Pot of Gold at the end of the rainbow.

Happy Gay Pride ya'll. Get into hoodrat stuff with your friends, drink gallons of fruity bullshit in a glass, dance your ass off to terrible music, and wake up in a gutter full of glittery puke.

I love you 4evs.
Betsy

One Ups to my pops.

This is a photo of my dad from last Christmas when my sister and I were home. I know I can always count on her for doing shit like taking photographs with her phone because in my mind, I am still using a rotary phone, checking my pager, and using a dot matrix printer.

This past Sunday was father's day, and I failed to call my old man, so I decided that I would dedicate this blog post to how awesome my dad is, and how much more awesome he is than your dad. SUCK IT EVERYONE ELSE'S DAD!!! I'm J/K you guys. Dads are awesome for reals.

My parents are both nerds, but differently. While my mom was reading us Mythology books, and learning us real good about the Civil War, my dad was indulging OUR inner nerd and letting us chillax with all of his dinosaur books. My favorite book was the one that, through pages and pages of awesome illustrations, mapped out the evolution of beasts that once roamed the planet, and it looks a little like this. AWESOME!!! I still love that book's greasy guts. My sister and I were encouraged by our dad to embrace our nerdiness, and even though it took a while for us to realize that we're still way cooler and more interesting than most girls we know, we're not afraid now to let the nerd flag fly. Just this afternoon, I was meeting with some friends about a gallery project I'm going to be working on, and we were eating this backyard smoked jerky, and I was all, "This looks like that shit Luke was eating when he crashed into the Dagobah swamp." What? Nerd. Alert.

My dad's accomplishments with his children are many, and they include, letting us listen to hilariously tragic folk music which, as a young Gaga in training, I loved. He taught us about music, taught me how to play guitar, taught us about the badasses of science fiction cinema and literature, and ultimately, these few things taught us how to roll with any kind of person we came in contact with which, as I have found in most every place I find myself these days, is an amazingly valuable skill. Talking to everyone and making them feel like you're actually paying attention to their boring asses at their boring ass parties is a skill I can attribute to my father. THANKS DAD for teaching me how to transport my mind to another dimension while looking like I'm totally interested! It's harder than you all think. J/K. It's totally E-Z! Watch for it the next time you're boring me.

My dad also, as I am sure most girl's fathers did, stuck it out through my annoying Tori Amos and dirty rock chick phases. He handled it when I turned thirteen and felt like leveling every building I walked into and out of. If I could give you an image of what it was like inside of my head when I was thirteen-eighteen, I would say, just pick any image of any explosion from ANY Die Hard movie, and there you have it kids. Shit was gittin' oh so real up in there. I was in my room constantly playing Siamese Dream over and over again, marrying Billy Corgan in my mind, lighting black candles and pretending to call the corners. Shit, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was written FOR ME! I was the queen of mopey shit and writing in my diary about boys. It was just one episode of My So Called Life after another. I was like, so totally Angela Chase minus Jared Catalano, and that dead angel chick.

The best part about parents, and I imagine the best part about being a parent, is that your renegade asshole teenagers will one day grow up to be intelligent well-spoken humans who make all the years of teenage fuckery worth it. I may still listen to Tori Amos when I'm alone, and I may have a "moment" everytime I'm in a car and "1979" comes on, but let's never do any of that again please.

My dad is awesome on so many levels and whenever I am home, and we get into serious conversations about anything, nerdy or otherwise, it makes me proud to tell people about my family, or have them meet my family.

I hope you had the bomb Father's Day dad, and I hope you did some grillaxing and some drinking of fine single malts. Thanks for reading my blog, and for supporting every avenue I have pursued in my young life. I appreciate having you as my dad errrrryday of my lifes!

XOXO
Betsy

Finna get my chappeau.

I work with a woman who is like my drunk Chicago mom. She's told me before that she's my Chicago mom, and while she sort of is, she absolutely is not. She is like my older drunk Chicago friend. You can never have too many!!! Maybe you're already wondering where the effzo I'm heading with these rather vague statements. Patience precious, I'll elaborate. My drunk Chicago mom is cleaning out her house, and she is unloading her collection of awesome hats from the 40s, 50s, and 60s on me. Every day when I come in to work, there's a new one for me. It's like Christmas. She also praises every crazy outfit I wear and tells me we were separated at birth. These are lifestyle affirming compliments, and I appreciate every last one of them.

The more hats I get, the more excited I am to wear them, and then I start thinking about all the opportunities women have to express themselves through their clothing. Ladies be shuffling down the street looking a mess with their Crocs and pajama jeans on, and wonder why they can feel my side eye from miles away??? It makes me wish that my friend Kevin and I would have really gone 100% on our show entitled, "WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?!?" Only I would have added "THEFUCK!?" I'm not saying that everyone has to walk out the door looking like Betty Draper...oh wait, that's exactly what I'm saying. Every day and every where you go is an opportunity for an outfit. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a ballerina because I was obsessed with the Nutcracker and the outfits were AWWWWEEEESSSSSOOOOOMMMMEEEEEE and not because I gave a shit about having some greasy queen in spandex flip me around the stage.

Ladies and gents have been wearing and making hats as fashion and function for centuries, and while I understand that I'm not going to persuade any women to look like they give a shred of a shit about their appearance through the medium of le BLOG, I like to think that I maybe I can. THROUGH DOING!

I've been in love with the work of Philip Treacy since I learned who Isabella Blow was. He custom designed all of her hats and if no one cared who she was as a person or what she did, we all cared and knew her for her outrageous style, and her ability to literally wear anything and still make it look like it was meant to be worn exactly like she did.


What made her powerful was that she wasn't afraid to make fashion choices that may have felt ridiculous or ugly to everyone else, and what made her vulnerable was that she wanted so desperately to fit in, that she would do anything for attention. We can talk all about her tragic life and end of said life when we're playing Mall Madness in my room later. In the meantime, let's talk about this: I believe the purpose of fashion is to scare the shit out of every person you pass on the street, but also, to stir up a maestrom of jealously because secretly, when they're at home looking through their closets of polos and Tori Burch flip flops, they wish they had something, anything, that would make people look at them the way they just looked at you.

My collection of ridiculous hats pales in comparison to Ms. Blow's, however, now that it is growing ever so rapidly, I feel the overwhelming need to kick things up a notch. BAM! I now belong to the school of silly hats. We've all accepted that our lives are far less formal day to day than they were fourty years ago, but that doesn't mean that we have to call that whole idea a bitch and keep dressing like slobbering idiots. The art of dressing doesn't have to sound so formal and academic if you just take a look at what you're putting on, and then think about what it looks like when you walk down the street, into your job, to a party, to the bar, to buy drugs from your dealer, the list could go on FORRRRRRREEEEEEVVVEEERRRRRRRR, but you get the jist. People are looking at you because you look like the bum on the corner of Rush and Walton who is wearing fifteen pairs of sweatpants rolled up to his balls. No. He. Didn't. Ohyeshedid.

I direct my criticisms towards men yes, but I will come down hard on women also. We've come a long way baby(Thanks Virginia Slims), and I know that we can all wear pants and work corporate jobs, and fly our asses around the cuntry in our G5s, but let's get serious. You're still a woman. Your feminine charm should be exploited at all costs!!! No one's going to take you more seriously because you wear a power suit to work(unless it looks like this) Don't take it over the edge and dress like the hot ho on the stroll either. Together we can find a happy medium where we can look feminine, have the best job, make more money than our male counterparts, and not look like we're giving $5 blowjobs in the breakroom(I mean, if that's part of your five year plan on your way to the top, then by all means, get.it).

After much rambling(I've had a distracting weekend) and gnashing of teeth, my point to all of this is that you shouldn't be afraid to dress up in public. Dress yourself like it is a lost artform, and you're one of the pioneers that has been given the task to bring back the excitement and drama that can come with. You shouldn't be afraid to dress well or even a little eccentrically because at the end of the day, you are not afraid, and everyone else is trapped in the closet. If you live in an accessories closet like I do, just roll around on the floor until something sticks, and then leave the house! Living in an ethnic neighborhood also helps. People are not afraid to roll their windows down and yell, "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT??!?!?!?!?!" I only speak from personal experience.

It'll be funnier next time I promise.
XOXO
Betsy

p.s. Here's a Philip Treacy retrospective
p.p.s. Here's a coupla bitches I'd like to know/dress like