Snappy Snippets

Personal: Hot weather innervates, cold weather invigorates.

Trends: Mary Pickford curls are all the rage now, an example of the repetition of fashion.

GOP Convention: Where are all the hippies when you need them?

Observations

Back to the future:
In days of yore, older women wore dresses and younger women reveled in unisex pants.  Now older women are still wearing those pants and younger women have rediscovered dresses.
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Book cover illustrations:
If heroes start shaving their faces again, will they be allowed to stop shaving theirs chests (and further down?)
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HGTV
Most neighborhoods that realtors call up-and-coming would be better described as down-and-out.

Always Stylish

How weird.  It's currently stylish for little girls to dress like princesses, teenage girls to dress like sluts, and adult women to dress like men.  And, yes, even as she writes, Fio is wearing jeans and an oversized sweatshirt.  Yesterday, when she visited Friend Beatriz in Austin, she wore Husband's leather jacket over jeans and a tee.

The pendulum swings as the pendulum swings.

House Snobbery, Part 2

People, wise up!  Houses are for comfort and shelter.  They're to live in, not runway items to go in and out of style as HG TV dictates.  Fio remembers the first time she  saw popcorn ceilings--she thought they were beautiful.  And they still are, but fashion has turned against them.  Likewise wood paneled family rooms.  And red walls.  And sliding glass doors.  And carpet in the bathroom (good riddance to that one). What's the next to go--kitchen islands?

I'll tell you what Fio would like to see bite the dust--can lights.  They're an eyesore and the very devil to change, especially with those new-fangled twisted light bulbs that blow every time you turn around.  But I think we're stuck with them until someone invents the glowing ceiling paint that Fio's been advocating for years.  Actually, she thinks the paint has already been invented, but no one can figure out how to turn it off.

Random Snippets

Fio's an old-fashioned type of gal. She appreciates courtesy, like saying "please," "excuse me," "I'm sorry," "thank you," and "you're welcome." She also likes the way little girls are being dressed now, more like children and less like Beyonce.
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Sonya Dog can sit, stay, and lie down on command, but Fiorella suspects these are more her natural inclination than learned behavior. And, by the way, Puppy has entered a new stage: if it's viewable, it's chewable.
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In a world without mirrors, a portrait artist would be king.

Up to Date

Fifty years ago women disdained the bra and discarded the girdle. Now we wear bras that look like padded coconut shells and embrace the embrace of latex Spanx. Just another example of fashion cycling round and round.
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Fiorella hopes Mitt Romney gets the Republican presidential nomination because he seems to her to be the best candidate. Not that she'd vote for him for President--she's solidly behind Obama--but because she believes in a strong two-party system.
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Israel released over a thousand Palestinian prisoners in order to get one Israeli soldier returned. Their own people's lives are cheap to the Palestinians, and that's why Israel has the moral upper hand.

In and Out

Fashion is an endless circle. What's new is old and what's old is new. Case in point: engagement rings. Used to be the total design of the ring, setting and all, was the thing. Then the solitaire came into style,the size of the rock being what counted. Later, the engagement ring itself became passe and the gold wedding band was the way to go. And now, we're back to the total design concept.

For example, look at Daughter's ring:

Been There, Worn That

Fio is fascinated by the pendulum swings of fashion. During her lifetime, hemlines have been way up high and way down low a couple of times. Waistlines also seem to move a lot, from the hips up to empire and back again. Even underwear changes: bras have gone from sturdy to flimsy, from nothing to those stupid coconut husk things on display now in the stores. And panties--don't get me started, except that we'll all probably be in bloomers soon.

In a way, I guess it's reassuring. There is nothing new under the sun, and Fio has a couple of things in the back of her closet she'd like to wear again--that is, if Daughter, her fashion arbiter, approves.

Cyclic

Looking through the stores this Christmas season, Fiorella has noted that little girls' clothes aren't as slutty as they used to be. In fact, the skirt length of children's dresses is just below the knees, and the dresses themselves seem to reflect an earlier era. Women's clothes too seem more, let us say, "classic".

Maybe the sleazy look had gone about as far as it could go.

Mental Health

Fio grabs Husband's old shirts because she she thinks they look cute on her--like a bobby soxer of a bygone age. Husband thinks Fio is crazy--but then, he always has.

Calling Esther Williams

Fiorella went swimming for the first time in years the other day, in a friend's pool. Well, actually, it was more like she hung onto the side and talked to friend Ashley, who also hung onto the side while they both watched friend Carol, who dived into the deep end and swam a couple of lengths without even breathing hard--but then, it was Carol's pool.

Fiorella doesn't own a standard swimsuit anymore so she put on a pair of red, white, and blue plaid seersucker shorts and a red T-shirt with an American flag on the front of it and called the outfit her drugger--er, Dugger modesty swimsuit.

RETURN OF THE GIRDLE

It's snapped back.

Yes, the girdle has returned, but now it's called a "shaper." You've seen them all over television and the tabloids--various sorts of elasticized fabric undergarments that supposedly reduce you by two sizes. Even plastic surgeon Robert Rey is hawking them.

First there were corsets, then there were girdles; then, in the '60s, we tossed our girdles into the fire with our bras and let our fat flab free. The bras were sheepishly retrieved within the decade, but the girdles remained in the ash bin till just this year. (Probably some kind of space technology development.)

Myself? Call me retro, but the last thing I want to do on a hot summer day is encase myself in a skin-tight sausage wrapping.