SFD

Erm so thanks blogger for completely spazzing out and deleting this post after it had been published. In case you haven't seen it already here it is again. 

I know that I’ve spoken about this before. My fear of fancy dress. It is a great one and is showing no signs of alleviating. I still hate fancy dress with all my soul and being but I am willing to accept that for some people it’s fun and if you’re going something for someone else you have to just suck it up and get on with it. It only lasts a few hours after all.

But there are different levels of fancy dress I’ve discovered. There are those where there is a fairly wide theme, take my friend’s hen do back in October 2010 which was a 50s/60s theme. Very broad, can be interpreted in many number of ways meaning that people can be as flamboyant or as reserved as they like. Or another friend who had a Pink Lady theme which meant that you could go for full on 50s regalia, or hire a Pink Lady jacket and sling it over your normal clothes.

But then there are those themes which are narrow. Narrow, narrow, narrow, leaving you with very little options.

These are the themes which really kill me and I’ve got one coming up which is narrow to the extreme.

This Saturday my friend is having a hen do in Manchester and she chose a fancy dress theme......Disney characters.

For a start I don’t like Disney. Maybe that makes me weird, maybe it doesn’t. But I don’t get the obsession some people have with Disney, clearly I was abused as a child.

I knew that this wasn’t going to be a theme that I would enjoy. But I didn’t realise how much worse things were going to get when I typed “Disney character fancy dress” into Google. I had officially entered the top tier of fancy dress dread...

....Slutty fancy dress.

SFD is the worst of all the kinds of fancy dress and the one that really makes me want to curl up into a little ball and cry myself to oblivion.

You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen them. You know the hallmarks of a classic SFD –something very very very short involved, knee high socks come along to join the party and more often than not there’s a flash of more flesh than anyone needs to see.

It turns out that when it comes to Disney characters in fancy dress, you basically have one option. And boy is it slutty. It doesn’t matter which character you choose, it’s slutty. There is no getting away from it.

I chose Alice in Wonderland (mainly because it was the only Disney character I could think of). I thought that maybe I could fashion something myself, a blue dress, a white apron, black shoes, happy days. But then I realised that the cost of buying myself a blue dress and trying to make an apron etc would end up costing more than just getting some kind of ‘official’ fancy dress outfit.

I did find one Alice in Wonderland outfit that wasn’t slutty. It also cost £35.

I moaned and I grumbled and I complained. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t. I really really didn’t. But in the end I knew I was just going to have to suck it up and go slutty.

I hadn’t really prepared myself for the level of sluttiness I would be reaching when I bought this outfit. It really does send a shiver down my spine every time I look at it.

One of my friends said she didn’t know why I was complaining. “But you’ll look good in it now that you’ve lost all the weight, your legs go on forever.” I understood what she was saying, and thank goodness I have lost the weight, if this was a year ago then I just plain wouldn’t have gone on this hen do rather than put myself through the horror of SFD. But I had to explain to her that I’d lost weight, not had a brain transplant. The fact is that my brain is not hardwired to embrace SFD, no matter how much I weigh.

One option is to turn to alcohol to numb the pain but again I need to be careful because the shoes that I’ve chosen to wear might be familiar to some. It’s the Embolism Shoes.Hurray!! And do you know what else I figured out? That Saturday will be the one year anniversary of the day that I went into hospital with said embolism. Some would say that this is officially a sign that I shouldn’t wear the shoes but it’s a good thing I don’t really believe in all that jazz. (But maybe I’ll take another pair and decide on the night, just in case I chicken out.)

So staying away from the alcohol means that I need to find some other way to make my peace with the SFD. I’ve told myself that it’s just this once and I’ve also told myself that I’ve seen worse sights wandering through Hull on a Saturday night. There’s a part of me that thinks, “Why the hell shouldn’t I do this for one night only?” I figure that the window of opportunity for me to be stupid and be silly and make a fool out of myself in public, is rapidly narrowing – soon I’ll be too old, I may succumb to middle age spread. I don’t want to look back and be gutted that I missed my chance to get my legs out in an inappropriately short skirt.

So I’m taking a deep breath. Buying a pair of hot pants. Pulling up my knee high socks and getting my SFD on.

Wish me luck.