The snail dress

A friend of our family uncovered this photo the other day and shared it with us, not knowing what a tangle of emotional issues it would bring up for me.

I apologize for the small size of the photo, but it is the only known evidence of a garment most famously known as the SNAIL DRESS.

I wore it for one summer when I was 18, I think I bought it with my mom in some fit of retail fatigue. I'll have it be known, before I continue with this tale, that I was somehow still popular despite this dress. I had boyfriends and went to parties and existed within a strong social framework, but now I think who KNOWS how much MORE popular I would have been had it not been for my misinformed notion that this dress was fashionable.

I felt so CHIC pairing it with black flats and a tight black T-shirt underneath. I knew it wasn't overtly sexy or anything, but I fancied it had a Demi Moore kind of cuteness, like those overalls she wore in "Ghost."



No one had the balls to tell me. Not my father, standing next to me in that picture, not the photographer, who thought it was "funny" to dig up this photo, not the dozens of people I fraternized with that summer.

Until my cousin's graduation, whereupon my Oma asked me to have a secret meeting with her in a back bedroom of my aunt's house. "Oh cool," I thought, "She's probably going to give me money."

Yeah, no such luck. I was so traumatized by this meeting, conducted as I wore said SNAIL DRESS, that I can't be sure I'm transcribing it here correctly, but he speech went something like this.

"I do not think you should wear that dress anymore. You look frumpy in it, like your father. You do not want to look like your father, do you?"

**************mental static***************trauma**************feel creepy all over body**************dress swings haplessly from body**************static*******ESCAPE

I thanked her for her opinion and ran out to report her remarks to my cousins, who, it must be said, did not defend the SNAIL DRESS in their replies. And thus, Oma was the only one with the CAJONES to get that dress out of our lives.