The Second, and First "Debut" of the Green Dress

I begin with the second airing of the green dress because I have vivid memories of that occasion, while the first has strangely slipped into oblivion. I have almost no recollection of that first time, and what I do remember is really strange.

After the senior dinner dance, the dress was idle until after I got married in 1973. As a young bride, I lived in New York City and danced at Alvin Ailey and American Ballet Theatre, among many others. I was having a ball! On Thanksgiving Day in 1974, my young husband arranged for us to have dinner at the famous (now infamous to me) Rainbow Room on the top of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. The dress and I made a grand entrance. The suede shoes and faux gold necklace were still with us.

Because I had grown up in poverty, my few good things were always carefully "laid away" when not in use, a la Ma Ingalls(recall the famous "Delaine" in Little House In The Big Woods). Therefore, the shoes and necklace had hung in a cloth bag, suspended from the dress' padded hanger. I really was afraid to use anything too much, for I knew from experience that things of value simply could not be replaced. I remember that, in the seventh grade, I got a Gilbert chemistry set for Christmas, but I was too afraid to use up the chemicals in experiments. Because I drastically cut the required amounts of chemicals, all my experiments were dismal failures. I knew exactly why, but that didn't help any. I did learn to bend glass pipes, and made a great little distillery. You see, glass pipes were reusable and did not go away after they were used. I was much less fearful about experimenting with them. What made me even happier were my own improvised experiments, like the time I lighted a sparkler in Grandma Lavina's upstairs bathroom. When it burned low, I threw it into the brand new porcelain sink, and escaped in a hail of shattering porcelain. Grandpa Sharkey was pissed, but I could see his inner Elf chuckling. Grandpa Sharkey always had a weak spot for the feisty ones.

Oh yes, The Rainbow Room. The prix fixe menu included rack of lamb for two in its short list of entrees, and that is what we ordered. Our table was lovely, being upstairs on a balcony overlooking the main dining and dance floors. Violins were in my ears from the full orchestra, and truth to tell, violins will never be the same to me. As soon as the waiter delivered our rack, I lit into mine with knife and fork. At the first stroke, the rack flew off my plate as if bewitched, and sailed over the balcony to strike a diner below and rebound onto his plate. Honestly, this is the gospel truth. He looked up, trying to isolate the offender, and my quick-thinking husband whisked me down to the dance floor until the heat was off. The rest of the evening was lovely, and I suppose that I looked lovely, but somehow I never felt lovely, or as lovely as the other women there who seemed so poised, or lovely enough to be noticed. I felt gauche and young and inexperienced and childish, all of which I certainly was. I think that this second outing for the green dress only stands out in my mind because I did something to mortify myself. I seem to recall that it is a corollary to Murphy's Law that we are destined to remember in detail those events which embarrass, mortify, or otherwise point to ourselves in a less-than-perfect light. Conversely, I probably had an okay time at the first wearing because I remember nothing about the evening. I do remember my grandma's house before the dance because of the terrible struggle I was having with food at the time.

I remember standing in my grandmother's parlor getting ready for the big dinner dance. Although I lived away at college, I had come home for the weekend to get ready in the comfort of home. Grandma's house was always home to me. It was a house in which the appliances always stood out, either because they were outdated and prone to malfunctioning or because they were on their last legs and grandpa had invented some way to kept them alive....an early form of life support.

Take the stove, for instance. When I was small, we had a coal stove. Grandpa Sharkey would start it up with chunks and sticks of wood, which would make the kitchen smell very good. Then he would tell me to "run down the cellar and put a shovelful on". This meant that I should put some coal on the furnace and then bring up the coal scuttle so we could put some coal on the stove as well. It was usually my job, and I loved it. I loved looking into the fiery furnace and seeing the blue and gold lights dancing and hovering above the coals. It was also creepy, because Grandpa Sharkey used to empty the mouse traps into the furnace, and the dead, burning mice smelled horrible....and looked worse.

The coal stove was where Grandma Lavina did all the cooking and baking, and one truly needed to be a scientist to know how to do these things using coal for a fuel. The heat was not even, and Grandma Lavina needed to know exactly how much coal to add for what she was cooking. Bread and cakes were the hardest, and you could never open the oven while the baking was in progress.

On top of the stove was the tea pot and the tea kettle. The kettle was full of water, and seemed always to be simmering in wait for the next pot of tea. We were an Irish family, so this could be at any given minute. The tea pot was brown crockery, and was half-full of tea leaves. This was because Grandma just threw in another handful every time she boiled up the water for tea. At the end of the day, there was a mighty heap of tea leaves emptied out of the pot.

I had set up the ironing board in the parlor, and for the life of me, I can't remember what it was that I was ironing. It couldn't have been the dress, for Qiana was a stretch knit that didn't like heat. Maybe it was my waist-length hair, for even though my hair was as straight as a poker, convention said that a girl should rinse her hair with Downy Fabric Softener and then iron it to achieve that Cher straightness.

For whatever reason, I had the iron at the ready, and I stood there feeling hungry and anxious. I had not eaten much all day, fearing that a stomach bulge would be too evident beneath the clingy material. Hindsight is 20/20, and I know now that I was showing the early signs of the eating disorder that would plague my life briefly in my twenties. I had not yet learned to throw up, so I starved instead. I had allowed myself four pieces of melba toast with cheese for lunch, but that was long gone by the time I stood at the ironing board. As much as I try, this is the only memory I have of my college senior dinner dance. I don't know where it was,, what was served, who played the music, what my date wore, or whether I had a good time. Time is frozen at the old ironing board with its burned, ill-fitting cover, food anxiety occupying what should have been a very happy and excited mind.