(2) The Circle Skirt
Remember that lovely red tiramisu dress I made to wear at Christmas but never wore at Christmas and instead wore at Têt? Yeah, that dress. It got fairly regular rotation for work, especially during Melbourne’s long, hot summer.
Long, hot summer sounds nice, but trust me, it wasn’t. It was too hot for too long.
Anyway, I made the circle skirt of the tiramisu dress slightly less than a circle. The fullness was just a bit too much for my tastes (on me; looks all kinds of lovely on oodles of folks). The circle skirt is quite good at allowing me to leap stairs three at a time, run for trams and twirl and swish. Because twirling and swishing is one of the key requirements of my job (this last might not actually be true).
After one long, hot Melbourne day, I was standing at a tram stop, unsurprisingly, waiting for a tram.
Melbourne’s streets are laid out on a grid, and the streets are long. As a matter of interest, I actually live on one end of a street, and work pretty much at the other end of the street. It’s just that the street is about 7kms long. Seriously. A grid layout is certainly organised, and neat , and easy to understand. But it also creates wind tunnels. Long wind tunnels.
There I was standing at the tram stop, thinking, thank goodness for that cooler breeze and when on earth is this tram going to arrive, I’m hungry and want to be home already.
As an aside, if anyone ever invents a teleporter, will there be peak times when everyone is trying to move their broken up particles through the air? Well our particles crash on the way to work or home again? What if they crash and get stuck? Could I be reassembled at the other end with someone else’s particles, or missing particles? How would I get reunited with my particles? Are these less than tractable problems the reason no one has invented a teleporter?
So, yes, nice cool breeze. Most welcome. Looking forward to a cool change. Near me was a young woman, also (unsurprisingly) waiting for the tram. Surprisingly, she spoke to me. (I talk to strangers all the time, but they rarely start talking to me. Most only talk to me under sufferance.)
She said,”Excuse me?”
(She actually had to say this more than once because I was stuck inside my head, trying to remember the contents of my fridge and pantry, and trying to visualise chopped veggies, persuading them to chop themselves while I was travelling home. You know what the self help books say, visualise your goal and you will achieve).
I said (because I am very articulate):, “Hmm?”
She said,”Um, your skirt,” and made an upwards waving gesture, “It’s um, it’s kinda, um.”
Now, you may be thinking that she was just so impressed by the beauty of my me-made dress that she was rendered wordless. The reality was, however, that she was so embarrassed for me, poor dear, that she couldn’t even say,”you’ve been flashing all of peak traffic Melbourne for the last few minutes while contemplating the contents of your fridge and pantry or whatever it was that you were doing when you stood there looking so spaced out.”
To which I would have said, “how did you know I was thinking about my fridge and pantry?”
Instead I said, “Good lord! Sorry ’bout that,” and held my skirt down.
I wasn’t terribly embarrassed. Lucky for me, I am not the easily embarrassed sort, otherwise my days endless rounds of blushing and retreat from the world.
So the circle skirt might permit me to run and leap and twirl. But by doing so, it also enables me to display my lovely underwear to the world.
In case you are wondering, I was wearing matching red smalls. The end.


