Skeletons in My Closet

So here’s the real epiphany to come out of the ladies’ clothing swap I hosted a few weeks ago at my house. I have a lot of horrendously boring clothing.

Laugh-out-loud boring.

Kill-you-with-kindness boring.

Stench of 1995 boring.

I mean, bags of it. Of black pants, and white shells and — gasp! — sweater vests and all sorts of things that I used to wear at my office job at the German Embassy but, which have been dying a slow death in my closet for the past four years.

Perhaps I am an awful friend for trying to lob these staid skeletons off on my friends, but that’s what I did. I wrote about the experience in this month’s Desperately Seeking Salem column over at Salem Monthly.

I invited women from different cubby holes of my Salem life — only two of them knew each other — to bring their own cast-offs and trade for new ones. Anything left at the end of the night I was taking to the Salvation Army.

Here’s what I learned about how to have a clothing swap:

1. Keep it smallish. Nine women in one room is just about the perfect number for a swap; anything more than that and you might as well be at the Goodwill Bins.

2. Invite the ladies — or dudes — to share a story about one of their cast-offs. Every garment has a story.

3. Like all charitable donations, clothing swap are equal parts altruism and greed. I felt good dropping off the bag of clothes at the Salvation Army, but I knew the real benefit for myself was in getting to know these ladies as a group, ridding myself of my boring former self, and achieving the catharsis of a good closet clean-out.

4. Don’t let your husband come. Mine had gone out to Noble’s Tavern, his new dive hangout, with a friend, but returned to find a pile of clothing the size of a three-year-old on our living room floor.  He then went through every single item saying: “This is cute, this would look great on you, are you sure you don’t want this?”  I am married to a champion rummager.

5. My new friends in Salem are awesome.