Sexy dresses that barely fit - Salon.com

Sexy dresses that barely fit - Salon.com:

Sometimes, despite all the acceptance and gentle-eyed self-appraisal, you put on your best tight-as-you-dare dress to find — discouragingly, irrefutably — that when you walk, your rump looks like two hams rumbling in a sack. Here’s the mindful, radically accepting solution: Wear a fuller skirt, or surrender to Spanx. They make lovely, center-squeezing, cellulite-smoothing fishnet tights. Mind the metaphor: If you feel like you’re exploding in all kinds of uncomfortable directions, there’s a multibillion-dollar industry built around helping you hold it together. Just roll them on, get over yourself, and get to the party. The goal weight — and the water pills and the rice cakes and the Pilates class — will be there tomorrow. And the next day … and the next. Recapturing your ideal form doesn’t have to slide from the wish list. Acceptance is not the same as settling — it’s simply giving your impossible expectations the evening off. A cloud of hairspray, a red rose pinned into my bouffant, and 6-inch scarlet sequined pumps later, I was cruising through the casino looking like a one-woman prison riot.

I was the shrinking violet in this crowd, though. Satin, corsets, cleavage, high femme fabulosity, butch drag, and gender bending — everyone was bringing it like this was Prom Night of the Damned. The hairdos and hats were so big, the event organizers had to establish a height rule for the showroom. One girl wore a yellow dress with a tutu-skirt and a Swarovski-crystal-bedazzled rubber ducky on her head. We were the beautiful people not because we were so naturally blessed but because we put in the time.

After the contest ended and the winners were chosen, I retired to the casino’s T.G.I. Friday’s with the rest of the sparkly rabble and ate the world’s greasiest quesadilla while watching the merrymakers stream by on the way to the after-party. By the time I headed up to my room, it was 5 a.m. — 8 if we’re adjusting for time zones. I doffed my wig, scrubbed off my makeup, and lowered into bed, feeling satisfied and fully alive. In the burlesque world, it’s called “the glitter high.” I got it. Sometimes you just need to get into that full-femme battle rattle and ride the night down to its pathetic, wheezing last. The grave can wait and so, for that matter, can sleep. I woke three hours later, pupils pinned in the beam of Vegas morning sunlight that streamed through the cheap hotel blinds, totally alert and not ravenously hungry for the first time in months, reborn in the Temple of Fake.