Happy New Year

Happy New Year!  I saw an aol "you've got" feature with Richard Simmons where he said the key phrase for the New Year is - "find heaven in twenty eleven".  I don't typically take advice from Richard Simmons, but my New Year's was heavenly.

In my last post I ranted about my lousy experience shopping for a dress and what to do for a wrap.

I ended up choosing this fabric:

It's way to slippery for a wrap, so I actually used a pattern for a poncho, seen here and it worked out quite well:

It's a SUPER easy pattern and I made the whole thing in 15 minutes.  Even on this slippery organza.

The whole purpose of the wrap wasn't so much to keep me warm, as it was to mask my ucky arms.  But I felt so pretty in the dress, with my hair, and the shoes with the necklace that I made to match, and the Conductor, and the bracelet....

Oh! The bracelet!  One of two things that the Conductor gave me for Christmas, it made its debut for New Year's.  (The other was a humongous box of Godiva chocolates because he knows I know better than to squander them). 

It's hard to tell in the pciture but every other link in the chain, and the heart on the clasp, have little diamonds encrusted around them.  For me, the best feature was actually the clasp so when I wore it on New Year's, I swung the clasp on top of my wrist. 

The Conductor took me to the Fireside Dinner Theater in Fort Atkinson, a town of about 11,000.  We had an amazing dinner of steak and lobster.  I especially loved the salad which had a papaya chutney dressing and delicious sesame seed crouton thingies, both of which I want to try and duplicate at home. 

The show was a feature of different show tunes, older songs, etc.  (They cater to a mostly senior crowd). The costumes, especially on the ladies, were spectacular but unfortunately you can't take pictures of live shows...

...which one very young, sexy looking, gal.....who was clearly the (oh....how can I put this nicely....) companion of an older gentleman didn't quite understand.  Suffice it to say, we had some good people watching, too.

We had champagne at midnight.  I am so not used to staying up that late!  But before that, we had to make it out of the theater to the car -- in FREEZING COLD weather.  And, that's the other reason I was so mad at the mall.  I wanted a formal so my legs would be warmer but all they had were goofy cocktail dresses.  In winter.  In Wisconsin.

I was thankful, though, when returning to our seat during intermission, one old lady remarked to her friend as I passed (in that voice that old people have that they think is a whisper but is actually really loud), "That dress really compliments her figure!" 

Thank you ma'am - and Happy New Year to you, too.