I began wearing an anklet when I'd outgrown little girl ankle socks and graduated to cheap mesh stockings in shades of a summer tan, worn over smooth legs. I went to Woolworths and used my allowance to buy my first anklet. My sister and I both wore them, copying one of our beloved aunts who wore a fancy one that had a tiny flower with a pearl in its center, with her name engraved on it.
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Accessories? I have never been into purses or shoes or hats or scarves. I have bought all those things, of course, but only as needed, not in a collecting kind of way.

However, in junior high school, I wore bows in my hair almost every day. My coiffure may not have been the angel hair of the song, but it certainly did flow. As shown in the Featured Image, my eighth grade class picture, I wore my hair with bangs, and the rest brushed straight back without a part. I had to tease it a little bit to keep it from falling to one side or the other. The bow fit nicely right into the space between the bangs going forward and the rest going back. They were pre-made bows of grosgrain ribbon, attached to a clip. Here is the best picture I could find of the back of a bow, showing how the clip was attached to it. I had them in every imaginable color so I could match whatever I was wearing. Often I had knee socks of the same color as the hair bow, but not always. Those were the days when I accessorized.

Since then, not so much. Over the years I have bought my fair share of jewelry, but I am not good at thinking about what I have in my wardrobe to go with it, so most of it ends up staying in the drawer.

After I got my ears pierced, in high school, I started buying lots of earrings. Not expensive ones, they were all of the five or ten dollar variety. I still have most of them, but I hardly ever wear them, because with all my hair they don’t show. When I do go to the trouble of finding earrings in my collection that go with an outfit, it’s just frustrating because nobody sees them.

I have had several beautiful opal rings, including one that was sort of an engagement ring, because opals are my favorite stones. There is a superstition that it is bad luck to wear opals if they are not your birthstone. They are the birthstone for October. My August birthstone is peridot which is an ugly shade of light green. Here is a peridot, so you can easily see why I would rather have an opal. However, every one of the opal rings I have worn has cracked or chipped and become unwearable, so perhaps that is the bad luck I incurred because I was not born in October.

Finally, I have a large collection of Jewish necklaces which I have acquired over the years. I’m not quite sure why I keep buying them. They are very beautiful, but the only time I wear any of them is when I go to temple or to some other Jewish event. But I have a special jewelry box just for them, so they don’t get tangled with all the other miscellaneous jewelry I have.

The only items of jewelry I treasure, and wear consistently, are my diamond ring (from my grandmother), my wedding ring which also has tiny diamonds in it (from my husband’s grandmother), and my Radcliffe ring. If I gave everything else away, it wouldn’t really matter.

I have never been much of a prankster. I don’t like having them played on me, usually don’t find them funny and am not creative in thinking them up. So this is a difficult prompt for me. I never created mischief on Halloween, or any other night, for that matter.

The closest I came was while working for Management Decision Systems in the early 1980s. They held an annual Christmas auction to benefit wonderful charities like the Globe Santa and Home for Little Wanderers, spreading Christmas cheer for needy children and had a great time doing it. The auctioneers dressed up in crazy ways and we all imbibed lots of alcohol. Creative things were auctioned off for large sums of money (we were young and all doing well, professionally. The flowing alcohol always kept the bidding going too).

I was friendly with another petite woman. We didn’t really look alike at all, except in stature and our dark hair, but clients sometimes mistook us for one another. We plotted up an auction item: dinner with the “DSS Twins” and did not reveal our identity to any one. Decision Support Systems were our major products.

As the auction approached there was much buzz about who those twins were. We didn’t let on until moments before our item came up for bid, when we changed into matching shirts and I combed my hair like Connie’s (the Featured photo, from 1982). Our item was announced and we came forward. We came to feel just a tiny bit like slaves felt in a slave auction, as people bid to have dinner with us while we were on display. I think we fetched a tidy sum and were happy that we had contributed to the overall success of the fundraising efforts. As best I can remember, who ever bought the dinner was so busy, that he never collected on his win (I’m sure it was a male high bidder)!

The next year, we upped our ante. This year, we offered to take a jacuzzi and home cook dinner with the DSS Twins (I had a large jacuzzi tub in my Back Bay condo). Of course, now everyone knew who the DSS Twins were, so Connie and I had T shirts made with our names, but wore each other’s shirts.

I think the offer to take a jacuzzi with us drove up the bidding and the item was won by the head of Tech Services, Jeff Stamen. I was quite friendly with him, but was still surprised by the amount he paid, though I don’t remember the sum now.

Again, busy schedules made it difficult to get us all together. I left the company before Jeff could collect, but stayed close to everyone involved. He did collect his dinner and soak, but not until 1985 and I was 8 months pregnant by the time of the reward (we cooked veal piccata, my speciality at the time) and couldn’t soak in the tub by that point, but of course, I do have photographic evidence of the evening, one month before my due date! I was a whale by that point. I eventually put on 42 pounds.

Dinner and jacuzzi with the “twins”. July 9, 1985

We all had a great time. We stayed in touch for a while, now occasionally even through Facebook. The next year, Management Decision Systems was sold to Information Resources, Inc., which was eventually swallowed up by Oracle.

I delivered David on August 20; 10 days late.

Perfection in a purse is an elusive pursuit I am afraid I will never achieve. For now, I have taken a vow. No new purses.
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