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.
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 and I suspected there would be some bad manners on display. And 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.”
“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.
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.
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
“hag”…not “had”
(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.
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
“If someone ask you if you are a god you say YES!!!”
The same thing applies in this situation.
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
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.
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Hell, I think you should have gone with the antenna beating.
I went to babelfish and guess what compact means in Russian? Compact.
but what is ‘compact’ in yiddish? ‘schwanz’.
not the schvanze of the schvartze !
I should write more of that
maybe not
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?
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.
“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
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.
Aw, gee, I was 18 and didn’t get to enjoy it.
Darn.
That pic of April and Sully and an ear of corn…I have some memory of the same scene being displayed, except with Andy Dick in the place of Sully. Part of an old tale of a restaurant that ran out of food, so Dick ate from April’s plate. And then he drunkenly stumbled away with the announced intention of driving to Las Vegas. Do I recall with accuracy? Is this sharing-an-ear-of-corn a thing April does with everybody?
The scientific thing to do here is find a 18 year old girl, drag her to Loehmann’s, and gage her reaction. This way we can determine if Loehmann’s has really changed, or if you have become your mother.
Jesus that’s depressing.
April, I wasn’t going to say what crotchet said, outloud. Take comfort though, even if you do turn into your mom you would still be fucking amazing. My back-up plan, should anything happen to Mrs. Fucker, is to move west and take a run at your mom. It’s not like you have to worry about changing into some regular boring parents.
The pic of Sully helping you finish off the corn — that’s real togetherness!
I always thought Sully was white and black, not brindle. Now I’m just… so confused.
We need an update picture of Daisy too.
Well, when we saw April last May, she also wasn’t brindle colored either, so maybe Sully is white and black. Now…
I think the Loehman’s near me closed like 20 years ago. I used to actually love that place, despite the “changing corral” of a dressing room. However, they also used to cut all the labels out of the clothes. I remember getting my first “real job” work wardrobe there. And yeah, my mom used to drag me to Loehman’s when I was a kid, too. I’m guessing the one in Northern Virginia was slightly less crowded than yours is, because there were only 37 Jewish families in the area.
What can I say? Chico’s solves my problems…