Black dress. Sleeveless. Slight slit in the front. Nine small black buttons. Knee-length. Thick, rugged material. Looks like denim. The tag says, “Made from Hemp.” Perfect cold weather fabric to be worn with a black cardigan and black leather boots. Would look fantastic while working in the library, particularly walking from the Young Adult section to 746.92 in non-fiction. A fashion must-have.
Grabbed the dress in my size. Went to the front of the artisan booth, which was crowded with four grimy, haggard looking men sitting on concrete eating Subway sandwiches with little regard for their merchandise or the potential customers skipping their booth in favor of organic soaps and chocolate honey.
“I am ready,” I said as I held the dress in front of my chin.
“You can’t go wrong with hemp. It will last twenty years. When the dye fades, you can just re-dye it,” said the man with the silver hair who had strange resemblance to Sean Connery in the eyes and cheekbones.
I rubbed my twenty dollar bill and my ten dollar bill together in my left hand, shifting my weight to my left side while the dress moved from my chin to my waist.
“Yep, hemp is a great material and that’s why the US government won’t allow clothes here to be made from it. They want people to buy cotton clothes that fall apart,” said that man with the metal leg who held a meatball sub. I was distracted by his stick of a limb briefly but quickly decided he lost his leg in Vietnam and refocused on the purchase of the dress.
No time for anti-government propaganda. Please just take my money and give me the dress. Why is this happening again? I just did this same thing 15 minutes ago to get a turquoise and fuchsia tie-die denim dress that will go great with a light denim jacket and magenta cowboy boots, looking particularly hot while I set up an outward facing Western Fiction display.
“So, you want that one?” said the Connery look-a-like.
“Yes, sir.” Why can’t I just buy my dresses like normal people at retail outlets that require drug and alcohol checks? Why I am feeling hungry?
“George, you got a customer,” the supposed Vietnam vet said. George fumbled to wipe his hands on a napkin and stared at me like he was unsure of my purpose for being there. I held out the dress and my money.
“So, you want this one,” he said.
Dear God, Woodstock was in 1969. This is Summer Festival 2010. I am not looking for government propaganda, a joint or casual sex. I just want a hemp dress to wear at the reference desk, please. The history books are wrong. The love was only free because they were too damn lethargic to charge for it. The message was anti-violent because it takes muscle coordination, concentration and depth perception to shoot a gun or throw a punch. How do these people function on so few brain cells? At least the drug culture of the 1980s was good for weeding out the waste. One too many hits of crack-cocaine. Dead. Shared heroin needles. AIDS then dead. Experimental drug users got a taste and moved on to more addictive habits like trading artificially-inflated tech stocks and flipping houses. Capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurism did not light up in the bong.
“Yes, Sir. I would like to pay for this dress.”
“You’ll love it. Got this one from China,” he said slowly as he placed the dress in brown paper sack and sealed it with a “Radically Hemp” sticker.
I left with my dress, a headache, a craving for pizza, and newly found belief in the designated cashier.
