This oughta be good.
I’m about to be a model. In a fashion show. Yes, you read that correctly. Me. Walking. In heels. ON COBBLESTONE, no less.
Hell, who am I kidding? I’d be just as likely to trip and flail in flip flops. The shoes aren’t the problem.
It’s me. I’m the issue.
“Good lord, you’re a moving violation,” my best friend once declared, shaking his head while yanking me off the sidewalk. He deftly pulled my dress back from the brink of indecency as only a gay man would, and collected the strewn contents of my purse while I wiped some gravel from my skinned knee.
“You’re so smart in so many ways,” Stan always says while marveling at my latest mishap.
It’s true. I’m a mess in many ways.
Stan assigned me the nickname “Grace” more than a decade ago — moments after I fell through our front door and crashed to the hardwood floor, keys in my mouth and my purse strap nearly strangling me.
I recently realized, while getting dressed, that I’d only shaved one leg in the shower. My attempts at self-tanner have been disastrous. If I had used the product on my face the way it turned out on my legs, I would have been canceled for unintentionally appearing in blackface. It was bad.
My friend, Bill, once bellowed from a second-floor balcony as I crossed Simonton Street below, “Hey, Mandy, your skirt’s stuck in your underwear.” And it was.
Ask any of my classmates from Leadership Monroe County about my spectacular “entrance” into a serious lecture hall in the Upper Keys campus of College of the Florida Keys. I had quietly excused myself to use the restroom and fully intended to return to the lecture just as unobtrusively. That didn’t happen.
As I crossed the threshold to reenter the room, my feet got tangled, apparently on some invisible speck of carpet lint, propelling me forward at an alarming speed. That prompted the windmilling of my arms as my momentum carried me alarmingly close to the startled speaker, who, at front and center, was directly in my line of fire.
The slow-motion flail ended with a spectacular recovery on my part, if I do say so myself. I managed to dodge the speaker and right the ship before I went fully down, finally coming to rest a full 20 feet from whence I’d begun.
Years ago, I was covering a very contentious meeting in a buttoned-up conference room at the hospital. All the seats were taken, so I stood at the side of the room, notebook in hand, leaning against a row of cabinets along the wall. The counter atop the cabinets held a coffee station, a microwave and small sink. As the meeting slogged into its third hour, I followed the lead of others, who had switched from leaning on the row of cabinets farther down from me to sitting atop it. Easy stuff, right? As four people before me had done successfully, I simply placed my hands behind me on the countertop and eased myself up and back a few inches. The “up” part went smoothly. My shift backward drew the attention of every person in the room.
I happened to have been standing in front of the small sink next to the coffeemaker. No problem. There was a good 8 or 9 inches of flat, empty countertop in front of the sink — plenty of room to sit. Well….
Who would have thought, back in 1999, that this particular conference room would have a sink equipped with a motion-activated faucet? Certainly not the person who was sliding back several inches on the countertop toward the high-tech faucet. Then it happened. I crossed the invisible threshold, and activated the faucet, triggering a surprisingly (and I would argue unnecessarily) forceful stream of water that shocked the hell out of me and everyone else in the room as I sprang (unsubtly) back into a standing position.
I apologized for the interruption — and complimented the board members on their technologically advanced faucet and impressive water pressure. Then I made sure I was the last person to leave the room when the meeting ended given the large wet spot on the back of my skirt.
This is all to say that my appearance in the Out of the Closet fashion show on Wednesday, Feb. 12 should be interesting. In fact, bring your phones, as this could be my viral moment — for all the wrong reasons.
But it’s for a great cause in support of Queer Keys, a community resource center for the Keys’ LGBT community, 1100 Truman Ave. Plus, in my defense, my friend, Kirby Myers, asked me to participate in the show midway through my fourth martini at the Square Grouper during our office Christmas party.
As the owner of Kirby’s Closet boutique, 218 Whitehead St., Kirby has partnered to present the fashion show with Queer Keys whose mission is to support, educate, empower and celebrate the queer community of the Florida Keys.
Kirby has assembled 21 local models — all ages, shapes and identities — and coordinated wardrobes and accessories for each. (My dress is pretty damn adorable.)
Thankfully, the other 20 models are sure to have more poise and grace than I could ever dream of. But the show takes place at that golden hour of sunset, at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 12, directly behind the Shops at Mallory, with the runway sitting between Mallory Square and Opal Key’s Gulf-facing bars.
I’ll see you there. (Just don’t wave at me while I’m on the runway — I need to concentrate.)
