I have two events this summer, one, the wedding of my cousin Holly and two, the 50th wedding anniversary party for my parents. The Great Dress Search of 2007 commenced today with visits to downtown boutiques and a schlump around the Fashion Square (that’s the name of our mall! Isn’t that a hoot?!) to see what I could find.

Fortunately, I found enough I didn’t hate to actually do some trying on. Fortunately, dresses are back in style and ’round these parts, it’s Foxfield season so sundresses are plentiful. Right off the bat I pulled a stack of seven frocks and tried them out. I have this intense sense of dread upon entering dressing rooms. The lighting is always bad, the pressure’s always on and because I rarely have the foresight to wear the perfect undergarments for trying on clothes, the result is often, well . . . disappointing.

If I were all about self humiliation, I thought, standing facing the three-way mirror of doom, I would have toted along the digi-cam and shared the results with y’all. You could then help me decide among:

• The brown and blue smokin’ hot halter dress (with matching cardigan so it’s church appropriate)
• The surprisingly sexy dress that looked like a mumu on the hanger but good on the bod (also blue and brown)
• The red and pink polkadot wrap dress (ruffled straps; too girly?)
• The brown and carmel patterned wrap dress (too seventies?)
• The turquoise print with matching beaded cardigan that almost didn’t make it into the dressing room but looked pretty good on
• The brown patterned skirt with the brown twinset
• The floral skirt with the pink twinset

This is not even a complete list of everything I tried on. I took home the skirts and twinsets and they’ll be worn to something — one to the anniversary party, most likely. I’m still undecided on the dress, though. The shops closed before I could go back and commit to one of the dresses I liked so the voting is open on that one.

The events aren’t until June so I know I have some time but May will be super busy and I know before I know it, June will be here.

For the past six months I’ve been heavily involved in working on a project that will launch this Thursday.

The Voices of Poverty project is a podcast series that will be kicked off, as the linked press release above details, at a press conference at the downtown library Thursday morning at 10a.m. If anyone is interested in attending and learning more about the project, please do; your support would be greatly appreciated.  

Thursday and after — for the four weeks the series will be initially broadcast online (the site and the podcasts will remain live for several years) — please share the site www.voicesofpoverty.org with friends in the community, and others who may find it of interest. The project team is also interested in your feedback, either directly to me or via comments on the site.

I’m incredibly proud of the team that pulled this project together and moved by the glimpses into our impoverished population we were able to capture. I hope you will be as well.

I was such a weird kid, I used to love watching 60 Minutes on Sunday night. Morley Safer has been a correspondant on that show since a month before my birth and man, I’m old.

So when Robin provided the inspiration for the interview meme, I was invited to interview a few folks. Raquita has responded to her questions with a very interesting take to question 5a. Sarah also played along and with her answer to number four, I think we’ll have to keep an eye on her career path!

A couple more people have signed up for the 60 Minutes treatment so stay tuned!

Darling, dear Robin aka Poppy Mom invited interviewees, and I accepted. Hence, Robin gets all Katie Couric on me:

1. I was never 100% clear on what prompted your move from St. Louis to Charlottesville. Explain.

My husband is a computer programmer who was working on a government contracted project in O’Fallon, Ill. The project was cancelled and the jobs were going away. The company he works for wisely decided they wanted to keep him (genius with an overdeveloped work ethic that he is)and so sent him hither and yon for interviews within the industry. The best offer? The best place to live in the United States, an offer we couldn’t refuse. Plus, he had long wanted to live somewhere we had chosen — St. Louis was home because his parents and grandparents live there — we didn’t get to “pick” it.

Further, I’d been working in my chosen field since 1997. Mark was just spreading his wings and honestly, I felt that it was his turn to follow his career dreams. I was extremely fortunate to not have to sacrifice mine in the process.

2. You freelance write from home. How did that come about?

Actually, I have a full time work from home position with a public relations firm in St. Louis. I telecommute five full days a week (and sneak in work on the weekends when I’m really cranking.) I travel to the ‘Lou about nine times a year for valuable face time with clients and colleagues. The freelancing is extra. I started freelancing in 2002 with this piece for The Commonspace. After that, I was like a house afire and started freelancing all over the place. Eventually I ended up with the Shop Talk column (then blog) for www.stltoday.com and a few features about shopping for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Tearing off a piece of my heart, I gave these up when we moved. In Charlottesville I have written for Albemarle Family magazine but beyond that my freelance writing time is consumed with blogging and other local projects.

3. Have you done any more experiments with veganism?

Oh, dear, no. The boy and I still talk about it though. It has given us great appreciation for those who live with restricted diets. It was also something we did together; a rarity with teenagers. I find it much easier to go vegetarian for periods of time but generally, we’re sticking with our animal friends as ingredients of delicious meals. Except for Clover (too smelly).

4. Next time you’re in St. Louis, will you let me take you to lunch? If so, where?

That would be spectacular and I’ll go anywhere I can get a bit o’ provel on my salad.

5. What do you miss most about the Lou’?

My friends (sob). There are so many people I love in St. Louis and not enough time in my brief visits to see them all. Besides that, in order, the food, the architecture and the big city characteristics I took for granted when I lived there.

Now it’s someone else’s turn to play if they wish: Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.” I will respond by asking you five questions in the comments here on this post so check back here. I get to pick the questions. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

When I went to my high school prom my junior year, two girls who were widely known as best friends, donned tuxes and went together. It was some time before the reality of that situation dawned on me. In fact, I remembered admiring their formalwear in a year when hoop skirts and rattails were popular simultaneously. Not at all the hoop skirt types, they looked good, and comfortable.

So when CNN ran this story today I thought of those girls. I also thought of the openly GLBT teens in high school and college my kids and I have known. How wonderful that we’ve seemingly made progress including kids who are “different.” (Seemingly, because I’m not naive enough to believe that these kids are accepted or treated fairly everywhere. Progress, yes. Across the board? Not yet.)

A fellow student was quoted as saying, “We live in a generation now where dudes are chicks and chicks are dudes.” Indeed.

People will certainly raise a fuss over the prom king; it gives me hope to know there’s a kid out there who was not afraid to have that tough conversation with parents and friends, and to live her life openly. 

As a kind of working mother/blogger penance, I am reading Mommy Wars by Leslie Morgan Steiner. I’m penitent over a blogging outburst I had almost two weeks ago now that unleashed some battling between stay-at-home moms and working mothers. It wasn’t at all my intent to stoke that fire, but I did. I also broke a rule of my own, and blogged political, something I promised myself I would not do.

My penance is proving thought provoking. Some dots to consider:

• Apparently, the working mother guilt and stigma is a white chick thing. African Americans, in particular, as one essayist mentioned in the book, do not have the same issue/s in their culture.
• You will never, ever see a book titled Daddy Wars.
• We mothers are terribly judgemental beings (of ourselves and others.)
• If you’re going to maintain a friendship with one of the others (a SAHM if you’re a working mom; a working mom if you’re a SAHM, a WAHM if . . . oh, you get it) there has to be an agreement to box up the angst, judgement, guilt, passive-aggressiveness, etc. and put it on a shelf.
• Remember we’re all going to laugh at this when we’re grandmothers.

Spam damners.

I’m getting heavily spammed as a result of my lax comment rules. Because of that, several of you have commented of late and your comments have not shown up at all. I think I’ve managed to post the comments that were in the queue (the ones not trying to provide me with prescription medication or hair growth methods).

For now I’ve disabled comments until I can get this fixed. Sorry! You know I love to hear from you (even you’re telling me how annoyed you are with me).

So if there’s something you have to say, e-mail me at marijean dot jaggers at gmail dot com

Inner dialog:

I thought you weren’t going to write about them anymore because of last time when you mistakenly thought no one read your blog.

What? Oh, yeah I guess so, but it’s not like I’m writing anything bad.

But you didn’t write anything bad last time either and remember, you ended up sending Amanda that long whiny e-mail when you thought you would be ousted?

Yeah, but she sent me a lovely gift so that didn’t work out too badly now, did it? I love Amanda. But anyway, I just wanted to write about how much I’m enjoying the Book Club. We met last night and had some delicious food including something called “Man Salad” and got to see a lovely house. Oh, and we discussed the book and several possibilities for the next book. I had a really good time and I really like everyone.

OK, now you’re just sucking up.

Am not. Anyway, I do like the people and the books — we’re reading Nabokov next, about which there was much discussion and a pretty close vote. I still don’t think they read the blog, either; that was just a fluke. Although . . . now that I think of it, everytime I meet someone new in the group, I introduce myself and they say, “Oh, the blogger.” Last night I was accused of having a tape recorder in my pocket.

Silly readers. Don’t they know you use a digital recorder?

In Charlottesville, the massacre that took place today on the Virginia Tech campus is heavily on our minds tonight. For the St. Louis audience, Blacksburg is about 2.5 hours away from here. Our community is full of VT grads and parents of students currently enrolled at the school. We’re glued to CNN tonight, trying to make sense of it, trying to understand what happened today.

It’s hard to know what to tell kids when these kinds of tragedies occur. The boy knew all about it before he got home from school. A junior in high school, many of his classmates have friends and relatives at VT. The girl watched CNN for awhile, by my side, trying with me to grasp what could have, what did, happen.

I’m watching the press conference with a critical eye, both feeling terribly sorry for the police chief and the university president to be in this position yet wondering why they are so clearly unprepared to address this crisis situation.

This tragedy will extend so far beyond the school and the state.

Our hearts go out to the families and the entire community.