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 struck by lightening in the Sawtooth peaks, you run your fingers through the air and feel the sparks. It makes magic of mortals. The love stories in my family are legends. Epics. My grandparents loved their way through jungles and concentration camps in the war-torn Philippines. My parents found their way back to love after a tragic 10 year split. Though it seems unlikely, so do the plots of all great Lifetime movies, I hope to someday have my own love story of legend (or psychological romantic thriller with shocking twists….oh, wait…*crosses off list*). Until and if I do, I’ll feel the vibes in this dress. vintage 1970s – no tag …

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 Apocalypse Capitalism, it’s like we got the Splenda version of the dystopia. Fake, saccharine…tastes like the uncanny valley…and conveniently comes in tiny packages. OK, maybe I’m dark. But only dark in the sense of a Salvador Dali surrealist film obsessed with high contrast and the eyes. What we see and what we don’t see. What is visible and what is invisible. What we choose to look at. (Like Lou Reed.) Sweet dreams. no label (handmade?) 1960s electric blue starburst gown – $45, Antique World Mall. Cheep it looking upside down and sideways.

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 in the bloom of her youth by consumption—who haunts this historic house wears. Her gray train shuffles against the hardwood. “Did I hear something?” one asks. Just the wind near the French doors. You imagine. Misslook dressing gown, $14. Antique World Mall Cheep!

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 inked her name on the label in all-caps: BAER DAWN. When I think it’s finally time for Dawn Baer to hang up her beret, a bitter gust comes in. What’s blowing in the wind this time? Better put on your trusty Fish & Game jacket (that I found at the Antique World Mall), Dawn Baer. Trigger warning: Bambi. I’ve now passed off a memory that involves the Idaho Fish & Game to Dawn Baer. See? It’s good to have an alter ego. Get some distance between you and you. There I was…I mean…there she was…a dorky doe-eyed information forest ranger in her mid-20s in Stanley, Idaho. A middle-aged man came in …

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. Never to leave. Masha Gessen best explains the crushing impact of the iron fist of Putin in The Man Without a Face. Here is the little I know: Russians love a strongman. Every town in Russia had multiple busts of Lenin. (By then the lingering Stalin statues had been exhiled.) I wandered through the streets of Moscow wondering which ordinary buildings hid the secret prisons of the Gulag. I wondered how ordinary people could accept the state-sponsored disappearing and the society-wide gaslighting. But no matter how bitter and cold it was outside, inside their homes, Russian hearts and minds were brilliantly warm and open. Now I understand, just as Russians were …