When I was growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Loehmann’s was synonymous with Death.
Giant, brightly lit stores, filled with hideous mother-of-the-bride dresses, Loehmann’s was a glue trap for the crotchety. Everywhere you looked, elderly women with carrot-colored hair clawed through piles of beaded formals, tried dresses on right over their clothes and eyed each other’s finds with a mixture of jealousy and contempt.
My mother loved Loehmann’s, but as a pouting, teen-aged, overweight drama student, this was clearly not my scene. I only accompanied her when I absolutely could not get out of it, rolling my eyes while she tried on anything metallic with shoulder pads in it. Truly, she was Alexis Carrington on a fixed income.
So when she called me earlier this year and started telling me how she and my sister Amber had gone the week before, and about how much “Loehmann’s has changed”, I instantly began formulating an excuse.
But then she said something that stopped me in my tracks.
“You know, they have Theory there.”
This was strange for two reasons.
One, Theory is a very good brand, and it has no business being at Loehmann’s.
And two, it would be completely off my mother’s radar if she hadn’t actually seen it there. If my mother was lying to get me to go to Loehmann’s, she’d probably tell me they had culottes.
Like most things my mother tells me, this required back-up. I immediately called Amber for confirmation.
Amazingly, she assured me that there were many good brands there, and she had found some things she liked a lot. I think you can imagine how excited my mother was when I told her I’d pick her up Thursday.
The first trip was life-changing. Not only did I see Theory, I saw D & G, Norma Kamali, Donna Karan, True Religion, Phillipe Adec, Moschino, Armani and on and on and on.
Now, I’ve never really been a clothes horse, but that’s got a lot to do with the fact that I was fat my whole life. As of this writing, I am 3 pounds from my goal weight, and clothes have a whole new fascination for me.
For hours I carried armloads of clothes into the giant, communal dressing room, trying on anything and everything that interested me. I had no idea what I wanted, just that I wanted. And while I loved the clothes I bought, nothing was as satisfying as seeing my exhausted mother leaning against a display, rolling her eyes.
Several months later, I was driving home by way of La Cienega. I had driven this route hundreds of times, but it was only this day that I realized there was a Loehmann’s there, less than a mile from my house. And not just any Loehmann’s: a two story Loehmann’s with its own parking garage! I vowed it would be mine.
Shopping at Loehmann’s is not a passive thing. Woman stare when you take something off the rack, sometimes grouping themselves around you, waiting for you to put it back. It’s not unlike the way Sully looks at me when I’m eating. My mother once dropped a black sweater while we were shopping, and when she turned around to get it, someone had already grabbed it and disappeared.
Yesterday, I decided to brave it and I drove down there. I knew it would be dicey so close to the holidays, and I suspected there would be some bad manners on display. But John and I are going away on Friday, and I wanted to make sure I had something to wear on New Year’s Eve.
It didn’t take long.
While I was waiting in line to get my ticket to get into the garage, I noticed a very small parking space right by the door. It was pretty prime. As I inched up, I looked at the ground, and saw that the word “COMPACT” was painted in the space. Seeing as I drive a Mini, I decided that was my spot.
As soon as the guard arm lifted, I made a very hard left and parked in that little spot. As I got out of the car, I heard someone yelling at me in a very thick Russian accent.
“MEEESS! MEEESS!”
I turn around and there’s an ancient hag in a Buick, about three cars down the line to get her parking ticket. She has her window rolled down, and she’s gesturing wildly at me.
“Yes?” I say.
“Do you working here?”, she yells.
“No,” I say, and start to walk into the store.
“Then why you parking there?”
I stop, totally confused.
“What?”
“That space is only for people who is working here. You no working here, you can’t parking there.”
Is she right?
I go back and look at the space. There’s nothing on the wall. There’s nothing on the ground. I walk to the back of the car to make sure I read it correctly, and there on the ground it says, “COMPACT”.
“No,” I say, “it’s not reserved.”
“Yes it is! It say right there, RESERVE.”
“No,” I say, getting irritated, “it says COMPACT. It’s in English so that could be why you’re having some trouble.”
“No, it say RESERVE! I see!”, and she continues pointing to the ground.
“Lady,” I say, “RESERVED doesn’t start with the letter C!”
Not getting what she wanted, she started to attempt to engage other people in their cars.
“Look, she is not working here but she is parking in that spot!”
At this point I figure there are two ways to fix it. I can either pull her out of her car and beat her with her antenna, or I can get a ruling from an employee.
Opting for the Ghandi approach, I walk all the way to the opposite end of the garage to find the cashier’s booth. The whole time I could hear her yelling from her car.
I approach the cashier and ask if I can park in that spot. He looks over at the car, then at me, and says, “I don’t care.”
I tried looking for her in Loehmann’s, but they all look like her in there.
19 responses so far ↓
1 Knavish Rogue // Dec 16, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Oh man. I just love the bad people exhibiting bad behavior. That ranks right up there with the mechanic who wouldn’t check the car because the engine light wasn’t on and as April drove out onto the street, the engine light comes on. My other favorite was people insisting they were calling who they were calling and not April’s house and car.
2 jj // Dec 16, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I also love the fact that the had in the Buick was not even in the lot yet, and that she attempted to engage others in line to rally to her side – like they give a big holiday shit.
Hope you found a faboo new year’s ensemble, and hope your holidays are great!
ho freakin ho,
jj
3 jj // Dec 16, 2007 at 4:12 pm
“hag”…not “had”
4 haineux // Dec 16, 2007 at 4:20 pm
(The following is a flip, offhand comment full of exaggerated generalizations. You can object to my broad strokes if you like, but I’m not going to spend a week making it PC. Deal or no deal.)
Apparently one thing that happens to some brands is that they get such loyal customers that it comes to pass that they get to be preferred exclusively by old people. And old people are often stingy, and sometimes die before they spend money on the brands in question.
That’s what (mostly) happened to Oldsmobile, and might or might not happen to Buick. Sure, zillions of retirees in Florida drive Buicks. Buicks from 1985. That have 14,000 miles on them. The people in charge of the brand, therefore, are trying to change their demographic, so that someone actually BUYS a Buick. Tiger Woods was a great choice. He’s pretty popular with the younger crowd, being a sports god, but he’s also a GOLFER, which holds a certain cachet with the current demographic.
Clearly, Buick is trying to expand their demographic, appealing to old and young people, rather than just pissing off the old folks.
And you might think that pissing off the old, loyal customers might be a bad thing.
But this incident shows you’d be wrong. If you don’t drive away the old demographic, you end up with them in your parking lots driving away the youngsters.
5 jandu // Dec 16, 2007 at 5:25 pm
This sounds like a job for the Liza IT.
That one eye and swoosh of bang is bound to draw fear into any russian jew
6 bnaivar // Dec 17, 2007 at 6:00 am
“If someone ask you if you are a god you say YES!!!”
The same thing applies in this situation.
7 JohnnyBoy // Dec 17, 2007 at 7:15 am
They likely changed their selection after The Fabulous Moolah passed away.
I recall one store in particular, Jays, which sold curtains, and in which my parents seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time, to the point where I COULD NO LONGER SUPPORT BODY WEIGHT and HAD to lie down on the piles of fabric.
Of course I got hollered at, but not by Mother Russia
8 pal Jacky // Dec 17, 2007 at 11:36 am
April was on KFI again!!! okay, it was just the audio of one of the big bear commercials. It was during Sunday night’s ‘coast to coast’. I wasn’t sure who the host was. The guest was a UFOol who was working on the edwards campaign and was going to press the candidate to be pro ET like kusinich.This is the democrats election to lose aren’t the front runners already doing enough to insure a republican in the white house without these kooks.
9 JohnnyBoy // Dec 17, 2007 at 11:57 am
klaatu barada nikto
10 JohnnyBoy // Dec 17, 2007 at 11:57 am
O-Qua Tangin Wann
11 Andre // Dec 17, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Hell, I think you should have gone with the antenna beating.
12 Knavish Rogue // Dec 17, 2007 at 2:05 pm
I went to babelfish and guess what compact means in Russian? Compact.
13 pal Jacky // Dec 17, 2007 at 5:23 pm
but what is ‘compact’ in yiddish? ’schwanz’.
14 JohnnyBoy // Dec 17, 2007 at 6:17 pm
not the schvanze of the schvartze !
I should write more of that
maybe not
15 JohnnyBoy // Dec 17, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Maybe I’ll concentrate more on The Angry Shakespeare, thusly:
Shall i compare thee to a summers day? NO ! I sweat like an effing PIG in the summer ! What the hell kind of comparison is that?
16 pal Jacky // Dec 18, 2007 at 12:12 am
actually, I think all jews having small penises is a lie. Milton Berle, Rodney Dangerfield and even the conductor George Solti were all rumoured to be hung like horses. For all I know it might just be Bill handel who has a small cock.
17 Stretch // Dec 19, 2007 at 12:58 pm
“Hell, I think you should have gone with the antenna beating.”
…and with John at the camera it had a guaranteed 100,000 YouTube hits written all over it
18 DavidinBerkeley // Dec 19, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I know that Loehmans. It’s there in the shadow of the Beverly Center and yes, has its own giganto garage.
I never went in since it seemed to be a women-only domain, plus shopping for me is not an endurance event.
19 DavidinBerkeley // Dec 19, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Aw, gee, I was 18 and didn’t get to enjoy it.
Darn.
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