The party was held at the Petroleum Club in Downtown Fort Worth, and I was dressed in a sexy purple halter dress with a plunging neckline, a low back, and an asymmetrical hem. It was a $200 dress--expensive by my standards--but I only paid $4.99 on final clearance at Dillard's! Wow! I couldn't believe my good fortune. (The brand name was Laundry, which Angela informs me is very nice.)
The only problem with the dress was that it was about three sizes too large. I figured I could get around that problem by using double-sided garment tape to hold it in place.
With the sticky tape and the stick-on bra cups, that added another $20 to my total.
With the sticky tape and the stick-on bra cups, that added another $20 to my total.On Angela's advice, I bought dangly gold earrings, chandelier style with a bit of purple--I found these by myself, on sale at Kohl's, and I was very proud. She also recommended matte gold sandals, and I found some on sale at Famous Footware. They were gold fabric slides with gold bows and a little frill. I thought they were a tad gaudy, but Emily and Angela said they were perfect.
Emily [my little sister] fixed my hair in a low bun and applied dramatic "evening" makeup. She used the sticky tape to cover most of my cleavage and hold the back of the dress in place. It worked amazingly well--at first. I had also gone to a nail salon and had my fingernails and toenails painted a pale pink shade, and I felt very put together.I knew I looked sensational--at least compared to the usual me--and that made me a little self-conscious. I felt a momentary stab of disappointment that Bill didn't swoon over my beauty and sex appeal, but he did offer a distracted, "You look beautiful." (I think he didn't really see me because he was agitated about running late.)
There were a lot of gaping stares and a few compliments when we arrived. My coworkers had just never seen me looking sexy before. The way the dress was taped, there wasn't much cleavage, but it was just a racy style. I did a lot of eating, quite a bit of dancing, and some occasional shouting over the music with my friends.
As the evening wore on, my dress got more and more revealing. [I was still nursing 6-month-old Allyson at the time.] My breasts gradually grew to gargantuan size, and the sticky tape lost its grip so that I had to keep pressing it back into place. To make matters worse, it had picked up the color of the dress, so you could see a purple line on my left boob! But that wasn't the worst of it, though I didn't know it yet.
Thankfully (I guess), it wasn't until I looked in the bathroom mirror back at home that I discovered I had CLOWN LIPS!!! Emily had used a new makeup kit that Hillary had gotten for Christmas, and maybe it was of dubious quality. The lipstick had bled all around the perimeter of my lips, about 2 millimeters outside the natural line of my lips. Here I'd been dancing around, thinking I looked so sexy, and really I had a mysterious purple boob and garish pink clown lips!
I howled, "Why didn't you TELL me I had clown lips??" Bill swore he hadn't noticed them, though he had to admit they were pretty funny just then. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt since it was quite dim at the party. Maybe no one noticed?
Oh well... It was still a romantic evening, even if I had a date with the breast pump when we got home.
2 comments:
That is one of the funniest stories, ever! Men in general are sooo oblivious to small detail. You looked gorgeous! I think next time you should have the dress altered professionally and ask Sheryl for make-up samples :)
I laughed so much when I read this, Blake was in the kitchen and turned to ask me what I was laughing about. This is like when you have something stuck in your teeth the entire day and you finally notice it when you look in the mirror before bed, after you've smiled at hundreds of people throughout the day.
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