We're too old to shop at Charlotte Russe

Permission granted by Bezoar to write this anecdote

Kristin and I couldn't really remember the last time that we were able to spend time together in the past year. There was the time we were downtown during Tulip Time, and then we went to dinner with our husbands in September or October, and then she and I had coffee sometime in November. So we spent the day shopping yesterday at the mall in Grandville after a snow"storm" put the kabosh on our plan to go to Birch Run (outlet mall on the other side of the state).

Our shopping goals were neither lofty nor glamorous: Kristin to buy new jeans if she could handle multiple tryings-on emotionally - as is par for course in the purchase of jeans and/or bathing suits (and if a worthy pair was to be found in the first place for said trying-on), and me to find some fun costume jewelry. We're walking by Charlotte Russe, which caters much more to the half-our-age set, and not really to anyone whose hips have pushed a day past puberty. But we decided to see if we could find something fun anyway.

Well, we had luck! I found some fun bracelets and a necklace, as did Kristin. We're up at the register paying, and there's a little display of buttons with sayings on them, the kind you'd pepper all over your backpack if you're fifteen. One of them had a leopard-print background and in hot pink letters said, "Holla!" *For the equally un-hip among us, the online urban dictionary says that "holla" is a term used to get the attention of a female, or for a man to express interest in a particularly impressive female.* Now, I must preface this by saying, I thought exactly what Kristin said, but she said it first. She said, "Um, you'd think they could spell hola right" (as in, the Spanish greeting). That's when we realized we were way too old to shop at Charlotte Russe. We kept it real until we left, though, so we didn't lose face.

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