TGIF

Good Lord it's Good Friday again! TGIGF!

And now Easter Sunday and me with no bonnet!

Cue memory circa mid-60s, walking to either Isobel and Maynard's or Frank & Inez's in an Easter bonnet but actually a hat, while my younger sister wore the bonnet that used to be mine. I didn't like the upgrade. The bonnet was cute, the hat scratchy and wouldn't stay on my head. It must've been a shared Passover and Easter because both couples were Jewish, the food at the house different and spread out buffet-style.

Isobel and Maynard eventually moved to Toronto and I always wondered if Andrea Martin of SCTV met Isobel and modelled "Edith Prickley" after her.

🙇

I really should read Morley Torgov's "A Good Place to Come From" some day, although I've read Harvey Simms' "The Best Man for the Job", also about the Sault, my hometown, the former mayor, Joe Fratezi, who appointed himself Chief Administration Officer, the highest paying job in the city, while still mayor.

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You can take the girl out of the Sault but you can't take the Sault out of the girl. I always think I'll return to live there one day, but I won't, will I. My first friends still live there, the twins, one of them in the house he grew up in right next door to mine that still features in all my dreams. He said to me last time I was visiting my mother in the nursing home and he was driving me there from church (he sings in the choir, which is incredibly talented, so I always go to church when I'm in the Sault) "Let's make sure we stay in touch. We're each other's first friends." This was after I told him our older sisters were a couple of bitches to us growing up. D sees life through rose-coloured glasses though so didn't say anything.

His sister died last year which I only found out about recently because we're really only in touch when I go to the Sault. He'd gifted my mother a plate with birds on it when she was in the nursing home. She used to paint pictures of birds when she could still see. Birds and either poppies or sunflowers. Anyway I took it from her room (she couldn't see it and objects on nursing room tables just get in the way of staff looking after the inmates, I mean, patients) with the plan of gifting it back to him at some point.

😇

Speaking of bonnets, I told you about Jo Pete in a previous post "Transspotting". Well, maybe like you, this is my spring to switch it up and go with a new style, but a bit of a return to Jo Pete.

I need to get to the thrift shop for a new old coat. Long and loose with pockets is my jam now.

Yup. I said "jam". The other day I used "miasma" thinking it meant "a bunch of stuff" when it actually means "a big stink". But it's all good because one of my sharp-eyed young readers (who suddenly celebrated her 40th birthday!) looked it up and posted the correction on Twitter. Now we're all the wiser.

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My new style is in reaction to my old style, or what used to be my old style, my old style as I imagined it came across, anyway, focused on my body.

Coquettish?

😬

My new style is androgynous, long and loose. Slouchy, but also funky. Layers. Affectations in a nod to older fashionistas with giant glasses and the like. (I've picked up a number of old scarves over the years from various thrift shops that will do the trick for the most part.) I'm undergoing a makeover of sorts, riffing off a couple of lifestyle changes I made to address the panic attacks I started having last spring. How I present myself, what I wear, is part of it.

Clothes make the man, as it were.

All bets are off for winters in Ottawa, though. As My Blond Companion pointed out while we waited for a bus one day in February, it's too hard to look cool in winter, and looking cool is where it's at for me right now. Cool look, cool feel, but winter is winter is winter. The other day we saw a middle aged man in shorts (my friend was regretting not wearing her toque, ffs) headband and sunglasses like he was hanging out in Venice Beach, not Bank and Catherine in Ottawa where the temperature was -5 degrees Celsius.

Cool he did not look. Cold he did.

😱