February 12th, 2010

So a guy walks into a dress shop….

I don’t really enjoy standing around small women’s clothing boutiques waiting for my wife to try on some item of clothing. In fact, I don’t like to go into these places, period but…

My wife frequents one of these frilly boutiques in our nabe — a placed called Otto — and has been a regular there for a long time. Men, you know the kind of place I’m talking about, the kind where, no matter what the woman picks out, they tell her it’s cute and she looks great in it. And the woman believes it. That kind of place!

Since Thanksgiving, my wife has gone into Otto over and over to look at this one purse. She even took my daughter there so they could admire it together but she could not pull the trigger on it because it was too pricey.

This is where I come in, quite literally. My wife’s birthday was coming up last week and my daughter thought by now the purse would be discounted enough that I should just go in and buy it as a present. I had no idea what purse she’d been looking at but my daughter assured me they’d know my wife immediately when I said her name and talked about the purse.

So I walked into this store. I felt immediately uncomfortable because I was the only male. I explained the situation to the women salesclerks who looked at me like I was speaking another language. It appeared no man had ever set foot in their fine establishment before. It didn’t help that my wife’s name is Susan and she has shoulder-length brown hair. Talk about distinctive. I was describing most of their customer base. The two clerks stared at me, secretly willing me to leave the store.

But I was determined. I called my daughter on my cell but she wasn’t around. I pondered my situation for a few moments. What to do? A woman plucking bras off a hanger was giving me one of those looks that said, “If you took one more step toward me, I’m reaching for the Mace.”

I looked at my cell phone and began scrolling through the photos. Maybe if I showed them a photo of my wife. But all the photos I found were kind of odd, like the 5 I had of my wife lounging on a mattress at Macy’s when we were shopping for a new mattress. I didn’t think they’d understand. The photo had the word ‘perv’ written all over it. I kept scrolling and finally found a head shot of my wife stuffing a pastrami sandwich in her face in Katz’s deli on the lower east side.

I held the phone up to one of the salesclerks. “Do you recognize this woman,” I asked. “Or this sandwich?”

“Oh Susan,” she said. “She has a poodle, right?”

“Well, our poodle died a year ago but yeah. So which purse?”

She reached up and took one off the shelf. It was half the price of what it used to be. “But what if it’s the wrong one?” I asked.

The salesclerk gave me another one of those glazed eyes expressions and I said, “Fine wrap it up.”

The night of my wife’s birthday came. I handed her the present. She took off the wrapping and said, “Oh it’s just the one I wanted. I’ve been going in there forever. They must have known who I was immediately right?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “All I had to tell them was Susan with the brown hair and bingo, they handed me this one.” (that’s a photo of the actual purse)

Digg This | Permalink | 6 Comments »