Comparing Favorably

Saturday night, I attended One Big Event at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. It is an annual fund raiser for the Hartford Gay & Lesbian Health Collective.

It is a black tie affair and I try to dress appropriately. I have attended four times in the past and have always worn a cocktail dress. The year was no different and I wore a purple Connected sequin-lace cowl-neck sheath dress from Macy’s that I bought on the day I went to work as a woman, Halloween Eve. It is a gorgeous dress and it garnered me compliments throughout the night. For example, I was touching up my makeup in the ladies’ room after dinner and a woman who was doing the same at another sink, tapped me on the shoulder as she left the room and said, “I love your dress!”

For days, I could not make up my mind what shoes to wear. I seriously considered wearing a pair of white sequin strappy sandals with a 5-inch heel, but I knew that they would cripple me half way through the evening (or even sooner), so I wore a pair of shoes that I figured would be easier on my feet, nude high heel pumps from Payless with a 3-inch heel. As it turned out, they were very comfortable and I wore them all night without a problem. I even drove to and from the affair wearing them in my standard shift Subaru.

I wanted to try a more glamorous look with my eye makeup: a smokey purple look to go along with my purple dress and to compliment my green eyes. I found exactly what I needed on the Internet: a how-to video on YouTube. I did not have the exact products that the woman in the video used, so I had to approximate and the results were a reasonable facsimile of the her handiwork.

After an uneventful 35-minute drive, I arrived at the Convention Center at 6 PM, just as the event was scheduled to begin. The Convention Center was also the site of an auto show, so leaving the Convention Center were throngs of people in casual garb, while in the opposite direction were groups of people dressed to kill. It was an incongruous sight.

The trans contingent was not as numerous as in past years: four trans girls I knew (Audrey,Diana, Laura and Karen), probably another three or four I did not know and there may have been others I did not identify as trans.

The cocktail hour lasted about 90 minutes. I mingled and chatted with a few friends and acquaintances while taking in all the women decked out in beautiful evening gowns and cocktail dresses. I think I compared favorably.

More in the next post.

Wearing Brahmin.

Andreja Pejic