Mirrorless dressing rooms

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, should I buy this dress? What's your call?

Cricket, cricket.

Oh, right. There's no mirror in here. Not even a fat or funhouse mirror.

Question, crappy clothing store: When you don’t outfit your dressing room with a mirror, are you trying to be merciful, preventing me from seeing muffin top, camel toe, or uniboob? Methinks not.

I think you have something more insidious in mind.

Here I am, stuck in the crawlspace of a dressing room, shimmying into some garment. Call me crazy, but if I miraculously manage to zip, hook, and button everything, I’d like to see what I look like in it. But if I slink out to eyeball the damage, sycophantic sales associates pounce on me, doing their best to convince me that the sausage casing look is the new black.

Yeah, no.

To be fair, there might be other reasons you decided to trick out your boutique or store with closets instead of dressing rooms. You might have broken your last mirror and are only two years into your seven years of bad luck. Maybe you're Medusa and want to make sure no one has a reflective surface when you're trying to turn them to stone. You might just be cheap.

But I think the most likely reason that the mirror has no places is that you’re trying to be wily, flushing me out of the retail brush so you can get me in your sights and kill me with false compliments.

It's time to fight back. The pacifist's way of getting even would be to just boycott your boutique. But where's the fun in that? I think I should call upon the evil queen from Snow White, who knows a thing or two about the power of reflection. She can offer you up some shiny poison apples. Better yet, she can turn you into a wizened old witch in a bad dress and hair desperately in need of conditioner. You will be resigned to a lifetime of looking like ass, and you won't be able to fix it, since mirrors seem to be nonexistent in your world. Reflect on that.

(photo: marys-view.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html)