Only Hearts

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.