Is April the Cruelest Month? T.S. Eliot Should Have Shopped at Goodwill

    T.S. Eliot was a grumpy old man. C'mon man, things may be bad, but calling it The Waste Land? (Are you happy now, CE? Next time could you just throw me a bone here?) Isn't that just a wee bit heavy-handed? On the other heavy hand, April goes out of its way to be annoying to the Empress, what with taxes, Santa Ana winds, pollen, the Warriors' ignominy, and feeling bad once again for not running the Boston Marathon. But April does, coincidentally,  have April Fool's Day, and it is National Manatee Awareness Month and we now get to trot out our white Keds to play kickball (oops, this is just a flashback). Eliot was an Anglophile of the worst order -- born a freckled American boy, and then getting all snotty in his tweeds and cool specs. So if he was so brilliant, why didn't he shop at Goodwill? (For a more postive take on T.S., see http://melicreview.com/archive/iss23/chaffinessay.htm)

May Day! May Day! The Empress has gone way Off-Topic again when she has Bright Spring Things to regale you with. These outfits speak for themselves, since I covered them with huge textual comments. It's time to store those cardigans and bring on some new hues because, as Walt Disney said, The World is a Carousel of Color, Wonderful, Wonderful Color. First my vintage Hawaiian dress -- the tag is really old and says "Kamehameha", which in Hawaiian means "Forget the volcano, I am the most fabulous thing on the island."

 

Donovan asks you to call him Mellow Yellow. The Empress asks you to wear your sunglasses while in her presence.

  

Or if you want to do yellow in a more subdued, T.S. Eliot groupie way:

 
Go out in your flowered Capris and wade in some warming waters -- just be sure to Keep Your Trousers Rolled (nudge, nudge, wink wink).

The Empress of Thrift Suffers Dive Bends on Splash-Down in the Retail World

       Did it fly by for you? In the Goodwill Six-Month Challenge, the Empress undertook to buy only non-profit-benefitting thrift items from Oct. 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.  As usual, the Empress had a mixed motive: (1) to show her subjects how she could spend less and be fashionable (which means "looking better than a hot mess") and (2) to promote her relentless and annoying quest to be "holier than thou" (a quality she had hoped to give up for Lent.) If you do not moonlight as an astronaut, you might not know that re-entry into earth's atmosphere is not pretty: the gases in the lungs and GI tract expand, the moisture in  the mouth and eyes quickly boils away, there is severe sunburn, and  some parts of the body swell to twice their usual size. 

A NASA altitude chamber     When the Empress opened the rubber sealed glass door at the indoor mall, she thought she could live with most of those effects: she'd need the expanded gases to breathe deeply, the boiled away mosture meant she could skip bathroom breaks, and the mall was a hermetically sealed chamber so sunburn would be minimal. But SWELLING TO TWICE HER SIZE? How would she buy those True Religion white, stretch jeans with the iPad in their pocket? It was so unfair -- she hadn't even been to Hot Dog on a Stick and she was lurching through the perfume counters like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.

   She had to get out, and fast. She gallumphed past the  salesclerks, the kiosk barkers, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Forever 21 (that was especially painful) and drove to Goodwill, where she found this New-With-Tags Rodarte' dress for her lovely offspring.

     To gain back her buying moxie,  she needed consumer confidence.


*The Empress realized that she needed to summon her patron saint of shopping, St. Elda Erickson, who taught her to thrift, sew, darn, and goshdarnit, look up words she didn't know before using them aloud to embarrass herself. Thank you, Mom.

The Empress of Thrift Gets Her Own Reality Show!

The Empress knows she's no Heidi or Spence, or even Ron Rod Blagojevich (though she shares his delusions of grandeur). So she thought she was HIGH when she got the call. But it turns out the Empress, traveling in rarified circles, knows people who know people in HIGH places. So word got around (thank you, subjects!) about the Empress' six month Goodwill Challenge, and she got a call from an underling at a broadcast station proposing a reality show. (The Empress doesn't live in reality, but she can play real on TV.) Okay, it wasn't BRAVO who called, but the Empress is willing to lower her royal standards for a local station, KCSM in San Mateo.

Cameras will follow the Empress as she shops undercover (no wearing the crown and mantle that day) at Goodwills and shares her tips for thrift buying, including don't look in the pockets of used robes as they may contain coins but usually have old petrified used Kleenex tissues. 

Here's where the fans come in. The Empress is old and wizened, and would not embarrass the peerage by donning the fabulous finds she is sure to procure, so SHE NEEDS MODELS. Model call: if you are alive and wear garments in sizes between 8 and 16 (the Empress refuses to associate with anyone sylphlike enough to wear a size 2 -- they should be force fed in her opinion). So please contact the Empress if you would be game for joining her and becoming famous too...

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Yes, of course, today is April 1. Have a safe and insane one!