My local Target is about a 20 minute drive from my house. Last Saturday my friend MKA was in town, visiting from NY, and we got up early in the morning to go to Target. (For us, on a weekend, 'early' was 9 am.) So around 10 there we were, driving through my neighborhood on a day that was turning out to be gorgeous. It wasn't supposed to be. According to the weather forecast it was supposed to be cool, gray and rainy, as it had been for the previous 2 days. Instead it was bright blue, cloudless, warm and sunny. It was so gorgeous it was intoxicating.
As you turn into the shopping center that includes my local Target, the access road is lower than the Target parking lot for about half a block, until it rises to the same level at the point of entry. So as MKA drove up the access road and I turned my eyes to our destination I saw a dramatic sight: there in the distance was Target, rising from a broad misty plain. The water that had soaked into the parking lot over the past 2 days was burning off in the morning sun and it looked as if Target had a starring role in some sort of theatrical production that relied heavily on a fog machine.
I realized then and there I'd probably pay good money to see Target on Ice.
MKA pointed out that their ads are lots of fun and their songs are very catchy.
The opening number could go to that song that gets stuck in my head all the time. You know, it goes:
La. Ti-Da. Ti-DAA-A-AH! And I said La. Ti-Da. Ti-DAA-A-AH! (repeat over and over)
Here comes a roll of Bounty on skates, followed by some Iams cat foot and an Isaac Mizrahi sundress. Oo, nice salchow. Some Tide surges around the rink, pausing to twirl with Barbie and a nice array of wrapping paper. Some soft-cover bestsellers and a pair of shoes do a fancy lift.
The closing number would be that song “Hello, Good Buy” and all the products would dance around doing a Rockettes-style kick line just as the final show-off – a Wii – brings the house down with a couple of athletic flips and a quadruple lutz.
Ta-Da!
Now wouldn't that be better than watching Ariel or Nemo skate around for a couple of hours?
(Oh humor me. We thought it was hilarious.)
Did you ever have one of those moments when you look up all of a sudden and it’s obvious that everyone in the whole world got a memo that you missed? This happened to me a few years back with cell phones. I didn’t have one, wasn’t worried about it, blithely living my heedlessly anachronistic and old-fashioned life and then WHAM! All of a sudden I realized that EVERYONE, including young children, had one and that without one I was like a telegraph in an internet world. Also as soon as I got one I found out that without one I had been missing out on a basic fact of modern life: I *need* to talk on the phone all the time. Why hadn’t I realized it before?! Those leisurely 8 minutes walks I used to take from the grocery store to my house in the evenings after work, lugging my milk and cat food, listening to the tweetlings of birds and the screech of the basketball coach’s whistle in the nearby school gym – no more. I still do that about half the time but I’ve also discovered those walks can be prime phone time.
My mother lives in
The reason I bring this up is that suddenly, in just exactly the way Malcolm Gladwell describes it in his book The Tipping Point, what used to be a sort of now-and-then in my experience has become everywhere, all the time, by EVERYONE. Until a few weeks ago it was EVERYONE BUT ME, but I did get the memo, however belatedly, and now I’m one of them too. Here it is: Everyone here carries their own shopping bags. Everywhere. I keep a couple folded into the carry-all I take with me to work every day, just in case I stop by a store on my way home. Suddenly, we’re all green and eco-friendly and carrying canvas/linen/polyester reusable bags.
We haven’t yet gotten to the my-bag’s-better-than-your-bag phase (or if we have I’ve missed the memo YET AGAIN) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned up at some point.
Being me, I’ve approached this new trend in two ways. First, I’ve started a collection. (Hey, I’m a museum person.) I think about it as a collection, and I try to rotate the bags I use so that the entire collection wears at the same rate, and no one bag suffers from overuse. I now have reusable shopping bags from Trader Joe’s (both with Hawaiian themes for some reason – also the straps are too long for me and I don’t like them as much but they do hold more than any other bag), a green one from Shaw’s supermarket, and a black-and-white one from Fairway Market in Manhattan. Naturally, I will soon add soft red compact ones from Target - they come in their own pouches! For the collection's sake I need bags of varying colors, textures, sizes and weights, but I’m already well on my way to total usefulness. Second, I’ve done some research. I looked online. These are the bags I’ll be adding to my collection soon, Envirosax and Reisenthels. Aren't they pretty? These will be the pretty, girly, boutique shopping bags I'll carry with me. The others are sort of the fashion equivalent of denim overalls - useful, but no one's every gonna say, "Ooooo, pretty" while you're wearing them.
Maybe this is a phenomenon only in the Northeast, but you should keep an eye on the mailbox. Your memo will probably turn up sooner or later.
Ah, springtime in
It’s definitely springier than it was a few weeks ago. I can tell because of 2 visual cues that have just popped up overnight: daffodils and crocus are blooming in flowerbeds all around my neighborhood and in the city, and the Weird Girls in my neighborhood are dressing for spring.
Weird Girls are the deliberately eclectic college students and girls in their early 20s who live in my neighborhood, which is full of them. (‘Deliberately eclectic’ is a generous interpretation. I suppose there could be that many accidents at any one time in any one person’s wardrobe, but it’s hard to believe…) It seems they wear their eccentricities like a badge of honor or prestige – the weirder they dress, the prouder they are of their fashion-sense and thrift-shop conquests. Now, I love a good find at a thrift shop. But unlike Weird Girls I don’t try to wear every good find all on the same day.
An example: This morning I walked to work behind one of these Weird Girls. She was wear black knee-high slouch boots that had a dangly-jangly silver buckle so they rang with each scuffed step she took; white super-lacy tights, the kind you see on chubby baby girls in church on a sunny spring Sunday; a chunky grey knitted, knobby-fringed mini skirt; and a vintage 70s tight leather cropped maroon bomber jacket. She topped this, of course, with the absolutely necessary aviator shades and giant pearl earrings the outfit was screaming for. Naturally.
Another Weird Girl in full spring regalia wore a puffy shiny red winter jacket, a pink flowered calico ruffly skirt, skin-tight indigo jeans cuffed at mid-calf, black tights and green clogs.
I’m telling you, it's not the spring I miss and wish for, but it has its compensations.
