First Date Dress Over 50 That Looked Like a Lampshade

My last first date was in 1989. Thirty-seven years later I bought a dress for the next one, and it made me look like a lampshade. CHAPTERS 0:00 A lampshade and 1989 0:31 The list 2:34 Eleven outfits 3:54 The Wheelhouse 5:18 Fabric that falls 6:27 Dee's fitting-room rule 8:13 The crumple test 9:44 The inspection 11:55 Rosa and the hem 12:58 The slip 14:09 Wool and new shoes 16:11 The door 17:43 The Wheelhouse, for real 19:32 Dear Claire So this one's for you if you've got a night coming up that scares you a little, like a first date after a long time, or a dinner where there's dancing. Now, I'm not a stylist, I just know what held up for me, you know, on one Tuesday at a supper club on the lake. You get the little tests I picked up that week. Honestly, you can do most of them right there in the store, like holding a dress up by the shoulders, or squeezing a handful of fabric and counting to five. And you get where a hem should stop, and why a skirt grabs your tights once the furnace comes on. Here's how the week went. Frank from next door made a reservation for the two of us at the Wheelhouse, Tuesday at seven, which is jazz night, with a little dance floor. And I wrote back OK. That's two letters, to a man who texts in full sentences with periods. So I got out a yellow legal pad and I made a list. Seven things on the list. I tried on eleven outfits on Sunday, I bought the dress that looked best on the hanger, and Dee handed me a wrap top I tugged at six times in thirty seconds. Then on Wednesday my daughter Claire showed up on my porch with an overnight bag, which she does not do on a weeknight, and by the second outfit she had a clipboard. And after that, well, Rosa got involved, with pins in her mouth. Dressed for Round Two is a story series about me, Maggie Brennan. I ran a school front office in northern Ohio for thirty-one years, and now I'm retired and kind of learning to dress all over again, one week at a time. THE FIVE NEVERS 1. Stiff fabric that stands up without you - 6:15 2. Anything you have to keep fixing - 7:33 3. A wrinkly woven before a car ride - 9:31 4. Scratchy wool against your skin - 15:17 5. Brand-new shoes for dancing - 15:41 ABOUT THIS VIDEO This is a fictional story. Some footage is stock or AI-generated illustration. Maggie Brennan and everyone in the story are fictional characters, and so is the Wheelhouse. The narration is an AI-generated voice. Nothing here is sponsored, and there are no affiliate links. CREDITS Music: "Jazz Brunch" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ #firstdateoutfit #womenover50 #datingover50