Dear Old Navy

My dear friend Joey and I decided to move our Wednesday lunch to a Monday at the mall today.  (The Wednesday lunch has not been happening lately anyhow, something about her gig as The Nanny that is really putting a damper on pitching our Real Housewives of Green Bay do Wednesday Lunch to the networks!)  After receiving a text message (read “cry for help”) notifying me that Target is clearly incorrectly sizing their clothing and something that made her sound like she was starving like a Survivor contestant who does not know how to use that fishing spear thingy, I asked if she wanted to go to lunch.  Of course she did… I had to go to the mall, to Old Navy, to buy a dress for my trip.  I informed her that Old Navy was much kinder with their sizing.  In fact my typical size 9 or 11 shrinks down to a size 3 or 5 in the Old Navy world.  This makes me feel wonderful when I try on my “normal” size clothing and find that miraculously I have shed pounds without even trying and I even went down TWO DRESS SIZES… overnight! (Ok lest you think I am delusional, obviously I know this is not the case, but a girl can dream, can’t she?)

When I walked in, Joey had already scoured the sales rack, but still had not yet found the coveted item of the day…. White pants.  Some might call these “sailor pants.”  It was like looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks, search as we may, high and low, there seemed not to be one pair of SAILOR pants in a store whose name includes the word Navy.  Now call me crazy, but if you name your store after a maritime division of the military, you would imagine you would stock your shelves with all sorts of clothing that Jackie O. might wear for a day on the yacht, or that Joey M. might wear strolling in the sand, pants rolled up, on the beaches of San Francisco.  I am picturing one of the photos from the Newport News catalog, a little outfit that used to send real printed catalogs and flyers to my home via U.S. Postal Service, showing an abundance of rail thin, modelesque women in these type of sailor pants. Joey would fit right in, as she is slim and probably close to 7 feet tall! Definitely Top Model Worthy…. with a personality.   It was either that or the thought of her in Popeye hat and one of those white and blue striped blouses with the “bib type” collar.  Of course, over lunch she debriefed me regarding the conversation earlier that day when she told her husband that she was looking for a pair of white pants – sailor pants – and he asked her why.  She indicated that since they were going to San Francisco, there would be beaches, leading her to believe there would be sailors or sailboats or the like.  I am not sure what he made of the fact that she envisioned herself hanging out on the beach with sailors, but being the kind of husband anyone would love to have, he went with it, of course after telling her she really had a way of justifying her need for these sailor pants. 

I originally thought of starting a petition to bring the sailor pants to Old Navy.  Or maybe we could start a new store called New Navy – our motto could be “FOR THE SAILOR IN ALL OF US!”  We could give discounts when customers brought in cans of spinach, just like Popeye.  Our mannequins could all be modeled after Olive Oyl.  But then I decided to leave Old Navy alone.  Despite the fact that they do not have sailor pants, they do have friendly salespeople, who humored us enough to remove a dress from a mannequin as I could not find the correct size on the rack, because the only one in that size was clothing a headless mannequin.  And the poor guy sure did struggle with this task, but kept a smile on his face the whole time!