Mean Girls Monday: You could try Sears

The sick thing is there was a store like that in my mall when I was a teenager but it was called “5,7,9.” Though I can attest it carried sizes lower than 5, as to the other end of the scale, if it carried over size 9, I was unaware of it. That’s bad enough but here’s the thing: I was lucky enough to be in kind of a Cindy Crawford, not Kate Moss, era.

I’m sure that if such a store still existed, changing ideal body types would dictate that it be called something like “1,3,5.” Well, what am I talking about; such things do exist of course: Forever 21 and the Bebe, yes? Blarg.

PSA: Collarbones are beautiful, but boobs are even better. Take it to the bank. SeaQuest out!

Mean Girls Monday: It Happens — Gretchen Weiner edition, redux

Why should Caesar get to stomp around like a giant, while the rest of us try not to get smooshed under his big feet? What’s so great about Caesar? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody? Because that’s not what Rome is about. W–We should totally just stab Caesar!

Gretchen, Mean Girls.

It also happens: an imaginary scene that just happened in my head.

A Marketplace in Rome. Citizens are gathered in the dusty streets beneath a balcony, on which a man in a white toga and a purple cape draped across his shoulders stands with one arm raised up. He is clearly a snappy dresser, but he is also, it seems from the expectant mood of the crowd, reputed to be a powerful orator.

I am standing next to an ordinary citizen, waiting to hear what the man on the balcony has to say. After greeting the crowd, his opening salvo shocks the audience:

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

The assembled friends, Romans, and countrymen are all puzzled and going, “Well, yeah. Did we not just assassinate that dude, like, yesterday?”

Marc Antony draws back a little for dramatic effect, and, in the interim, I leap to my feet and address the stirring crowd calmly.

“Settle down, you guys — yes, we stabbed the everloving crap out of Julius Caesar, but you’re about to hear what is widely regarded as just about the most thumping-good rhetorical masterpiece evah: you will be thunderstruck and agog as you are lead on a journey challenging and surpassing all the expectations you hold about typical conventions of speech.

“Everything you think you know about eulogies is about to change. Hush, now, Citizens, and let Marc Antony blow ya mind.”

Won’t you please let Marc Antony blow ya mind?

Scene.