Fashionista!

One of the reasons I detest drop-in company is the way I like to dress when I'm home alone. Although I make an effort to see that my pants and shirts match each other, I tend to dig out the oldest, softest not-quite-rags I can find. There are a couple of reasons for this: (a) I'll be cleaning the house and don't want to get my good clothes dirty or, more likely, (b) I'll be in the recliner watching TV with huge dogs piled on top of me and I want to be comfortable. Anyway, earlier this week I dug into my basket of clean-but-not-put-away clothes and pulled out a pair of pants and a T-shirt to wear while I watched "Wife Swap."

If you remember that last episode, it was about the home-schooler mom who traded places with a "hoochie-mama" career lady. The show brought out that the home-schooler mom spent only $500 per year on her whole family's wardrobe, a lot of their clothes being hand-me-downs from members of their church. The other mom, whose career was hosting in-home parties to sell women's sexy lingerie and other, ahem, unmentionables, spent somewhere in the high five-figure range on clothes for her family.

I felt kind of smug as I watched the show, thinking my style (though certainly not my budget) fell somewhere in the middle of the two moms: I dress better than the mom whose only fashion rule was decency and I'm not as flashy as the sparkly, must-show-cleavage mom. As it turned out, my smugness was short-lived.

The scene changed to show Hoochie-mom going through the other mom's closet, shaking her head in dismay. Suddenly, she zeroed in on something, reached in and yanked out a single pair of pants, declaring those pants the ugliest, unsexiest thing she had ever seen. Yup, it was the exact same plaid pants I had pulled out of my laundry basket 15 minutes earlier.