Friday 25 June 2010

Mermaids & Lingerie

Went to Westfield today, which basically took the whole day (poor D-Bubz!)  Anyway, I bought up most of the stock on offer, including a visit to Rigby & Peller who are currently having a sale.  I have always coveted their undies, in particular that kind of scaffolding-like corsetry that Gok Wan loves to squeeze his banger-tastic ladies into on his makeover show.

So I found myself a couple of cheeky little numbers (a few stages down from the actual scaffolding, thank christ) going for a vastly reduced price, and waited with an increasingly irritated baby for the salesgirl to get off the phone (no-one else visits without arranging a fitting, apparently) and give me the damn bras before I got even sweatier contemplating my overdraft and left.

Eventually she was done, and I thought I'd better ask, notorious as I am for changing my mind, if they were returnable.  Looking like she was about to burst into tears at the very notion of that kind of thing, she shook her head sadly and mumbled something about exchanging.  "Well that's OK then" I said, "I can come and change them for something else if they're no good".  At this, she looked even more sorrowful.  "No exchanges either.  If you buy it, you can't exchange or refund".  It was a bit like the scene at the end of Splash where Tom Hanks is getting all excited thinking he can go and become a merman and live with Daryl Hannah but still come back and visit his fun brother John Candy in the holidays, and she's shaking her head no, no because he can't ever come back, not ever, it's either/or (presumably the tail would be a hindrance).

So, it got me thinking.  Do mermaids, specifically New York-based ones, wear underwear?  No, SATC impresh over, it didn't.  But it did make me think about Splash, one of the best 80s films featuring a crimped mermaid ever.  In fact, THE best.  I watched that film so many times as a pre-teen that I was single-handedly responsible for destroying my mum's VHS video player.  I even memorised the lyrics to the song at the end, recorded it onto cassette so I could listen to it anytime (its a terrible dirge, btw, called 'One Fine Day'), and spent many hours squinting into the sea-bed at the end deciding I could definitely see Mermaid City in the distance.  Never mind that these days, Daryl Hannah is more often to be found smoking a zoot up a tree than being a fish, just as Tom Hanks spends much more time being jowly and unmasking dastardly religious cover-ups while being pursued by crazy monks, than he does running around Cape Cod trying to drown himself and yelling "Madison!"  Which pretty much sums up how wrong its all gone since then.....ah 1984, you weren't sinister at all.