Review: "Love, Loss and What I Wore"

Hollywood, California – If you just love Sex and the City, and if you just love boots and clothes and girly stuff, and suffer when there is nothing — absolutely nothing — in your closet, then you will absolutely love the new, shall I call it, reading at the Geffen. Five first-rate actresses sit and read from short pieces by the Ephron sisters, all connected to clothes. What I wore to the first date, what I hated about what my mother chose for me, how I horribly suffered when I wore my first and only paper dress and got my gushing period sitting on a new chair at the dinner table of a friend. How I had to deal with my first bra, how I lost the one most absolutely wonderful perfect can-never-be-replaced blouse that was central to my wardrobe…one dramatic piece about the bra for the newly reconstructed breasts after cancer…otherwise light and frothy, an easy evening of just…clothes.

Carol Kane starts off with drawings of her first dresses and rather guides the ladies from one subject to another and, at one point, draws a childlike drawing of herself. Carolyn Aaron, Natasha Lyonne, Trecee Ellis Ross and Rita Wilson sit easily, read easily, very comfortable together and just having fun and inviting the audience to have a light, funny good time. And judging by the laughter, the audience does.

Of course, if you are or have ever been a fat lady or from a difficult early life, a clothing-sense-deprived lady who sat in Lane Bryant just before her first TV interview for a new book weeping because she looked like a blob, who could never control her weight long enough to fit into current styles, who has often wandered bewildered in Nordstroms wondering why she isn’t like other ladies just enthralled with shopping and knowing why she couldn’t remember what she wore to that so-great prom when she didn’t have a date to that prom, when she never tried to wear naughty stuff like Madonna because she would have looked like a loony from the nuthouse… When you are that kind of lady, you will watch the thin beautiful gals up there on the stage doing a fine job and listen to the audience in gales of laughter and, as a theater lover, wonder why you aren’t watching a Tennessee Williams revival, and check your watch often, knowing that if you leave early to go piddle they will not let you back in and be embarrassed…

But hey, trust me, that’s only me. The performance was lightweight but first-rate, taking normal ladies back to trying clothing times as a metaphor for stages in life, and just having fun being “gals.”

I have a party tonight. What am I going to wear?