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“Watermelon Sugar High Seas” outfit
When you buy a wicker watermelon clutch purse on the beaches of Isla Mujeres, make sure you pretend to eat it and spit out the seeds into the sand, so that when you later randomly pass a clutch of servers standing in front of a restaurant, they’ll mouth out your action and laugh. Making you a legend. A legend of the sandìa mime jokes....
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“Reading Myself at the Japanese Reading Room (NYC)” outfit
A read is an insult pointing out one’s flaws, according to Urban Dictionary, which I consult for my job, OK? (One time a corporation I worked for blocked out this site for obscenity and I had to take it to the top…of the internal chat gossip thread.) I love Cheep because, even after 11+ solid years, it makes me realize how mediocre I still...
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“The dress my grandma wore to my mom’s wedding” outfit
I officiate weddings in the dress my grandma wore to my mom’s wedding. This last Friday, I cried more than the bride, seeing her float toward her groom (and me, peripherally) through rows of perfectly arched trees in an idyllic rural Idaho garden in the glow of the golden hour. I love that electric feeling of real love. Like that time I almost got...
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“The Eyes Have It” outfit
In 1984, the Telescreen, peering into your room like a dull mirror inset in the wall, recorded every private act for the nosey overlords to look / listen in. “Never,” we claimed. Then came Alexa. And all our George Orwell / Jeff Bezos dreamscapes came true. “Watch me now,” said the Danger Twins, and the populace. In the end, we opted in. Apropos for...
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“The House of the Rising Sun” outfit
This dressing gown would only be house-of-ill-repute hot in 1718, the year New Orleans was founded by French knaves, and reputable women were in scant supply. Meticulously unbutton with your eyes this Reformation Era chic boudoir cosplay in the French Quarter. Patterns for days. Swampy-heat languor for miles. In my fevered imagination, this dressing gown is the mirror image of the one the woman—taken...
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“The Unbearable Lightness of Being Dawn Baer” outfit
How people live without an alter ego I’ll never know. Lately, mine has been Dawn Baer. She wears vintage concert tees without bras. She wears wire-framed 70s dad glasses with thick lenses (so you can’t read her unspoken shade). She wears forest green wool berets hand-beaded with a tropical beach. She cadged her jacket during a stint in the Idaho Fish & Game. She...
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“To be or not to be in Death Valley” outfit
My longstanding quest for Cheep has been to capture the look of a disinterested bohemian model in an Anthropologie catalog. She side eyes you in her cotton patchwork gown against a distressed backdrop—fingering strange, decayed objets d’art—like an end-of-times queen of leisure. At long last, a solid decade into thick of Cheep, I finally reached my goal in a ghost town in Death Valley...
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“Electric Kool-Aid acid test site” outfit
Two camo jet planes flew in between the Panamit Dunes of Death Valley directly behind me as I stood for the shot. I didn’t notice until the first one passed my line of sight. Then the second came through sideways beside me before horizontally sweeping below me through the desert floor. I’ve encountered this once before in the dead silence of the deadest of...
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“Military fatigued” outfit
I was into dystopias before dystopias were de rigueur. Among the things I carried on a spur-of-the-moment exchange trip to Russia in 1998: worn-out copies of A Clockwork Orange and The Gulag Archipelago. Dumb American style, I unwittingly landed into political and economic turmoil. The ruble was in freefall. Yeltsin’s rule…spiraling too. Putin, then head of the ruthless FSB, would soon take his place....
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“Quitting cherry bomb” outfit
My first real quit: DirecTV call center, February 2002. Crippling social anxiety and a lifelong phone phobia had my number, so I excelled at awkward pauses, nervous laughter, and average call times. Even if custom designed by the damned to torture me singularly, no greater corporate hellscape could exist. With its fluorescent lighting. Forced cheery attitude. And “this call will be recorded for quality...
Cheep 