That Shirt

 When I was in sixth grade, Masterpiece theater was running The Six Wives of Henry The Eighth, and I was ALL IN.  My mother, and even my father.  Aleister Cooke introduced the episodes sitting in an armchair before an open fire, in a library full of books, and then for an hour on public television you were in a scandalous, irreverent, wonderful world of exquisite lace collars and extravagant codpieces, gems,  satin, silk and furs, court intrigue, corruption, base influence and true, if misguided, piety.

Nobody had ever seen anything like this, not where I lived.  And everyone was watching it.  Everybody!  In my neighborhood of legal secretaries, truck drivers, bartenders, store clerks, accountants and housewives, it was on every tongue, the way Upstairs, Downstairs would be, and Brideshead Revisited, and Downton Abbey would be.  My father, a foreman splicer at the dockyards, would manage to stay awake through an episode, and react to the things going on as the episode played.

Me, I was IN.  

I found, and don't ask me where, a beautiful shirt.  It was tailored and had long tails.  It buttoned up the front, had a tall, long collar and long, pointed cuffs.  The sleeves were gathered hard at the shoulders, leg o' mutton, and ran all the way down in tiny, tiny pleats to the long cuffs.  It was a muted sunset color, with lengthwise stripes, and I practically lived in it.

It made me feel like a young courtier, a princess pretending to be a prince, a duchess pretending to be a duke.  It fit me perfectly.  

I was a bounteous young thing at 11 years old.  I would braid my hair wet the night before, and then unbraid it the next morning and pull it back into a loose, romantic ponytail with the temples curled, and hit school like...I dunno. The Scarlet Pimpernel?  Something androgenous.

Because I had a reputation as a reader and an artist, I was allowed to walk to the big library in  downtown Milwaukie and use the adult readers section. (This was an honor that I'd won at the age of six, when the librarian took a look at what I'd been checking out and upped my age and printed out my card with a wink.)  And like a dork, instead of using that time to get high and hang out under the railroad tracks with homeless junkies, I did honestly walk all the way from Seth Llewelling Elementary School to the main library in downtown (as it was ) Milwaukie and luxuriate in ALL THE REFERENCE and THE ADULT COLLECTION.

One day I was there looking up a list of words in the Big Dictionary that was set on a sturdy oak podium near the main checkout desk. When I say Big Dictionary, I mean a book that you had to have a librarian help you open, and then had to use cotton gloves to turn the pages and a weighted bar to hold the pages in place so you didn't accidentally cause any creases when you closed the book.

So there I was, in my favorite shirt, with my favorite hairdo, looking at the Truly Immense Dictionary

in a studious manner, and someone took my picture.  I looked up, and it was a young man with an unnecessarily large and complex camera, and I thought to myself "Huh." and let that go.

Until I turned up in the Milwaukie Journal.  Our little towns newspaper.

Looking fuckin' STUNNING.

Out of all the pictures ever taken of me, that photo is the one that pretty much captures  me.  

I wore that shirt until it refused to button over the tits anymore.  It was wore OUT.  And I  miss it. It was just my color, just my style, set off the shape of my face and made me look like an androgynous, sexy young courtier who got up to no good at night and conveyed secret messages and got up to Hijinks.

One of the things I am surprisingly good at is using a sewing machine.  One of these days I might go online and find a pattern and make myself a grown up version of that shirt.  It made me feel heroic and adventurous.  And what more can you ask from a piece of clothing?

(My love to The Elf)