In which I missed a memo yet again...

So, I’m now going on a week with no interweb. Is it ever coming back? At least it will be summer soon and a bit easier to have access to some interweb goodness.

The memo.
I apparently am forever missing the “how you should dress” memo. You see, I hear of an event, and, being raised in the South, have an idea of proper attire. My mama, and more specifically my aunt, taught me how to dress for every occasion from a very early age, with a specific emphasis on what NOT to wear, way before Clinton and Stacy’s time.

So, when I get an invitation to…say, a Sunday afternoon lunch potluck put together as a thank you from the Young Life committee, I think I know what to wear. I’m wearing a long summer sundress to church, complete with white cardigan, and I think that will be perfectly acceptable to wear to said luncheon.

Until I get to said luncheon, and realize that while the words “kickball game” were not expressly written in the invitation, they were implied, and I am the only person there not wearing shorts, much less the floor-length maxi-sundress that I was indeed wearing.

The upside to this is that I am so skilled in the art of missing the memo and being way overdressed that it is second-nature to me. Because at this point in my life, I am overdressed for everything. It’s become my “thing”. “How I roll” so to speak. I no longer drive home in tears or make a quick escape, feigning some other prior commitment.

Let me give you some examples of this:
- The Saturday afternoon bridal showers I get invited to. To a Southern girl, a Saturday afternoon bridal shower means you wear a lovely sundress or at the very least a skirt, because there will be lots of teacakes and petit-fours, and finger sandwiches and punch. However, both (yes, this has happened more than once) of the Saturday afternoon bridal showers to which I’ve gone have been a bunch of 20-something girls in jeans and tee shirts, if not shorts, and I’ve been the oddly overdressed one. However, because I was in fact raised by Southern women, I did not tell these 20-something heathens “My grandmamma would roll over in her grave if she thought I came to a Saturday afternoon shower dressed like THAT.” But I really wanted to.
- The funeral I went to. Now, this is not the funeral in which I was harassed by a wasp in the middle of Amazing Grace. No, this one was for my sort-of father in law, in which my parents attended. I know right now you are asking yourself “how exactly were you inappropriately dressed for a funeral? Did you wear a prom dress?” No, friend, I merely wore black. Yes, even when I think I am completely safe and sound by wearing a lovely black sweater/skirt combo to a funeral it would happen that only four other people in the whole place were wearing black. Those four other people would be my mother, step-father, aunt, and her kids. Everyone else was wearing bright colors and just looked all out of place.
- And the weddings I’ve been to in which I was overdressed! People. YOU DO NOT WEAR JEANS TO A WEDDING. PERIOD. I just can’t even talk about some of the things I have seen at weddings. I understand that the people getting married are about 12, but that doesn’t mean you get to dress in a tee shirt for the blessed event. It just stresses me out to think about it, so I won’t.

I am always overdressed, unless I have the potential for meeting some single, cute, and Jesus-loving man. In that case, I’m typically wearing my pajamas or a shirt with markers, flour, and coffee on it, and my hair’s a mess. Because that too is how I roll.