The Cult of The Island Girls Shirt

The Island Girls Shirt I make for my shirt business SOMETHING FISHY has been a staple for the past nine or ten years.  It's sort of a 'retro' print, with reclining and posing Fifties bathing beauties on a background of blue with big red hibiscus flowers.  It's not a shirt made for quiet men who want to blend into the woodwork.  It's definitely a shirt for a man to be proud to wear and to get comments on.  It has sold very well for me on eBay and this year a strange thing is happening:  I call it The Cult of the Island Girls Shirt.

Back in June, I was delighted to sell my first shirt to a lady in Moscow, Russia (not Idaho).  Yup, the Island Girls shirt.  I marveled at what the shirt would see in  Russia.  Here was a shirt made for wearing to Hawaii and sipping mai tais on the white sand beach under a blazing sun.  Not for sitting in a pea green cafeteria drinking homemade vodka out of Mason jars.  (I don't know!  I've never visited Russia.  But it's my mental picture of how Russians celebrate based on the few Russian novels I've been able to wade through.  Sorry!)  So I bid the poor shirt good-bye, hoping 'my girls' wouldn't freeze and went on with my sewing. 

The shirt, you see, has five fetching beauties in various retro bathing suits, ranging from a strapless to a modest two piece to my favorite (which doesn't show up in the the photo, unfortunately) a red and white halter with white flower blossoms on them.  It reminds me of a suit that I had back in 1978 that was very like that suit that I wore on my very first trip to Hawaii.... oh sorry!  I digress.  Anyway, it's not the type of clothing you would wear if you were packing to go to Russia, you see.  Those swimsuits would probably be the last article of clothes you'd pack to take there.  (Now let me... where's my fur coat and those fleece lined boots?)

Anyway, a month later, in June, darned if I didn't sell the exact same shirt to a fellow in Moscow.  I checked the name, no different fellow.  Different address.  I wondered if old Dimitri had met Olga in some steam filled bar and they'd exchanged information about my Island Girls shirt and he'd found me on eBay.  I could dream!  But I sewed up another one and sent those girls on out to Moscow to warm some chilly fellow's day.

I've been making this shirt, like I said, for ten years now.  At times, the print just lagged in sales.  It was times like those that I wondered if I shouldn't turn the rest of my Island Girl stash into tablecloths, retro for the Fifties kitchens, but just about the time I'd start pondering such a thought, sales would flare up, some new men would discover "The Girls" and I'd sew through what I had and order another bolt.  By the beginning of this year, I had successfully clothed most of my steady customers in Island Girls shirts.  (Look, I have very flashy customers who don't mind wearing scantily clad ladies on their backs.)  Back in 2002, I even made one for the director of our Harley club.  Instead of the requisite black leather all the bikers wore for the meetings, Mel would show up with his Island Girls shirt on and a big grin, trying to start a whole new look.  (It never quite worked for the rest of the bikers.)

Anyway, a week after the second Island Girls shirt was sold to Moscow, a man with a very Russian-y sounding name, bought one and had me send it to  Charleston, South Carolina.  I wondered if he too, might have known  ol' Dimitri and Olga in Moscow and told him when he was visiting Charleston to get Nancy to send him a shirt.  I did, of course.  I also wondered if perhaps I wasn't clothing some parts of the Russian mafia.  Who would think of looking at these folks clad in the retro Hawaiian print?  They certainly wouldn't look ominous.

So then, in August, I sent one of these shirts out to a fellow in the South of France.  And on October 15, one was ordered by a man in a little village in Greece.  At least those girls would get to see the sun now and then!  But a week later, on October 15, another Russian man Sergei (also from Moscow, mind you) ordered an Island Girls.  And a week later, a fellow ordered one from Copenhagen.    As I stuffed these last two shirts into their mailing envelopes, I told the girls not to despair.  I hoped they wouldn't freeze too bad.  I told them to keep smiling and cheer up the fellows who would be warmed by the girls' sunny dispositions.  But it does seem a cruel thing, to send those little beauties into the cold Northern winter. 

Do you think those folks will ever travel to a warm sunny climate and take the girls along to wear?  Or will they be destined to a life spent under sweaters and coats, perhaps layered over thermal underwear when their owner wants to show them off?  Seems sort of cruel to me.  But then.... I've got to order another bolt of Island Girls.  When she's Hot she's Hot!  And those Girls are burning bright right now.

You Can't Hide In A Small Town

Two years ago when we moved to Superior, Bill and I jumped into civic matters in a big way.  We not only wanted to do some "Good" for the town but it was a good way to meet our neighbors and make friends.  Our first foray was to help on the "Crime Free Superior" committee, a bridge between the police and the citizens.  The police department was in the middle of getting restructured and overall, it hadn't had its best rapport with the community, so there was a lot of 'Good' that came with that group, even if we didn't meet all of our lofty goals.  In the middle of organizing the committee, I was asked to serve as an interim secretary by the chairman.  One of the first things we did was to email everybody on the committee each other's email addresses so we could keep in touch if something happened. 

There was a lady in our community who objected to having her email address shared with the rest of the committee and she reacted (or over-reacted, seemed to me) in a big way, saying we'd overstepped our bounds and were going to invite Heaps of Trouble by letting everybody have her email address.  Her letter to the committee seemed especially vile towards me, so at the next meeting, I offered to sever my relations with the committee and not serve any more.  Personally, I felt as if just when the new community door had opened towards me and I'd stepped in, that it was shutting so hard my nose would get hit.  But the others on the committee assured me they didn't share the lady's feelings and please not to quit.  The gist of the matter was that I stayed on to work on the committee; the lady dropped out of attending the meetings; and throughout the course of the next two years my path hasn't crossed hers. 

Until this week-end, however.  Since there are fewer than four thousand people in this town, it is highly unlikely that one could move around and not share the same space at some point, isn't it?  At the Dia de Los Colores art festival this past week-end, I bought a vendor space to sell my SOMETHING FISHY shirts I make.  They set us up in the room with the art show and it was a colorful and lively group that entered to check out the entries in the art show as well as the vendors: we had jewelry, photography, baby clothes, sculpture and pottery as well as my shirts.  Sales were sluggish for me, i.e. to say, I sold nothing but I did talk to a lot of folks and gave out my cards to potential buyers, so it wasn't all bad. 

Towards the end of the day, a lady stopped by and exclaimed over my shirts.  She was wearing a Chamber volunteer badge and said she'd worked the event all day and only then could get in.  She asked if I took plastic and I regretfully told her no, I only took plastic on eBay.  She asked if I had a shirt in a certain size and I regretfully told her no, I didn't have one in the size she wanted but I did have more material and could make her one.  She agreed and opened her purse and pulled out her card.  It was then that I "got it".  YEP!  The same lady who had trounced me in the email two years before for sharing her email address.  But she looked so happy with her potential purchase, I guess she'd forgiven me.  

Until I handed her my card and when she glanced at it, she blinked hard but said nothing.  

I studied her, wondering if my potential sale was going to go down the tubes.  Not then.  She either had forgotten her outburst from two years ago or has deemed it 'water under the bridge'.  Well, if she can, so can I, I thought.  Besides, a potential shirt sale is a potential shirt sale.

So here's my parting shot:  If you live in a small town, and you tend to spout off to people over things you don't like that they do, then you'd best be prepared to re-meet up with those same people at some period in time.  You can pretend you've forgotten all about it (hey, works for some of us Old People) or you can play the Forgive and Forget Scene.  It's your choice... but you can't hide forever!

A Whiff of Roast Beef

Wednesday, the 7th, we had a good trek to the desert with my sister and brother-in-law.  Since it had been nearly a year since our last one, it made it all the more fun.  We celebrate these desert outings with a picnic, going "all out", (meaning: it's so much food you're quite likely not going to be eating another meal that day.)  It was no exception this time.  From a lofty perch on Iron Mountain looking southward towards Picket Post Mountain, we ate turkey and pastrami sandwiches on sourdough, ate fresh salsa with Bill's home grown cherry tomatoes and polished it off with fun sized Halloween candies.  I'd made an apple pie for later, but when we returned home we were much too full to eat pie, so shared it out to eat later in the evening. 

The point was, by four PM Wednesday afternoon, I wasn't hungry.  Should not have been hungry.  Food was probably the last thing I had been thinking about.  But.... passing through the kitchen around that time, I smelled garlic.  Yes:  garlic.  The smell was definitely there.  Not in the sunroom.  Not in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen.  But the the pungent, aromatic smell of garlic was hanging in the kitchen.  As soon as I smelled it, I was assailed by the thought:  roast beef.  I needed a piece of roast beef.  The kind of tender roast beef studded with garlic cloves.  The kind my mother-in-law, Betty, used to make whenever we visited.    How silly!  I'd eaten myself full that noon on a turkey sandwich.  I certainly didn't NEED roast  beef. 

However, the feeling remained.  Every time I'd pass through the house (the kitchen is centrally located, so you have to cross it whenever you go from one end of the house to the other), I'd smell that rich lurking odor of garlic.  I even opened the refrigerator a time or two to make sure there were no peeled garlic cloves sitting inside.  No, there weren't.  I had used several cloves when I made the salsa earlier in the day.  But now the salsa was sitting covered up in the refrigerator.  And still that garlic smell remained with the proviso that it should be studded inside a succulent roast beef, with its warm juices bubbling out into a roaster pan in the oven.  My mouth was watering from the thought.

"Geez, I need some roast beef! " I fumed to Bill.

"Let's have a piece of that apple pie," he offered.  "It's time."

We did.  I warmed it up and it was good apple pie but it didn't do anything to assauge my appetite for that piece of roast beef.  Darned garlic smell!  I went to bed later that night feeling dissatisfied and hungry.  And I shouldn't have been.

Thursday, I decided to do something about it.  I walked up to the post office and stopped in at the grocery store on my way home.  They didn't have any good looking cross rib roasts, but they did have a passable chuck roast, so I bought it and brought it home and put it in a crock pot with lots of garlic and potatoes for some pot roast.  I figured that would take care of the craving. 

It didn't.

At the first bite of the 'okay' pot roast, I knew what I was missing.  "I should have made your mom's garlic roast beef," I told Bill.  "That's what I've been craving.  I thought pot roast would do but it's your mom's roast I'm wanting."

He grinned.  "Yeah, that sure was good.  With those cloves studded in there.  And..." he smiled again, "yesterday was her birthday, you know."

"That's right!  The seventh! Well, did you smell that garlic in the kitchen last night?  It was driving me nuts!"

"I smelled it.  I thought maybe you'd left some out when you made the salsa."

"No, I checked.  But I guess your mother was wanting to remind me of her good garlic roast she used to make.  And since it was her birthday, what better day to do it?"  Tears glistened in our eyes.  It was three years ago in June that Betty died.  "And, of course, your mother knows what store I put in food when it comes to memories.  All of my old memories are tied up with meals.  So of course, she was reminding me of her birthday with the smell of garlic and roast beef!"

Listen:  if my mother-in-law wants to visit us in spirit fashion this way, it's fine with me. I'm just glad nobody in the family spent their days cleaning out septic tanks!