The Dress!

Amazingly enough it hasn't been that long since I last blogged....so to speak. As you may know from my last entry outside of being soccer mom, law student, wife, cleaning lady and dog walker, I was on the hunt for the "dress". My friend Rachel and I took off in search of the perfect dress on Sunday and what a fiasco that turned out to be. We started at Ross and Marshalls because all of our other friends got their dresses there for around $30 so we went out on a limb thinking the stars might align, but not so much. So off to Kohl's next. They don't carry formal dresses but the sales lady told us about a store going out of business at the mall in Olympia so off to the capital city we went. We stopped a JC Penny's first because they DID have homecoming dresses a few weeks ago but hardly anything left by the time we got there. We did try on about 3 dresses each without luck. Frankly I did not even pay much attention to the sizes so luckily we shared a dressing room so when we got stuck in them help was close by. I did find one dress that was OK - size medium but still a few issues with the boobage, however it could be workable so I carefully hid the dress behind some others and off we went to the going out of business sale.....

OK so we get to this raggedy store with tons of formal dresses filled with high school girls size sub zero. All the dresses were pretty well picked over but we managed to find some sizes larger than a 1/2 and off to the dressing room we went. Again a few were OK but not the dress and we got stuck in some as well. The one I liked best was still $80 on sale and I could not return it if I found another one. We were getting pretty nervous at this point. We stopped in Charlotte Russo and asked the lady if they knew of any where that sold dresses and they advised us to go to a store downtown called Daria's. Off we went again. We get there and walk in and it is wall to wall dresses that were packed so tightly you could barely move. My first thoughts were "crap a boutique.....$$$$" but we stayed anyway.

So here is where it gets good.....we start to pick out some dresses. The dresses look like they run a bit small so I decided to grab larges as did my friend. After we have a handful of dresses on our arms, the sales lady gets to Rachel first and asks what function we are going to etc and then takes her dresses and says "oh honey lets get some in your size". I managed to grab one dress away from her cuz it looked cute and frankly I was thinking the lady is on crack because she started grabbing 2XL and 3XL and my friend is no where near that size. So after that humiliation was over she stated she was going to put our dresses into the room. I asked if we could have the same room and then she hit us with it...."sweetie - we have a community dressing room so you will have to change in front of everyone!" Now this took me back a bit as I felt like I had entered the twilight zone: first you think we need to wear a size 2X (I should have informed her that we just ran a marathon a few months ago) and now you want us to strip down infront of the entire store. At this point I was thinking that the bar sounded pretty good right about now. But being troopers and in a time crunch for a dress we let her lead us into the community room - a room about the size of a decent sized square bathroom with mirrors everywhere!!! And it was full of more sub zero girls going to homecoming who looked like they had eating disorders.

I was really not feeling this experience but needed a dress so being the diplomat that I am, I apologized to the girls for the sight they were about to see and preceeded to strip down. The sales lady asked us what kind of dress we were looking for so I replied to her that it did not matter - just don't make us look like a house! She seemed to like us for some odd reason and even offered to give us a military discount - Yes the first good news all day! I put on the dress that I snatched from her prior to entering the room and kinda liked it except that it was backless and deep cut - a plus for my husband but a con for my boobs. Still it was the favorite up to that point. Then I tried on a black dress with a jeweled halter top neckline and I was in love - until she said it was $258! I started stripping down right there - boobs hanging out and everything. She was like "honey it looked so good on you" - yeah it did until you mentioned the price. I told her to take all her stuff out and bring me something under $150 (okay so I am cheap - I spend $ on purses, not dresses that I will only wear once). So there I was - no clothes except for the thong I decided I needed to wear, maginified in the plethera of mirrors in the dressing room. When she got to the dress that I took from her earlier that I tried on she said that it was on sale for $94! SOLD!!! I was like we will make this work and sent her to get me something to hold up my boobs since I have to go braless (a first for me by the way). She came back with some sticky things that will hopefully work and a $86 black dress that fit Rachel like a glove. Exhausted by our ordeal we paid the lady and headed home to drink.

So after all that drama and embarrassment we did find the dress - add a pair of spanx and some heels and we should be good to go .... hopefully :)