alliecat8 | I feel pretty, oh so pretty!

It's Pilgrimage time again, y'all. For those of you who are new and don't know what this is, it's a two-week time for tourists to visit all of our antebellum mansions. My town and Natchez are the only two towns in Mississippi that didn't get pillaged and burned in the ~~War of Northern Aggression~~ Civil War, and so we have a beautiful and vivid showcase of genteel Southern life back in the olden days (we ignore the not-so-genteel parts, of course). The owners of the mansions ask certain people to be "hostesses," and each hostess gives a tour of a certain part of the house. I'm a hostess for Miz Gracie (you'll hear me talk about Miz Gracie a lot - she's quite a character!). The really *ahem* fun part is that we all dress up in period costumes. I've worked for Miz Gracie for ten years and I'd always borrowed one of her dresses, but I finally realized that I'm going to be doing this for years to come and since I didn't really like my borrowed dress anyway (it was a replica of Scarlett O'Hara's "curtain" dress), I decided to buy my own. It looks like this:

It's super-flattering because of the way the bodice is cut, and the steel "boning" in the corset. It holds everything in (tight!) except for my boobs, which show off my cleavage, lol! It also looks nice with my strawberry-blonde hair and really fair skin...I don't mean to brag, sorry, I'm just proud of it!

Anyhow, I hostess one of the bedrooms and the other bedroom hostesses are brunettes, and when a group of people who were touring the house went back downstairs Miz Gracie asked them, jokingly, if anybody'd found a bed they wanted. One man spoke up and said "I'll take the redhead!" I'm still LOL-ing about that! I feel like I haven't had a man look at me as pretty or sexy for almost 20 years, so that made my day!

Later I decided to be funny so I dropped in on Thing 1, who lives just around the corner from Miz Gracie. I was in my full "glory" in my dress and pearls and gently curled hair, and when he opened the door his eyes literally popped open and he said, "WHAT THE FREAK ARE YOU DOING?" Then his girlfriend came to the door and said, "Wow, that's pretty, but what ARE you doing?" I said that I wanted to show her what a flake Thing 1's mother is, and she said (affectionately) that she already knew. Then Thing 1 remembered Pilgrimage and figured out what I was up to. He has one of our cats and I wanted to see him, so the girlfriend got him and he freaked out - he was terrified of the dress! I said, "You're neurotic, you know that?" Thing 1 answered for him: "Hey, you're the one wearing the scary dress!" Then girlfriend and Thing 1 helped me stuff all the layers of crinoline and hoops into my SUV so I could drive home.

Sometimes it's fun being a flake. ;)