Another Black Dress: February 2012

Dress: Vintage. Circle Skirt. Bow at top of zipper. V-neck. Slightly oversized. Circle skirt.
Label: None
Fiber Content: Chiffon, Taffetta
Year purchased: 1989
Purchase price: $15
Store: I don’t remember (I suspect it was at Keep ‘Em Flying, my favorite vintage store in Portland, which is located near Cinema 21, the cool arty movie theatre.)
Additional information/Oddities: This looks exactly like the dress worn by Sinead O’Connor in the Emperor’s New Clothes video.
How I wear it: I remember standing in the hallway of my freshman dormitory without anything but a black t-shirt and blue underpants underneath this dress and my various dorm-mates telling me that it was just too sheer to wear that way. So I have worn it with black tights and a camisole (which isn’t as revealing as it sounds) or, when I have felt more demure, with a black vintage slip.

I wore this dress a lot in college. In fact, I think this would have qualified as my favorite dress, my dress-up dress, and I suspect I was wearing this dress to 70% of the dress-up opportunities I had between the ages of 17 and 21. This is another dress infused with love and memory.

I wore this dress with a red hat and short black crocheted gloves to the wedding of Bosco (one of my British cousins) and Angela in 1990. I got tons of compliments, even had a few people ask me if I was a model back in the States. Which is hilarious given that I am only 5’3” on a good day, but flattering nevertheless.

At the end of September 2001, Fred and I went to London to see Roddy Frame perform at Queen Elizabeth Hall. We took a train to Loughborough to visit Bosco, Angela, and their daughters, Lauren and Rachel. Bosco then drove us to see his parents and siblings in Birmingham and then to another brother’s in Reading. Everyone wanted to talk to us about the recent attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, in part because the events had just occurred and in part because we were American. Everyone, that is, except Lauren and Rachel who wanted to talk to us about Britney Spears and The Jungle Book. I am so happy that we took this trip as it gave Fred an opportunity to meet Bosco and Angela and we both got a chance to meet their girls. We visited them, again, in December 2002. Bosco had been diagnosed with kidney cancer in the spring of 2002 and it had metastasized to his brain by the fall. My mother thought it would be great if we all went there for Christmas. It was the last time we saw him. He died in the summer of 2004 at the age of 45.

This is the dress I was wearing the first time I met Fred. It was the night before I was to go back to Portland to begin my junior year of college and I had been dating Michael for three weeks. We went back to his apartment and his roommate, Fred, was there with some other women, including Fred’s recently ex-girlfriend, Nancy. They were trying to decide where to go dancing and I made some suggestions (which was funny because I was nineteen and could only get into a limited number of clubs when they had an all ages night.) I remember that Nancy was extremely rude to me, though I don’t remember how, and I remember thinking she looked old and ugly and how sad it must be to be that bitter. The group soon left and I think I asked Michael why he was even friends with Nancy (he had been the one who fixed up that harpy with Fred in the first place.) Michael excused her behavior saying that I looked “so young.” As if that is an excuse for rudeness. In retrospect, I should have dumped Michael then, instead of waiting until the following March. However, I went back to school and conducted a long distance relationship. Which meant I spent a lot of time of the telephone. Which meant I ended up talking a lot with his roommate if Michael wasn’t home. So Fred and I became friends and two-and-a-half years after we met (and close to two years after breaking up with Michael) Fred and I kissed at my New Year’s Eve party, on the cusp between 1993 and 1994. (I was wearing a different black dress that night, a black stretch cotton mini-dress which I donated to Salvation Army in July 2004.) What is odd is that I am now older than Nancy was when I met her and yet I still think she was a shriveled hag then and while I am still a spring chicken.

I wore this dress on my twenty-first birthday when my parents took me to Charlie Trotter’s. I remember that was the first time I ever really understood what it meant for a wine to compliment a meal. I recall telling Maria about the dinner in excruciating details (reconstructing each course) and I am pretty sure a copy of the menu is in a box at my parent’s house. After the dinner, I went to a party with Maria and Jenny Stewart at a coop near University of Chicago and I wore a black hat with fake flowers pinned to the brim. There was a guy there who I had a crush on, but he was uninterested in me. There was another guy I liked there, a guy who I had actually gone for coffee with over the course of my five week winter break, who lived in the coop and, at one point in the evening, he said to me, “since you are going back to Portland tomorrow, I was wondering if you wanted to go back to my room for a ten minute smooching session.” While I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “good line,” anyone can understand how disastrous a bad line can be where these things are concerned. I managed to keep a straight face and not say anything snarky as a declined and found Maria and Jenny and left. The next day, I flew back to Portland to complete my senior year and write my thesis.

Dress: Scoop neck, stretch lace tank dress.

Label: Only Hearts

Fiber Content: Nylon

Year purchased: 1994

Purchase price: $50

Store: La Coquette, a now defunct lingerie store. When I was in high school, this store was located just north of Century Mall (I remember this because a friend of mine bought a garter belt and fishnet stockings there once.) It moved farther south on Clark Street and was across the street from Francis Parker school in 1994. It went out of business a year or two later.

Additional information/Oddities: I am pretty sure this dress is meant to be worn as a slip (i.e. in private and with nothing underneath.)

How I wear it: If I were the useless lingerie (i.e. clothes one wears for the sole purpose of having them taken off) sort of girl, I might actually wear this dress/slip even more than I do. As a dress, worn with black tights and a camisole to combat the see-throughness of the lace, it has seen quite a bit of action in its own right.

Photos of this dress can also be seen here and here

In 1995, I took a performance class with a locally famous performance artist and actress and wrote a one-woman show. It was supposed to be about love and obsession. I took the title, Not Far Away, But Too Far Too Touch, from Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, which served as my inspiration. I was trying to be literary and wise, and I was so very young and naïve (as if I am so very old and experienced now.) The show evolved. It ended up being part scripted, part improvised and I used a stack of my favorite novels as the backbone (After each monologue, I randomly picked up a book, opened it up and read whatever passage happened to appear. Then I chose the most appropriate monologue from my memorized pieces, or I talked to the audience off the top of my head.) This dress was my costume. To this day, my mother wishes she had videotaped this and talks about this as one of my best performances ever. (It helps, perhaps, that it was a one time only event. I tried to recreate it for a performance festival and it didn’t work at all.) My wish is that Fred could have seen it; we were having a long distance relationship at the time and saw each other every few weekends, and this performance was on a Wednesday night.

In 1996, I was doing a dance show (Walter Benjamin: A Theory of Chaos) with three other actors, one of whom was this boy with whom I had gone to high school. A friend of one of the cast members was having a party and I wore this dress there. The boy brought a bunch of people from high school to the party. I was hands down the best-looking woman there. It was an amazing thing, looking so good in front of all these people who had scorned me for being ugly less than a decade earlier. Of course, I was so nervous I drank lots and lots of sangria, not realizing that there was lots and lots of gin in there with the wine and fruit, so I spent the hours between 2 and 7 A.M. lying on a bathroom floor throwing up. The next day, I had the worst hangover of my life and had to go to my cousin Savio’s wedding. I wish I could say that I never drank to excess again, but I am a lightweight and a really bad judge of my own alcohol tolerance, so I often find I am already drunk before I have even finished my first drink.

In 1998, I was Ruth in A Book of Ruth at the New York Fringe Festival (which was unfortunate for us as the show was not terribly fringe and, being that the company was not from New York, we had no core audience to depend upon, so we played to nearly empty houses.) I wore this dress to the closing night party where I remember chatting up various actors and directors from far more successful productions. I felt powerful and lovely and fabulous that night, in spite of the poor reviews our show had received.

I must have also worn this dress at some point during my August 2001 visit to New York City when Jenny and I performed our show Submission at the Riant Theatre’s Strawberry One Act Festival because Jenny remembered it when I referenced it later.

However, this will always be the dress I wore when I met Roddy Frame on September 30, 2001.

In 1985, I was thirteen and interested in music. I bought magazines and read about different bands, in part because I was curious about the music, but also because I was a thirteen year old girl and wanted the pictures. Most of the music I listened to at the time is entirely forgettable, though it always seems to be remembered for the ubiquitous eighties retrospectives that every TV and radio station trots out during the dead hours of the day. I remember coming across an interview with the then teenage Roddy Frame, the singer/songwriter/lead singer/guitarist of a band called Aztec Camera. He sounded interesting and a few months later WXRT broadcast a concert of theirs. So I listened. And became a fan. I bought both their records. I was at an age when one of the things I would ask people was what bands they liked (because I believed that sort of thing was important) and I almost never met anyone, even then, who had even heard of Aztec Camera. But the videos were occasionally played on 120 Minutes. I should probably say that there were other bands I liked much more, at no point would I ever have called Aztec Camera my favorite.

In 1988, I bought the third album, Love, which was a big disappointment. (It was the same thing for me with The Joshua Tree, a highly anticipated album by a band I really liked which just was not what I wanted to hear. However, unlike The Joshua Tree, which was gigantic, still is many a U2 fan’s favorite record and transcended its time, Love is an album which a lot of Aztec Camera/Roddy Frame fans agree was probably one of his worst and, when you listen to it now, sounds like the eighties.) Aztec Camera released Stray in 1990, which I didn’t even buy at the time. However, I saw this CD on the living room table at Michael and Fred’s house in 1991 and I got excited because I thought this new guy I was dating liked the same obscure band I did, but Michael told me the CD was Fred’s. Which probably should have set some alarm bells ringing off in my head, but did not (I think I just said something like, “Oh cool. You should listen to it.”—Okay, I know I am going to digress now from what is already something of a digression, but part of the reason I didn’t think too much about this was because I believed I could introduce anyone to new things and they would be receptive to this. I was also so sure about the rightness of my taste in stuff. I was totally wrong in the case of Michael, and I sometimes wonder if I am just wrong in general. I mean, not everyone wants to be exposed to new music, films, ideas, etc. Also, while I am pretty sure I have the best taste in everything, I have realized, with age, that this may just be my interpretation of things. Alright, end of digression.)

So, in 1996, after I had broken up with Michael, after Fred and I had started dating and were finally living in the same city and same apartment, we listened to Stray a lot. We also bought the subsequent Aztec Camera CDs and Roddy Frame’s solo record (which was funny since every AC record was, in many ways, just Roddy Frame’s solo project.) The fact that we both liked the music and it seemed like no one else had even heard of it did bring us closer together, in a way (not an important or significant way.) When we were planning our wedding, Fred and I made jokes that we should hire Roddy Frame to play, or at the very least invite him. We didn’t (which I am actually quite glad about.)

I started checking out the internet for information about Roddy Frame (was he alive, was he dead, did he fall and hit his head?) and found an amazing fan website (killermontstreet.com) which answered all my questions. This is where, in the summer of 2001, I found out he was going to perform a one-time show with Edwyn Collins at the end of September. The WXRT broadcast in 1985 was the closest I had ever come to seeing Roddy Frame perform (although Fred had seen him in 1993 and I was incredibly jealous.) So we decided to go and planned to stay in England for a week (to sight see and visit relatives. To this day, Fred insists we did not fly 3000 miles to go to a concert.)

I bought the tickets and worked out the details of trans-Atlantic travel. Some of the details included getting a new passport as mine had expired in May of 2000 and I mailed in my application September 10, 2001. The next day the world changed.

The first week, when I was alone in the house, sitting on the sofa, glued to the tv set, I didn’t even think about what would happen. But then I received my passport and I started to worry we wouldn’t be able to go, but international flights resumed, and we boarded the airplane on September 28.

We spent that day (which was a Sunday) at the Tate Modern. Then we went to a pub for a fan meet up (it seemed like all his fans knew each other already. We just went because we had time to kill) which was so boring until Dan and Jenniene arrived. It turned out we were sitting next to Jenniene and spent the concert giggling with her. Then we waited outside because Jenniene was determined to meet him and I, well, I decided it sounded like a good idea. It really was because Jenniene eventually grew bored and she and I just walked backstage. (I would never have even thought of doing this on my own.) Jenniene introduced herself as “Jenniene from Sydney” and I followed suit by introducing myself as “Alison from Chicago.” He seemed interested in talking to me and I remember thinking, “Don’t say anything stupid.” Then he said “you’re a little bit goth, aren’t you?” and I replied “No, I wear black on the outside because I am really sunny on the inside.” And then I realized how stupid that was of me and turned bright red at the goofiness of my statement. If I think about it, I could probably recollect every cringe worthy, embarrassing thing I said that night, but that one is so indelibly burned in my memory that I can’t even hear the word goth without thinking of it. We admire people for the work they produce and we want them to admire us back, but then we meet them and all we can hope for is not making total fools of ourselves. I know there are people who manage to come across as intelligent, sophisticated, attractive, and funny when confronted with artists they, for want of a better word, idolize. I am not one of them.

So this is not just the dress I was wearing when I met Roddy Frame, the is the dress I was wearing when we met Dan and this is the dress I wore when we went to celebrate his marriage to Helen a decade later. There is a reason why this is one of the most important dress in my collection. Few other dresses I own have had so many opportunities to absorb as much love.

Of course, it also has had the opportunity to absorb a great deal of pain. I wore this dress on the opening night of My Sister In this House in July of 2002. It was the first (and thus far only) professional show I directed. I had spent months thinking about it, working on it, and I had really believed that we had something special. Then, during tech week (which was actually two weeks in our case) everything unraveled. The designers wanted to kill the cast for acting like divas, the cast I loved decided that I was incompetent because I tried to rein them in, and the theatre company that produced the show gave none of us any support. In spite of all this, the show turned out well and received pretty good reviews, but I was damaged from the experience. I may have looked great that night, but I had a broken heart.