The Kings Of Cool

226

O is conflicted as to what to wear.

She walks into her closet, surveys the hangers full of clothes, and tries to decide how to go, sartorially speaking.

I mean, what does the style-conscious South Orange County Princess wear to meet her father for the first time?

Dress it up, or caj it down?

Go older, or younger?

She thinks about a polka-dot dress and pigtails, but decides it’s waaaay too creepy because maybe Paul Patterson doesn’t have a sense of satire or irony.

She looks at your basic “little black dress”-like, look at what a lovely lady the daughter you threw away turned out to be-but worries about crossing the paper-thin line between sophisticated and sexy.

She thinks about not going at all.

This is a girl who has stood in front of a vending machine-torn between F-3 (Peanut M amp;Ms) and D-7 (Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies)-for fifteen minutes and then walked away with nothing rather than make a choice.

O knows she doesn’t have that luxury here. She has to wear something, she can’t just go naked as the day she was born, as symbolically appropriate as that might be.

You might be able to walk naked in Laguna without raising alarm-or an eyebrow-but Newport Beach? They don’t get undressed to have sex. You could get arrested in Newport for wearing white after Labor Day.

Okay, this is getting you nowhere, O thinks.

But maybe that’s just where you should go.

Maybe you should lie down, fire up a blunt, and forget it.