even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: opening night at the metropolitan opera

imaginary outfit: opening night at the metropolitan opera

My adult life has been pretty casual — a handful of cocktail dresses sprinkled through a wardrobe of plaid, denim, cotton and wool — but I love dressing up. It's my favorite kind of shopping to do. As satisfying as it might be to buy something to wear everyday, I prefer hunting for a knockout dress. I might only wear it a few times, but each time becomes a distinct memory – a specific night, a specific place. For me, they are the hardest pieces to let go of, and they tend to hang in my closet for years beyond their season of glory. They hold the ghosts of happy times in a way that regular clothes don't.

Sometimes, if I have a weekend afternoon with nothing to do, I'll drift over to fancy department stores on pretend shopping missions. One of my favorites is picking an outfit to wear to the opening night gala of the Metropolitan Opera. (Multiple viewings of Moonstruck and Cher's opera-related shopping spree probably have something to do with this particular dream.) I picture myself slightly older, elegant and silver-haired, wearing something devastatingly luxe, ready to step into a box and hear the tenor of the moment in his signature role. Someday, maybe.

In the meantime, I have a wedding and an anniversary celebration to shop for. I have my eye on this.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: opening night at the metropolitan opera

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