I’m a cool mom, but I’m not a hip mom. No surprise; I’ve never really been hip in my entire life, and I actually still enjoy watching people stare when I wear Lilly Pulitzer pants outside the safe grounds of a country club.
Cutting edge? No. Avant-garde? Nope. Trendy? Ha!! Noooo….one of my life goals is still to learn how to accessorize. It shouldn’t be hard, but I am a dismal failure at it.
So when my sister-in-law texted me Friday to invite me to a fashion show and book-signing by Kelly Cutrone, I heard “open bar!” and “VIP seats!” and “goody bags!” more than I heard “totally cool MTV fashionista!”
So yes, I blew right by the famous chick (yes, she has her own Wikipedia entry) signing books and made a beeline for the pomitinis at the bar. In fact, it was only later (time-later and number-of-pomitinis-later) that I looked around and saw that it was just me and Kelly, as everyone was leaving to go sit down for the fashion show.
Okay, so now I’ve googled her, and it turns out she’s a controversial, sometimes (often?) bitchy piece of work. And she’s got a new book out that is laced with sex talk and expletives. On paper, she looks like a mean biker who will eat a suburban mother alive and mock her inexpensive, albeit cute, Maggy London shift within seconds.
But I’ll tell you the truth, if you’re trendier than I am and already have an opinion about her: she’s nice. She’s funny. She’s conversational and approachable and kind. She laughed with me about raising daughters and how her eight-year-old has this living monument to being your own person around all the time and yet still writes “My name is Ava Bieber” in her notebook.
We left for our seats and we all loved the fashion show.
Side note: I do have to say I’ve never seen a man wear pants as tight as those models wore. Many of the women (and some of the men) in the audience literally went into heat.
(Second side note: Someone needs to tell the clothing sponsors of fashion shows that if the women were allowed to wear bras and the men could wear pants that don’t fit like shrink wrap, we’d pay more attention to the actual clothes.)
The whole long, late night was fun. I lost count of the number of bars we entered and the number of drinks we downed, but I think I really, truly earned my Saturday-morning headache. Whit looked at me and shook his head and said, “Yup, you howled at the moon. It’s good for the soul AND the sales of aspirin.”
But the funniest thing to me was that I was uber-cool and chatty with Kelly Cutrone. I was calmly appreciative during the fashion show. I held my pinky elegantly crooked with every drink.
But then I met a local newscaster, and I was like a bubbling teenager. I think I scared her, but it was really, really exciting to meet her. She was laughing at me bypassing Kelly Cutrone to go talk to her and I finally said, “Look, I have two kids. I don’t have time to watch MTV. I already know people who dress head-to-toe in black. Plenty of people make fun of my clothes. But YOU! I watch YOU every morning!!” (By the way, I did note and compliment her very trendy shoes. I don’t have my head TOTALLY up my butt.)
Pathetic, huh? But I bet there are plenty of like-minded moms out there who get a little thrill out of meeting the face that tells them about gas prices and school closings every morning…you know, the things that really count.
Because really – what’s more important, knowing whether it’s okay for your underwear to show on the red carpet, or knowing whether a soccer game is going to get rained out? Which is more common in your life, a black tie event where even your shoes will be photographed, or the rainy sidelines where your sneakers will surely get soaked?
No contest. You can tell who my heroes are.
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