lowering signified.

She didn't know, yet. It was announced across the school intercom shortly thereafter. I remember sitting on the floor watching his funeral on our black and white tv. I guess my mother kept me home, or, good Southern Democratic town that it was, school was suspended for the occasion.
I was sitting on a hotel bed in Kingston, New York, right off the NY State thruway, when Howard Cosell broke into the Miami Dolphins game to tell us all that John Lennon had been shot. I called The Coolest Person in the World, and we cried together.

Howard Cosell? That's who broke the news to me that my idol was gone? How much did that suck. And the Dolphins were winning? Losing? Winning, I think. I think it was an important game, maybe one that determined if they went to the Superbowl that year. I don't remember anything about the game, just that I'd come down out of the top of the Catskills where I was holed up, to Kingston, so that I could see the game on cable. All I remember is Howard Cosell and the horrible, horrible news.

Yesterday, there was a photo of some old geezers in their uniforms, the handful of survivors of Pearl Harbor. It was buried in the Herald, somewhere in section A, but not on the front page. Not even a banner over the title, like they do for the first day of Kwanzaa. The most horrible throwing of the gauntlet of war of the last generation, and it doesn't even get a nod.

Today, there's a little something on the wires about it being the 25th anniversary of John's death at the hands of "a deranged fan". Huh. Yeah. Sort of obvious, isn't it? I mean, a normal fan isn't going to kill the person they adore, are they? But it has become part of the myth, part of his name: Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan.

And back in November, on the 23rd, to be precise, there was no mention in the Herald at all of what anniversary of a national nightmare we were recognizing.

Time heals all wounds, they tell us. But I think that sometimes, we need to pick at the scabs, and never let the hurt heal altogether.


PS: CBGBs is safe until next year. They got a year's extension on the lease. At least I don't have to go into mourning over that.

I've been saving this story for a while. The other day, the RLA and I were coming home around dusk, and we pulled up to our gate, put the car in park, and the RLA got out to unlock the gate. It's not that we're Luddites, but we rely on a lot of old-fashioned technology: manual can openers, a gate troll instead of an electric gate, a chain-link fence to keep the dogs in the yard instead of zapping them with electroshock... like that. So, the RLA gets out to unlock the gate, and as he does, a big-ass SUV (a Cadillac, I think) driven by a guy with a blue light in his ear goes whizzing past at a much-too-rapid-for -a-one-lane-road clip... almost clipping the side mirror off our car.
Well, it's a small neighborhood, and we know everybody in it, and what they drive, so we knew that this guy was probably lost. And he was, evidenced by his hitting the end of the street, making a u-turn and coming back up the one-lane road, still at a clip, and still almost removing my side mirror.

Well, the RLA lost it, and yelled at the driver that he was a jerk, and that we live here, and he doesn't and we're unlocking our gate, and he can just wait a second, because the RLA is NOT moving the car.

The Cadillac SUV screeched to a halt. The middle-aged driver threw it in reverse and stopped next to us. He reached under his seat (I'm thinking... oh, fucking great. A gun. Now we're in for it.) but only to roll down the window.

He proceded to yell at the RLA and called HIM a jerk and a few other names before coming to the crescendo of his response:

"You," he shouted at us, "are like a spaz!"

Well, that just set us back on our heels. Was blue light man saying that the RLA is a spaz, or was he saying that the RLA is merely spaz-like?

We debated this for several minutes, with me offering the opinion that maybe the word like was just an interjection, as in; "it's, like, you know", even though there was no audible comma or pause. We also opined that the driver was like a Borg, in that he had a piece of electronics embedded in his ear and it was lit up with a blue light. We never did get a definitive answer from the SUV driver, because once we started parsing out his sentence, he seemed to loose interest in us entirely.

But this phrase has crept into our vocabulary, so that everything is now "like". It's like a bridge. You know, it's sort of bridge-like, in that it spans a body of water, but maybe it's not totally a bridge.

I'm like hungry. I could eat, but I'm not ravenous, so I'm hungryish. I'm close to hungry, but I'm not exactly hungry, so I'm only like hungry.

We have been entertaining ourselves and our friends with this for like a month. It may not be a real month, or a whole month. Maybe it has been longer than a month, in which case it is only like a month, not exactly a month, but sort of a month. Similar in time to an exact month and yet, not.

This entry is like done.

I had lunch with the RLA today. He met me after his class and we went to a nice little bistro in the courtyard of the tower across the way. We were unable to have any sort of conversation over our burgers, however, because behind me was a woman having lunch with her friend, and her conversation was conducted at such a pitch and such a volume that all else was drowned out.

I'm sure that her friend felt exactly the way I did, because there were little bits of twisted napkin shreds on her side of the table when they finally left.

The non-stop talking woman was on about her boyfriend Frank, Frank's ex-wife, Frank's kids and how they sleep in the same bed as him, even when he's at her house on the nights that he has custody of the two kids, how the kids are brats and it's all the fault of the ex-wife, how the ex-wife has a skanky boyfriend who smokes a) in front of the kids and b) in her -- the ex-wife's-- house. I heard all about it. I heard all about how unattractive the ex is, how much the speaker spent on her Christmas tree decorations, because it's her first Christmas (ever? alone? in her own space? she didn't elaborate) and she needed all the ornaments she bought. I heard about how the ex works at her parent's beauty shop. Or maybe it was body shop.

I heard way, way, way too much. And did I mention that she NEVER SHUT UP. Not for a sip of water, not for a breath, not to shovel food in her mouth, not to let her friend even murmmur uh-huh, or really? or oh, that's too bad.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, with all my heart and all my soul, and I feel certain that I speak for everyone within a twenty foot radius of you today at lunch:

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Thank you. I'm done now.