What I Wore: A silk beige diagonally checkered shirt that my mother bought when she was 16 from the Beverly Hills General Store [if my mother and I were both 16 at the same time we would have been best friends] and a brown Armani tweed skirt that I have never worn because it is high-waisted and way too big for the only part of my body that is truly tiny, but luckily I was in New York where there are three tailors on every block, one of which was able to pin it for me so that it added two creases that looked as if they were meant to be, and brown Ralph Lauren heels that make me feel confident because the struggle to find the second shoe amongst the insane amount of boxes at the Union Square DSW to this day still makes me feel triumphant.
The Occasion: Opening Night of the second of a rotating cast of “Love, Loss and What I Wore,” an off-Broadway play my two aunts, Nora and Delia Ephron, wrote together. Since the play is all about clothes, I knew I had to dress the part, despite getting off an airplane two hours before the curtain. I packed my best Mad Men inspired outfit freshly pressed so the suitcase could do minimal harm.
The Other Occasion: I had not seen my two best girl friends from college for over a year and of course we all showed up in the best of the best of our wardrobes that now sadly exist on different coasts. I made sure to fill the rest of my suitcase with all my ‘Hope would love this’s and ‘Hannah would have told me to buy this’s. A colorful, heavy and squished suitcase resulted.
The bonus: The play is great: witty, funny, completely relatable. I felt as though I personally knew all the New York women in the audience since we all laughed at the same stories. We all remember our lives based on the clothes we were wearing while it happened.
The added bonus: at the opening night party we were sitting way too far from the kitchen so every hors d'oeurves platter showed up completely lacking. Luckily for us, the manager came our way and asked how we were. Hungry, we replied. And within moments fresh trays came out non-stop for the next fifteen minutes and before we knew it we had consumed a three-course meal worth of hors d’oeurves, somehow. Hannah looked at me knowingly, “It’s because we’re dressed well.” Our well-fed stomachs agreed.