This post is about my new hat (see right). Also, dirty movies (supposedly with hats)!
This particular hat was purchased to go with my new winter coat. There would be a picture of the coat, too, if I had longer arms. Instead you get a picture of the coat collar. But mostly I just want to show off that, in addition to being stripey, my new hat has a bow on the side.
Not everybody likes the hat. My boyfriend was wondering why I bought "an old lady hat," and my boss, more tactfully, said "if I saw you on the bus, I would give up my seat."
I'm pro-hat, which is easy for me as my natural hair already looks like hat hair anyway. Actually, I'm going to try to wear hats and gloves every day this year. It annoys me that that's considered weird. I appreciate that we don't have to wear hats and gloves every time we go outside. What I don't like is that we're basically not allowed to without coming off as eccentric.
As a foreigner in Russia, I'm automatically eccentric, so that's fine. But, if I went back to America, the hat-and-glove thing would not go over. But, years ago, it would have been really, really weird not to wear them. So what happened?
Someday I'm going to totter around in my hat and gloves and reinforced-toe nylons* impressing people by telling them that I'm from the 20th century, "back when women were ladies." Yes, I am totally going to use that phrase. Totally. But I don't think I can get away with it just yet. I mean, I hope I can't. But someday...
Today, however, I write about dirty movies (and also hats)! My boyfriend has satellite TV, which includes a subscription to this block of movie channels. About half of the movies they show are in English, which I appreciate.
I was channel-surfing the other day while he was in the other room getting actual work done and I stopped on a scene of Courtney Love and some guy going riding-crop shopping. I'm not creepy (not pervy-creepy anyway), but I had to know what movie would be dumb enough to have a riding-crop salesman look so shocked that one of his customers might be buying a riding-crop for sexual purposes.
In the very next scene, my question was answered with the strains of "You Can Leave Your Hat On," which made me think:
1. Hey, this is a really famous movie scene!
2. Either this is a takeoff or screwed-up Kim Basinger looks a lot like cleaned-up Courtney Love.**
3. She has NO HAT!
Apparently, I said this last one out loud because my boyfriend had to know why I was angrily berating his beloved TV. This was embarassing:
M: Oh, because this woman is stripping and she's not wearing a hat.
D: What?
M: It's a really famous scene, but it's just stupid if she's not even wearing a hat. Though she is wearing a slip. Why don't women wear slips anymore?
D: Why are you watching dirty movies on my TV?!
M: Well, I was flipping through channels and I just had to know...you know what? Never mind.
* Fun fact: in other countries, these are called tights, but I always think of tights as patterned or opaque. I also hear Americans calling them pantyhose, which is just too much information.
** I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm good with names and terrible with faces.
If I weren't who's to say
15 years ago
8 comments:
I've only seen that movie once and it was many years ago, but I thought I remembered a hat. I was just listening to the Randy Newman version on my way home tonight. Strange coincidence.
You are so funny. I look forward to your return and the reactions you get to the hat and gloves. Me, I love you in the hat and I love the hat. Gloves, I'm glad they're gone. I'm old enough to have had to wear them to Church on occassion. But the part that cracked me up the most was the reinforced toe nylons, which I'm also secretly all for.
While you're at it, you should set out ribbon candies in bowls in your home on top of doilies.
You are so funny!!! I so enjoy your blog. You really should get into journalism.
I have been known to surf channels late at night and have come across some very interesting shows. They are quite artsy. Lol. I love your picture. The hat is so cute on you.
I like the hat and the coat with the fur collar -- it all looks very 1920s. I've never seen 9 1/2 Weeks, so I can't comment on the hat-appropriateness. But I can tell you when hats fell out of style for men: when Kennedy didn't wear them. Then the whole '60s thing happened, and it probably just seemed a little silly to show up at the Human Be-in in the park with your gloves, which would just get covered with grass (of all sorts) stains. These days, it's even odd to have a job where you men wear neckties, and I do miss them.
I can't type tonight, so I should just stop. I revised my last sentence, and didn't delete correctly. I didn't mean to refer to you as "you men." The sentence is supposed to read: These days, it's odd to have a job where men wear neckties, and I do miss them.
Sheesh. I should call it a night.
There was not a single hat in that scene, I promise. Possibly it was written with a hat but that proved to be logistically difficult, but in that case they should either have found a workaround or used a different song. But what really annoyed me was that people consider this scene memorable rather than stupid.
Anyway, she does wear nylons and a slip, which means that she's actually more dressed whilst stripping than a lot of young people these days are on any occasion. I also have to say that her suit was so great that, in her place, I would never remove it for any reason. But I suppose that would be a very different movie.
Actually, after I wrote that, I realized that I was probably thinking of a famous scene in a much, much, much better movie---The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That involves a hat, but not the song. I saw the two movies around the same time and they probably melded in my mind in some sick, sad way.
That being said, I'm not sure that a very literal interpretation of You Can Leave Your Hat On is what one really wants. And I do remember her suit, which was quite nice.
I was just thinking, I should tell her to watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being and check out the bowler hat action, but your mother beat me to it, though I'm laughing at the idea of mixing up Unbearable Lightness with 9 1/2 Weeks.
The movie is one of the few that might actually improve on the novel in some ways, since Kundera went on about their dog in a way I found really excessive and sentimental, but that was before I was being stalked by cockapi, so maybe I wouldn't feel that way now.
If you can't conjure up a bowler hat, they're the iconic hat that Magritte used in his paintings -- Sondheim has a song in Pacific Overtures about a bowler hat.
We had our Chinese New Year dinner last night -- sorry you weren't with us. . . .
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