Hi, is Banana Republic there? Yeh, hi...I kind of owe you $150

Something terrible happened today.

I went to the mall in search of a dress to wear to a fancy dinner party Chuck and I have been invited to on Saturday night. Pre-Junior I was a size 6. Post-Junior I am a size...

Oh, what the hell does it matter?

The only thing that matters is that I barricaded myself in the dressing room of fricken Banana Republic in the hope against hopes that I could get one of their flouncy, flirty, made-for-sticks spring dresses on to my pasty body, and I did!

But I couldn’t get it off.

No really.

I actually tried bending over so I could stretch my hands behind my back and hoist it over my head and that’s when all the material fell forward and I started suffocating in a sea of green silk. Sweat was pouring. My heart was pounding. The material had no give my God I was trying to hog tie myself.

Then I had a vision of my accidental asphyxiation and how I’d look if the salesclerks found me in a tangle of half nude, half green battle. I’ll tell you how I’d look: like a human molting experiment gone terribly wrong. And you know how they are—those snooty Banana salesclerks—they’d take one look at me and tsk, tsk my inability to recognize that someone larger than a size 2 could not possibly slip into one of their trendy dresses without some kind of epic throw down.

They’d pick up their snooty little phones and call Headquarters and say, “Another fat one bit it. Poor dress.” Then they’d take my picture and hang it on their corkboard dedicated to “people who have died trying to wear our clothes.”

So you see, when I say that I had no choice about what to do next, I am not lying. I knew that dress looked terrible (how could it not? It pinched and pulled in places I didn’t even know I had malleable flesh). There was no way in hell I was wearing it out the door just because I couldn’t get it off. My reputation was at stake.

So like Bruce Banner, I gave one giant snort and busted through the seams.

If you must know, I lay there afterward in the fetal position and wept.

Then I got the hell out of there.

(Psst, Chuck? This is why when you asked, “I thought you were getting a dress the party’s in two days?!” I threw my shoe at your head.)