Kimono Rag

My father taught me this silly little ditty when I was old enough to memorize it. He would ask and I would answer: “Where’s your money?” “In my pockets.” “Where’re your pockets?” “In my pants.” “Where’re your pants?” “I left them home.” “Get outta here, you dirty bum!” I know, I know, that last line is not politically correct. In fact the whole sing-song is stupid, except that it was hysterically funny to a five-year-old. The fact is, it’s a teaching song, not about remembering to wear your pants when you go out in public, though that was the lesson I first grasped. It’s a reverse exercise in planning for catastrophes, the classic “If-then” scenario. I’ll give you another example. Yesterday my sister-in-law the artist was explaining how her latest project had just derailed. Well, not derailed as much as taken a sharp detour off the mountainside. “You know how I planned to incorporate stencil work into my paintings?” “Yes.” “Well, I just finished the first and last piece. Honey, everything has to be lined up perfectly. Not only that, you have to crank your neck to see what you’re doing. Sweetie, this old neck has seen the last of its cranking days. Yep. No more stencil work for me.” “Ah. I can relate.” “I had a really good plan, you know? I did my homework; I watched YouTube videos about how to do it. But after this piece dries and goes to a good home, Mamma’s gotta come up with another new plan.” That’s what we do. We plan and then we shift gears. NASA calls it redundancy management. I call it shifting to plan C. “How about you,” she asked. “How’s your sewing?” “I’m using the last of my mauve silk on a kimono-style wrap,” “Sounds pretty.” “Yeah. No. I’m making it up as I go along. If the kimono doesn’t work out, I’ll have enough fabric to make a shirt. If the shirt doesn’t work out, I can make a shell. And the shell looks like s..t, I can always use the scraps as cleaning rags.” A long pause ensued. “You should write a blog about that.” From Riches to Rags, that’s my kind of fashion design redundancy management. If all else fails, fabric can always be turned into pillow stuffing or knee pads. It’s a comforting thought that helps me push past my fear of ruining a perfectly good piece of cotton. Yet sometimes the backup plan just won’t do, not that it wasn’t a perfectly good NASA-worthy idea. It’s because the whole universe just blew up. Then what’s needed is a recreation schematic. You know, we reinvent ourselves. Have you ever noticed that some people manage to pull off what I refer to as linear lives? They state what their career and/or family lifelines will be at age twenty and stay on the same paths with utter success until they drop dead. Oh, sure, their lives have hiccups along the way. Every life is filled with hiccups. Yet there are no real atomic bombs to throw them off their trajectories. They retire from the same job they’ve had for thirty years. Their children and grandchildren, if they have any, actually like them. If they have a spouse, it’s the same one they started off with. Linear lives. Then there are reinvention lives, the kind my SIL the artist and I have in common. These are where you start off with a perfectly good, establishment endorsed, rational plan and before too long it blows up in your face. After dusting yourself off and resolving to do better next time, you come up with an even better, more reasonable, safer objective and then it, too, goes boom in the night. My mother’s life was like that. One of the things I admired most about her was how she was able to relaunch herself over and over again, always expecting better outcomes, right up until the end. I admired her for that. I thought she was a great role model. Now it occurs to me that either I’m supposed to keep starting over because it’s my karmic lesson in character development or—and I hate to even consider the possibility—those of us who fit this mold make terrible choices. The last notion is not nearly as flattering as thinking of ourselves as agile of mind and spirit, with the eternal ability to land on our feet after falling down the back stairs. Yet perhaps it’s possible we’re hitching our wagons to the wrong ponies. Then again, we may just get bored easily. Whatever the reason, in this incarnation I seem to be missing the linear life gene. What does a non-linear life span have to do with redundancy plans, you ask? Everything. In linear mode, you adjust to the tides and currents of life and keep paddling down the same stream. In a reinvention life, you have to swim to the shore and tote your canoe on your head while wading through leech-filled swamps until you find a new river where you can start paddling madly upstream. That’s how I arrived at a shantung silk kimono wrap. I woke up one morning with the image of a woolen pantsuit in my mind. It was more like a Star Trek Next Generation uniform than a teatime suit, but it excited my imagination and was going to be a great training program for learning pattern drafting and haute couture tailoring techniques. That was in October. By the time I was ready to start my woolen suit I realized it wouldn’t be done until May and the weather would be too hot for wool. Besides, wool makes me itchy and I no longer go places where a wool pantsuit would be appropriate. Maybe silk would be better. Yes. That would do. Wool was out; silk was in. Next came pattern drafting. Despite reference books and class notes, I couldn’t come up with a mannish style jacket, which was crucial to the design. What to do, what to do? Aha! I’d use the same princes pattern I’d used for the previous six projects and turn it into a Nehru jacket. I knew how do that! Patterns were drawn; mockups were sewn; I was ready for fabric. Off to to the fabric district I went; to the store that has the shantung silk I love. My favorite salesman was on hand; the one who helped me choose the right colors in the past. “This one?” “No, over to the right three bolts. The burgundy silk.” “This one?” “No, more to the right. The one you’re touching is blue.” “Sorry. I’m color blind.” “What? How can you be color blind and work in a fabric store? Also, how did you help me choose such good colors in the past?” “I see colors. I just don’t know what names goes with them.” “Never mind. Go help that customer and I will poke around here myself.” The owner of the store helped me choose the most gorgeous, shimmering, emerald green shantung shot through with hints of magenta for the main pieces and bright chartreuse for the stripes. They would make my Nehru jacket look like something Captain Picard would wear to an Indian wedding. The owner assured me the fabrics went well together. In fact, he told me several times I had a good eye. I forgot to ask him if he was color blind, too. I was thrilled with my selection and came home with six yards of emerald and five yards of chartreuse. I feel confident those where the starting colors because I confirmed them with my other sister-in-law, the one who comes over to make sure I’m not wearing rags. Then I did a little online research that told me I should always prewash silk because it often shrinks. Those instructions were wrong. Machine washing made the red threads bleed. What came out was no longer shining emerald but dusky, dull, matte, maybe mauve. The chartreuse turned into dusky, matte, celery with smears of pink splotches. Since I had spent two months allotment of lunch money on this yardage, I decided to proceed anyway. So I made a pantsuit of dull maybe mauve with some kind of green tuxedo stripes. I turned the lining into a second pair of pants, also sort of green. There was a rectangle of the green left over. What’s a person to do? Cut a hole in the middle, sew up the sides and call it a shell. Not enough fabric to finish the seams? No problem. Sew the raw edges with the serger and call it deconstructed on purpose. That left me with a mauvish/greenish pantsuit appropriate for luncheon with the Mayor of Mumbai, not that I’ve been asked, and greenish pants and top that made me look like an aging bunch of celery stalks. Something needed to be done. The solution was to make a kimono style wrap out of mauve leftovers to partially cover the celery stalks. And now we’re back to page one: plans, blowups, new plans. Start with the goal of an elegant, sophisticated, expensive, designer pantsuit made of the finest woolens in a luscious dusty pink and rose color palette and end up with an 8-way mix-and-match Indian mini wardrobe made of colors no one has ever seen before or can ever duplicate again. Did I end up with a wrap or a rag? I’ll have to get back to you on that.