I saw a man recently, walking down the street, wearing something that looked like an antennae -- it was a wire coming from his back pocket and looped around one shoulder and then, at the top, it had some sort of protrusion (tall, skinny). I did a double-take as I drove by, mostly wondering if it he was some sort of telephone worker (not obvious by his clothes if he was) or if this was just his fashion statement. (Baggy jeans, ripped flannel shirt, antennae. (shrug) Maybe I'm just not up-to-date. It reminded me of a woman I saw when I was in L.A. -- I had parked the car and was walking back toward Tamar's (visions and revisions journal) apartment (at the time) and I saw a woman walking toward me with a leaf covering her nose. It was a big enough leaf to cover the whole nose, and she'd inverted it so that the skinny end was near her eyebrows and the wider section draped over her nose. I was a bit confounded as to why someone would wear a leaf (Tamar suggested as a suncreen, though I think Tamar was half-teasing). After reading all of the fashion, um, adventures of some of the characters in Brad's entries here, I began to think I'm just plain old boring in how I dress.

What freakish accessories have you seen someone wear or worn yourself? What freakish thing would you like to wear if you were brave enough to go out in public with it?

-- toni (toni@la-lagniappe.com), April 03, 2001

Answers

Hey, does my husband count?

I'm kidding...slightly. Okay, freakish accessories. I've worn some unusual things that have caused people to look askance. For one, there's my "evil eye" ring. It's a silver ring with an eyeball in the center. Creeps people out a bit, but hey, I like to make a statement.

Then there's my metallic royal blue leather Converse sneakers. Got a huge thumbs up MH who asked me where I got such weird shoes. BD proclaimed them "wild." They were extremely distracting in the room, however. If I put my feet up on the table, the writers would become transfixed with them, go slackjawed and we'd forget why we were there.

I'm going to have to come back and thing of other things I've seen people wear.

-- Brad (javagirl@scriptbrads.tv), April 03, 2001.

On a recent visit to LA, I hopped on the bus that took me from the terminal to the Avis location and was followed on by a German couple. They didn't have to speak for me to know they were German because the wife (or "frau" as they say over there) was wearing socks with sandles. That in itself is fairly common for those of the German persuasion, but in this case, I sat toward the back of the bus, one of those two-level types, and she climbed to the upper tier so her feet were at my eye level.

Well, I tried not to look at them. I'm not that fond of feet to begin with and for some reason sandles freak me out. But I happened to glance over at her and noticed that just above her knees, her legs were ringed by thick bright white lumps approximately two inches across.

I had to stare.

And then I realized what they were. It was not socks she was wearing, but thigh-high stockings, the kind with the elastic at the top and she was wearing them with white transparent crepe pants. Euwww.

Didn't she look in the mirror before she left the house that morning? And if she did, did she look down at those legs and say, "Now THAT'S a goo look!"

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), July 06, 2001.

Excuse me. That time it was MY fault. It should have read "good look," not "goo look."

-- Reginald Squirrel (rsquirrels@prodigy.net), July 06, 2001.