Style

How-To: Keep Your Louboutins Looking Lovely

March 12, 2013

This post is a highly problematic one for me.

Because while I, like every other woman on the planet, would really (really) like to own a pair of Louboutins...it's just not really the kind of thing I'd ever buy.

Honestly, I'm not really an "expensive shoe" kind of girl; fancy handbags are more my thing (as you might have noticed). Why am I not really into expensive shoes? Because...I mean...you walk on them. And for me, until recently that meant walking in New York City. On things like subway platforms and cobblestone streets and grates and lots and lots of other surfaces that would strip away that lovely, pristine red sole in approximately thirty seconds.

And that leads me to another reason why I don't tend to buy very expensive shoes: I'm not very precious about my things - I think clothing and bags and shoes are there to be worn and enjoyed, not put on a shelf and petted - and just the idea of them stresses me out. This, as an example, is the reason I'd much rather spend money on a rugged brown leather bag that would wear beautifully over time than, say, a pale-green clutch that would be ruined by a single raindrop or pen mark. I just think that buying something - especially something very expensive - that sends you into a panic every time you put it on doesn't make a ton of sense.

My Looks

With My Red Bandanna On

March 8, 2013

During my senior year of college, I got a bartending job at Red Line, a bar in Harvard Square that had replaced the much-storied Crimson Sports Grille. (The Grille had been shut down in the wake of years of very accurate allegations that freshmen were routinely being let in with the very most pathetic of fake IDs; as an indicator of how closely they were examining the photos at the door, my own ID was a hand-me-down from the older sister of a friend. Who was Korean.) Red Line was struggling a little to match the Grille's popularity, and I was hired to promote and host a weekly Senior Night, which mostly meant serving a lot of Black & Tans and Kamikaze shots to extremely drunk classmates. Which was pretty fun, actually.

Now, Red Line was more of a Cobb salads-and-martinis-type place, but I've always been a dive bar girl; I like my beer completely uninteresting-tasting and hovering somewhere around the three-dollar mark. The place where I got my first bartending job, Hogs 'n' Heifers (the bar that the movie Coyote Ugly was based on, and yes I did dance around in cowboy boots, light the bar on fire, and yell song lyrics over a megaphone), was much more my speed. My "work uniform" consisted of things like cowboy boots, fringed leather, and denim cutoffs. At Red Line, it was black slacks and a black tee. No megaphone, alas.

But I couldn't resist bringing one little memento from my biker bar days: my red bandanna. When I worked at Hogs 'n' Heifers I had an enormous collection of red bandannas and kept one tucked into my back pocket at all times, using it for everything: wiping off my hands after a too-enthusiastic pour, tying my hair back when my elastic broke, patching up my jeans when they grew one too many holes. In all the bartending jobs I held in the years that followed - I worked everywhere from a tapas restaurant in the Valley to a pizza place in West Hollywood to a swanky club in Hell's Kitchen - I wore lots and lots of different things to work...but always, always carried my bandanna. To this day, whenever I upend a milk carton or spill a little water on my kitchen countertop, I sometimes find myself reaching towards my back pocket.

I kind of miss it.