Well, I bought a dress! Spending a little bit more than I would like, but the dress is quality and I will be able to use it again and again. Plus, since I did "Buy it Now," I get free shipping! (I lost the PERFECT dress on my birthday no less from Ebay because I was too reluctant to ask for a buy it now price...and someone outbid me. The dress is now happily living in France and I'm sure the owner is carrying on an Audrey Hepburn experience whenever she wears it.)
However, this has been a very harrowing experience, and I will tell you in third person present tense because it sounds best that way: Kate needs a special outfit for a wedding or pageant or an interview or some such event. Kate quickly browses a few stores online and finds a few potentially promising things but realizes the smallest size available is still two sizes too large. She finds something else that would be PERFECT but costs double her budget. She goes alone to a few local stores but doesn't see anything that would work. Frustrated, she returns home with a pessimistic tirade, her mother witnessing, about how there is nothing affordable for a petite woman. What, do people think that small, successful, and yes, thin people don't exist? Or are they simply so unimportant that they don't need clothes that fit? Her mother, at merely 2 1/2 inches taller than Kate, offers consoling words and promises to go with her to look for something that works. The two women spend the next two days calling resale shops, visiting malls, tearing apart clearance racks, and spending the majority of their money on consolation food (carbs and chocolate...and yet I still cannot gain!). Kate goes on a few frustrated tirades about how "Apparently petite women aren't allowed to go to formal events/enter the working world/compete in pageants." Kate also threatens to open her own store filled with clothes that only fit her, and declares yet again that she will learn to sew and never buy another item of clothing again. Kate and mom enter an upscale mall, and after a few moments of entering a store, looking at the clearance price of a dress, and heading right out of it, throws her hands up in despair and asks why they even came. She privately fantasizes about marrying a rich and vengeful man who proceeds to buy out every store in the mall and replace the stores with well-priced clothes that fit. She also fantasizes about taking a wrecking ball to the entire store, ripping up an item of clothing and throwing it against a wall, and of course making it so that the color she can't find just doesn't exist, and she has to find another, more popular color. Frustrated and their resources exhausted, the two women return home. Kate falls asleep in the car.
Someday, my friends, things will be different. Until then, I'll keep coming up with snarky comments, making my mom laugh while she reminds me to take a deep breath and remember we haven't checked every store, and that we will find something that works because we have to. I don't think my personality is ever more explosive than when I'm on a failing mission to find the right garment.
At least now, however, the search for this dress is over. It was strange though, because as soon as I ordered my dress, and the quest was ended, I was at a loss as to what to do next!
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