Robert Manners

The Both of Me

Sometimes having two distinct, if interrelated, personalities can be difficult. Especially when both personalities clamor to shop but there's only one rather meagre income to distribute between them. Last week, the Robert side of me wanted desperately to look gayer, yet I managed to thwart his desire for those outgrageous tropical-print board shorts from Ralph Lauren and the Hugo Boss slides at Shoe Pavilion and the thirty or forty different hair and skin products seen advertised in flashy fashion magazines... but this was fairly easy to do, since the communal bank account was dead empty.



But this week, several things happened at once which set Miss Marlénè off on a tear: I bought and read the 740-page September issue of Vogue, and I got paid. I also started thinking about the title of Royal Crown Countess, and what one would wear to Investitures, and started feeling inadequate. And then my coworker JB suggested playing hookey (or taking a looooong lunch) on pay-day and perusing certain of the shops on Piedmont Avenue, where I bought a cream-colored crêpe de chine evening gown that just barely fits (and gives me a spectacular silhouette), a graphite satin skirt that also just barely fit, and a water-blue chiffon garden-party dress with red and green beaded flowers. Later that day I hit another shop and bought a whole lot of very long and chunky Chanel-esque pearl necklaces and a really capacious handbag in figured chinese silk with a snazzy silver clasp/handle. It was the most shopping I'd done in months, and it was heaven!



What really got me started, though, was the tiaras. Angelique told me that it was bad luck to buy your own tiara, so I told her I'd buy hers and she could buy mine. So I started hunting around on eBay for a tiara that fit her specifications. After a good deal of searching, I found one that I thought absolutely perfect... which was rendered even more perfect because the same vendor offered another tiara of the same style, only smaller. So I bought the big one for Angelique and the smaller one for myself (bad luck be damned), at sinfully low prices.



One success on eBay is never enough. I started hunting for beaded evening gowns and furs while I was at it. And while waiting for a page of evening gowns to load (damned lo-fi dialup), I visited some favorite jewelry vendors. Though I only bought one gown while I was fiddling around yesterday, I bookmarked a number of auctions that won't be ending for a day or two. If the prices stay low, I may just have to bid on them.



The question is, can I afford it? I'm not so sure. If I only make the minimum payment on Visa, as I decided to do before launching into this decadent shopathon, that frees up a good chunk of cash... but I think I may have already run through that. There is still my car-payment to make, and the cable and insurance payments that will hit next week. And with the holiday weekend, my online banking pages won't be fully updated until Tuesday.



The prudent side of me think I should just stop now... but the drag-queen side of me says "fuck that noise! Buy! Buy! BUY!"



Ah, the joys of multiple personalities.



In other news, I am spending my Labor Day Weekend laboring away, as usual. I have laundry on top of laundry, clothes that haven't seen the outside of the hamper in two or three months, clothes I probably don't even remember that I have. Plus I have a Ninth-Step letter to write, which should occupy a certain amount of my time and expend a certain amount of mental and physical energy (the list of my wrongdoings is going to be pretty epic, when I start sifting through an unhealthy thirteen-year relationship). That ought to keep me away from the shops... except for some of those auctions, which I really have to bid on (there's a red fox boa that I simply must have, and this blue cocktail dress that's absolutely to die... God help me).