The Empress Who Came in from the Cold

I wish I could say that this post is back by popular demand, but that would violate the cone of truthiness between the Empress and her two readers. The Empress has a hard time disguising herself since the rhinestone points of her tiara poke through the Trilby hat and her flowing robes drag on the floor under her trench coat. But due to her passion for Goodwill, and all things thrift, the Empress accepted her mission to be a mole embedded with the enemy -- the crack-like discount auction sites that have their own alarms to alert vulnerable shoppers when to start the on-line mob scene. Going on Gilt.com at 9:00 PST is like pummeling your way through T.J. Maxx when someone announces Fendi bags over the sound system, which is not protected speech under the First Amendment because it incites violence. The resulting PSTD has kept the Empress cowering in the corner of her closet trying to forget the bloodbath otherwise known as Christmas shopping.

  

What could lure her out of her hidey-hole? Only one thing could make her crawl out from the dust bunnies and old shoes, not to mention the ratty leg warmers left over from the Eighties, and the Aughts (yes, look it up)(how could this fashion mistake rear its ugly head twice in the Empress lifetime? Answer: the Empress has some miles on her). That one thing is Shiny Objects. Place one in the Empress' peripheral view, and ...wait, what was that, I can't focus now that this shiny thing with a million other shiny things appears before me.

Now I hear the Jersey Boys soundtrack, and Frankie Valli, or his imitator in that show, crooning "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You and here's the part that is Too Good to Be True -- this is on SF Goodwill's eBay site right at this minute. The Empress is even bidding on itrather than declaring eminent domain over it, as she could since all crown jewels inure to her as Head of State in the Empire of Fabulous Thrift Finds.

There are six hours left to bid. The Empress would provide a link, but then she'd have to empty the royal coffers to beat out all your bids to add this to the Royal collections. Okay, let's unleash the hounds... go to
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290519791725&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

The Empress of Thrift at the Movie Premier: The 500 Skirts of Summer

In the Summer, The Empress comes unstuck in time, and she regresses to the 9th grade, the year before her high school first allowed girls to wear PANTS. And this was not a private school with adorable uniforms, but a public high school whose principal made girls kneel to make sure that their skirts touched the floor. Yes, the Empress speaketh of olden times --  she might as well be explaining how to administer smelling salts and belladonna when your corset stops your blood flow during a quadrille.  (The Empress is so old that she has enlarged the font so that her two wizened cronies can read this blog if they so choose.) So the Empress never completely adapted to pants, and adheres more to the Betty Rubble and Betty Draper schools of fashion. So here are just some of the Empress' skirts for Summer from Goodwill and thrift stores:




Another reason to collect skirts: Science dictates skirts provide nature's best Summer cooling system.  The first law of thermodynamics, which mandates conservation of energy, and states in particular that the flow of heat is a form of transfer energy. For all you physics tyros, here is a simple explanation of this phenomenon: 

Here is a diagram of how this cooling system works:

And here is a visual of how this cooling system works:

Here is a visual of how this system does not work because skirts are not meant for actresses who steal literary names then parade around in their twee skirts and break Joseph Gordon-Levitt's heart in The 500 Days of Summer. Yes, I am talking about Zooey Deschanel, who is ultra-precious in her 100% cotton, and bears no resemblance to the real Zooey, who was an older brother who was a genius who at the age of twelve and had "a vocabulary on an exact par with Mary Baker Eddy's" and once said, "I'm so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream." J.D. Salinger See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Baker_Eddy

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THIS is not the real Zooey. If you see her, please report her to the keepers of J.D. Salinger's flame immediately.

Arrested for Excessive Twee-ism

Stay cool this Summer with your A-line, balloon, cargo, circle, dirndl, flared, full, jean,mini, midi, maxi, pencil, pleated, poodle, prairie, , tube, tulip, and wraparound skirts. 

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The Empress Humbly Salutes the Goddess of Thrift, Mrs. Vera

      After the six month Goodwill Challenge was over, I succumbed to the sirens of retail for a few days, and have been doing penance by wearing a hair shirt (by Marc Jacobs, with great buttons of course) and meditating on my Sins in my little garden shed full of flea market finds valuable only to me. I even started refinishing thrift furniture for my Cloister of Retail Regret.
      What could inspire me to blog again after The Fall? (My apologies to Camus and my defense lawyer colleague, Jean-Baptiste Clamence.) It would have to be a subject that shines as a beacon of light for Thrift and Goodwill, a fashionista of the Five & Dime, a maven for the mundane, a Doyenne of the global junk drawer, a Harry Winston of Household Objects and an Artist of the First Order: Mrs. Vera.

Mrs. Vera, the original Conehead.

      Some of the Great Unwashed have accused me of being Mrs. Vera's Biggest Fan, as if that's a bad thing, like Kathy Bates in Misery (hey, she won an Oscar donchaknow). The truth is I am a huge fan. Because the fact is MRS. VERA RULES THE WORLD, the Verasphere that is. She is making art out of the world's cast-offs, creating beauty out of our flotsam and jetsam, and her creativity knows no bounds. The world she creates is beautiful -- a Woolworth's counter on acid, with a dash of wormwood and a side of Gaudi on steroids. No more talking! I'm out of words. Let me show you why Mrs. Vera deserves more attention, funding grants, museum exhibits and stalkers (nay, fans!):

Mrs. Vera was on Leave it to Beaver.  

     

   Mrs. Vera brightens any room.

                           

Mrs. Vera is a poser, not a poseur.   

                           

 Mrs. Vera is a travelling picnic basket of wonders.

Mrs. Vera's personal paparazzi, an artist in his own right, Mr. Stone. 

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Dot dot dash, so much panache!

Mrs. Vera dressed scores of people for the Pride Parade, a wonder of ingenuity.

And if that is not enough to make a fan out of you, check out Mrs. Vera and Mr. Stone's adorable Cindy Lou in her chapeau!

oxoxoxoxoxoxo

The Empress

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!

What does the Empress of Scandinavia wear on St. Patty's Day?

Being of Scandinavian Royal Blood, the Empress tends to wrap herself in blue, yellow, white and red.

The Empress salutes all ethnic cultures (except those with rules about pure truth-telling -- oh wait that's ethical cultures). But it seems unseemly for a non-Irish descendant to go about one day a year in dangly Celtic jewelry, a clannish plaid kilt, drinking sour mash, and tilting up at the end of each sentence like she's asking a question instead of answering one: "Aye, begoren, and hawarye I'm drinkin sto-(inflection up here mid-word) ut." And I must confess that there is almost nothing as vile as the uranium-laced powder left at the bottom of the box of Lucky Charms (my brother snorted it through middle school and still sets off security alarms at the airport).

So, not wanting to get pinched under any meaning of that versatile word, but ambivalent about the wearin' of the green, the Empress dons a muted drab olive BCBG sweater from Goodwill, which will stretch nicely after she gorges on boiled cabbage and potatos, and dense salty Irish Soda Bread, washed down with Baileys and a Diet Coke chaser.