Wait, I’m finally able to execute a small purchase!! Success!
2:33 a.m.
Or is it a success? How come I’m not getting a confirmation email?
2:34 a.m.
Seriously, where’s my email?
2:35 a.m.
What if I don’t even like how shift dresses look on me?
2:36 a.m.
And why is the site down again? Argh.
2:37 a.m.
Do I just go to bed? Like I could sleep with all this adrenaline coursing through me. Or am I committed and I should soldier on? I really did want some scarves and bags, not in lieu of the clothes, but in addition. I’ve seen the Dog of Despair so many times that Spuds McKenzie-type bull terriers will forever be a trigger for me.
And, you, Tracee Ellis Ross? You’re on notice.
2:38 a.m.
Fill cart, cart disappears. Dog of Despair.
2:45 a.m.
Fill cart, cart disappears. Dog of Despair.
2:59 a.m.
Fill cart, cart disappears. Dog of Despair.
3:01 a.m.
Confirmation email appears and my own dog hides again when I begin yelping.
Then the site goes down.
3:10 a.m.
TargetStyle blames the snafu on “overwhelming excitement.” I can’t imagine they didn’t see this coming. Again, they are a master class in predicting their customers’ behavior. How’d they so miss the mark here? The plan couldn’t have been to hype everyone up, release a tiny amount of product, then let customers twist in the wind... right?
3:11 a.m.
Again, I am sorry, polar bears, for being more worried about festive prints and affordable pricing than the environment. Ditto for Syria. Tomorrow, I will be a good person, concerned for and engaged in the world around me. But tonight, I will be a deranged, pajama-wearing, pearl-clad lunatic who is incapable of any thought, save for, “Refresh! Refresh! Refresh! I hate you, Tracee Ellis Ross!”
3:12 a.m.
I hope that kid isn’t going through this, too. I want her to get her dresses.
Maybe even more than I want me to get them.
3:17 a.m.
Ha! Back up, back in, and I complete one final transaction for clothes. Okay. I can live with this. Didn’t pick up everything I wanted, but that just means there’s more for all the other late-nighters. I’m not (that) greedy. I’d planned on going to Target in the morning but now I revise my plan, seeing the frenzy. I shall leave at first light, so I’ll try to catch a couple of hours of sleep.
3:18 a.m.
I get in bed with The Royal We, by the Fug Girls. They are the opposite of Target right now, as they’ve under-promised and over-delivered. I love this book.
I can’t sleep. Too keyed up.
3:35 a.m.
Wide awake.
3:45 a.m.
Wide awake.
4:00 a.m.
Wide awake. I should probably see if I could buy some plates, as I’m up.
4:01 a.m.
Wide awake, 500-server error. Not even a dog this time.
4:30 a.m.
Wide awake, 500-server error. Scream the screen, “Take my money, goddamn it! Why won’t you take my money?”
5:00 a.m.
Wide awake, back up, but items keep disappearing from my cart. I want to kick the Target dog every time he tells me my cart is empty. I want to kick him HARD. I want to “take him to a farm” where he can “live with a nice family.”
As for Jason Goldberger?
Vanished from social media like so many pineapple serving bowls.
5:30 a.m.
Site is back and fully operational… and sold out of EVERYTHING.
Screw it, I’m having breakfast and getting dressed.
6:35 a.m.
Arrive at Target in Vernon Hills. I’d planned on hitting the Target a little farther away in Mundelein, but I don’t know the layout of that store, so I figured I’d lose valuable time trying to find stuff.
I’m not the first person in line.
6:35 a.m. to 7:58 a.m.
Everyone talks and makes friends, all of us sharing what we love about Lilly. One woman tells us she had a quilt made from all her daughter’s old Lilly dresses and she could look at every scrap of fabric and remember her daughter at that age. She even got a shot of the quilt to Lilly herself before she passed on last year. Suspect her daughter is not one of the spoiled assholes from Twitter.
The mood is light and convivial, likely because we’re at the head of the line and have confidence we’ll at least end up with something, as that seems less and less likely for most.
Is worth noting that the blonde to brunette ratio here is ten to one. And every car in the lot is a newish SUV.
7:59 a.m.
We take position at the front door, much to the employees’ amusement and the confusion of a couple of old guys making an early run for foot powder, orange juice, and Tums. There are easily one hundred women in line behind me.
8:00 a.m.
Speaking of running, the doors open and everyone runs.
She runs.
He runs.
You run.
We all run.
I run.
I run?
I forget for a minute that I’m wearing an Achilles CAM boot. Shit, why am I running? I should not run. Running is really, really dumb. My physical therapist is going to murder me. I had surgery three months ago. I just got done walking with crutches last week. And yet, the crowd crushes in behind me and I realize that if I want anything, and if I don’t care to be trampled under so many Wellies and ballet flats, I need to pick up the pace.
I dash to accessories and nab two purses and one overnight bag, and with that, the whole display is cleared. How are there only one of each of these items? Shouldn’t there be, like, so many more?
8:01 a.m.
The accessories area is decimated, as is the clothing rack. Wait, there’s only a single rack of adult dresses? For this many people?
8:02 a.m.
Is this how everyone on the Titanic felt when they counted the lifeboats?
8:03 a.m.
I grab the last set of glasses from the now-empty housewares display.
8:04 a.m.
Gone. It’s all gone.
I check out, having picked up the green straw purse, the blue and gold overnight bag, and the green and white scarf/sarong with little pink balls on the border. I gave a Lake Forest woman one of the purses and she swapped me the two lounge chairs. I don’t find out until later that neither chair accommodates more than one hundred and sixty-five pounds, so even though I’m thinner, I’m still too fat for this furniture.
Still, I consider myself lucky.
Most people didn’t get anything.
Outside of the running into the store, I didn’t see any terrible behavior, any shoving or elbows being thrown, or any single person sweeping everything into her cart to list on eBay later. Really, no one could have – the inventory didn’t exist. What I saw was a bunch of Lilly devotees, thrilled at the opportunity to score a less expensive slice of the pink and green pie.
8:44 a.m.
I’m home and ready to get into bed, reflecting on how badly the last nine hours went, what a tremendous waste of time and resources it all was. I feel awful for the bulk of the shoppers who were walking around shell-shocked, with nothing in their carts. They came to stock up, they stood in line before opening, and they left empty-handed. I know life isn’t fair, and it can be argued that since I had a few items, and not just one, I was part of the problem.
However, I don’t understand not making the hype and the inventory commensurate. I grasp how limited supplies build buzz, but couldn’t Target have doubled or tripled the stock and still gotten the same results? Or were the Lilly products considered a loss leader and the whole thing rolled out exactly to plan?
I send out my final tweet on the debacle, speculating on the above. I fall asleep not having any idea if the orders I placed will b
e fulfilled, or, if I’ll even like anything. I didn’t have a chance to feel any of the material, or even see the garments in person. I haven’t a clue as to the fit, either. I can almost guarantee that whatever I receive won’t measure up to thirty-five years of anticipation and nine straight hours of pure focus.
Nothing could.
April 20th
My last tweet on this debacle is featured on USA Today, CNN, and the Today show online. My Facebook post about it gets more than ten thousand likes, reaching an audience of five hundred thousand eyeballs. Oh, the irony of spending months trying to promote my books, only to land national coverage by freaking out over #LillyforTarget.
The news reports on how the website “almost crashed” which makes me think Target’s definition of “almost” differs greatly from my own.
BTW, it’s been radio silent on both TargetStyle’s twitter and Jason Goldberger’s. The only apology they’ve offered is that of being sorry that we were frustrated. The “I’m sorry you feel that way” nonsense is worse than no apology at all.
Despite the backlash, despite the pitchfork-wielding women who just wanted to pick up something pretty, despite the collective, utter waste of time and effort, the Target execs knew exactly what they were doing because they couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Target’s happy.
Lilly Pulitzer’s parent company’s stock skyrocketed today. The folks at Lilly corporate are happy. The eBay re-sellers? Well, they’re really happy selling items at a higher price than they’d get for Lilly proper.
The only losers are the devoted consumers, especially those of us who are plus-sized, or on a budget.
And I’m worried about the kid.
Did she get anything?
I hate how I lost perspective – and my mind – during this endeavor. I mean, I’m a fan of Lilly’s clothes, no denying that. I’ve wanted her dresses for a long time. But these are not the zenith of my existence. I’m mad that I allowed myself to be swept up in the whole fiasco. I’m sure there are weeks, nay, months, that I don’t think about Lilly.
[This time is called “winter.”]
I became obsessed and it’s my own damn fault.
Something good needs to come of this fiasco, all this stupid angst can’t be for naught.
I click back to that mother’s Facebook comment on Target’s page but I can’t locate it. However, after I’d read her post, I’d tracked down the woman’s personal page so I knew her name. I had been curious [read: was the nosiest Posey] and I wanted to see who this lady was. What prompted her to leave that kind of post?
What I’d found was a single mom who ran her ass off for the benefit of her family. Her posts were infrequent, but every one of them was a love letter to her kids. I feel like she should be recognized for caring, for having rallied on her daughter’s behalf.
I return to the mom’s personal Facebook page to see if she’s posted any status updates. She hasn’t. That’s troubling. I can’t tell if her daughter had any success and I’m worried. I can’t enjoy mine until I confirm she has hers.
Then I realize I’ve been waiting for Target to make this right when that’s not the solution at all. So I type out a private message on Facebook. And then I wait.
April 23rd
With that mother’s blessing, I pack up my all my best clothing that no longer fits to send to the daughter. Lots of pieces still have tags on them, too. I’d been storing a handful of special garments for years, like my favorite cashmere sweaters and the bejeweled skater dress I bought in London but never wore. While I do a charity purge twice yearly, I’d never been able to part with these few garments because I was waiting for the right time. Now I know that this is it. I’m so happy that someone will finally have the chance to love this stuff as much as I do.
In my Facebook message, I tell the mom to consign what she and her daughter don’t like, but she insists they’ll donate instead. They both want to pay it forward, too.
Right before I tape closed the boxes, I toss in one last thing – a strand of freshwater pearls. Every girl deserves to wear a piece of jewelry that makes her feel like anything’s possible.
I think of something Lilly once said as I seal it all up:
“If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”
Seven
High Times II, The Electric Boogaloo
“For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”
- Jane Austen
Seven years ago, Fletch and I went from renting the best house in a bad city neighborhood to owning the worst house on a pretty suburban street. Honestly, we didn’t care because we loved our place and the term “worst” is relative in a town like Lake Forest, about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Once I thought Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.”
[Kingdom Come Farm, the storied estate belonging to the woman on whom he based his character Daisy Buchanan, and who inspired him to pen The Great Gatsby, has since fallen into disrepair. The property is about to be razed and divided thirty ways to make way for single-story ranch houses. My feelings on this are mixed.]
What we learned owning the least desirable property in one square mile is that no one comes to greet you. We’d heard about suburban neighbors showing up at the door with cookies and baskets of wine to welcome the new folks, but that wasn’t our experience. In fact, we went years without meeting anyone.
Years.
That was fine – I wanted to live somewhere quiet with lots of room for our dogs, and if I had to drive back to the city to see friends, so be it.
Almost five years into our tenure here, I heard strange voices coming from my driveway. I stalked out of the kitchen, ready to yell at the trespassers – and threaten them with a shovel, if needed – because I clearly don’t have enough to do when I’m not on deadline.
Instead of a pack of marauding bandits, I found some neighbors. The couple had chased Argo, their errant Golden Lab, into the dense woods surrounding our front yard and couldn’t get him back.
Argo was close enough to see, but thanks to the all the undergrowth that had yet to be cleared, he wasn’t close enough to grab. They were trying everything in their power to coax him out – funny voices, little dances, threats and recriminations, followed immediately by heartfelt apologies – but to no avail.
I grabbed some treats from the house and, through teamwork, we convinced Argo to join us. The dog seemed sort of swanky and was immediately taken our off-brand of dog cookie, full of beaks and assholes. I bet Argo ate nothing but organic at home. We had a pleasant conversation and I was glad to have fought my initial instinct to shout at the nice people.
Their names were Brad and Angie Smith. [Fake names to keep from painting them with my eventual stupidity, because, inevitable.] While somewhat younger than us, they were cool, they were hip, and the best part was that they didn’t have kids.
Finding another childfree couple in the suburbs is like stumbling across a unicorn in the wild. You throw a chain around that shit and lock it down.
That’s why when Fletch and I discovered a heavy piece of monogrammed card-stock in our mailbox, inviting us for dinner, I insisted we go. He was surprised as I’m usually the one looking for any excuse to not have to put on pants.
His skepticism was palpable.
“Why do they want to meet us?” he asked.
“Probably because we live in the same neighborhood?” I replied.
“We had such a good streak going,” he said. “Five years with zero interaction with anyone.”
“You realize that’s a strange goal, right?” I asked.
“Yet it’s worked for us so far.”
Despite my overwhelming desire to fit in, that’s never quite happened here, largely because we’re childfree in a family-orientated community.
Our bigger stumbling block, though, is that we’re do-it-yourselfers in a town where everyone else simply “calls a
guy.” For the first few years here, we tried to be “call the guy” people, too, but it just wasn’t us. On any given Sunday, the fine folks of Lake Forest have seen us doing everything from re-grading the gravel on our driveway to tuck-pointing the bluestone on the front porch. Fletch is running the show, with me assisting, unless it’s a gardening project and then roles are reversed. That’s why Fletch was ready to despise Mr. and Mrs. Smith on principle.
They were “call the guy” people, he just knew it.
“I bet the husband doesn’t even own chainsaw pants,” Fletch huffed as we made our way to their house, carrying the only non-screw-top bottle of wine we had in our collection.
“They’re dogs-not-kids people,” I argued. They were on our team.
“A Lab is barely a dog. A Lab is a stuffed animal that shits outdoors.”
“Oh, yeah, I hate pets you don’t have to do up Hannibal Lecter-style just to take on a walk,” I said, referring to the multi-leash protocol I employ when walking Hambone.
[When Loki, our thousand-year-old, Shepherd-Husky-Let’s-Not-Kid-Ourselves-He’s-a-Wolf decided he was done being the Alpha, that created a power vacuum that neither of our idiot pit bulls knew how to fill. The girls, Libby and Hambone, scuffled and now they’re afraid of each other, so we’re working with a vet behaviorist to repair the relationship. We’re all Elsa and Anna up here as we move them separately from room to room and we take a lot of extra precautions that look, well, sort of crazy from the outside. My main strategy is to run the naughty out of them. While Hambone’s a superstar on-leash, better behaved than every dog in this ‘hood, I keep her extra-restrained, just in case.]
Then I told him, “If you don’t like the couple, if you’re not into them, tell them you have a migraine and we can excuse ourselves early.”
Surprisingly, we both fell profoundly in love with the Smiths during dinner, and at no point was Argo’s head not in Fletch’s lap. Brad and Angie were entertained by our antics, rather than horrified. They even seemed charmed at having to walk us home, Fletch because he was hammered and me because I fell over a doggie gate and sprained my ankle.
Stories I'd Tell in Bars Page 9