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"          In the Soup By Meg Ryan Kind of Blue By Rosie O&amp;#039;Donnell Body by Gram By Samantha Bee I&amp;#039;ve worn a lot of stupid things in my day, but the hands-down stupidest thing I ever wore\u2013other than the bib overalls and little blue blazer I had on the first time I went skiing\u2014was the white cotton tunic and capri pants that I wore last year to a garbage dump in Phnom Penh. The truth is, I have no fashion sense\u2014never did. For many years, I blamed this on my mom&amp;#039;s death. Then again, I blame pretty much everything on that\u2014my weight, my addiction to television, my inability to spell.  One outfit perfectly encapsulated middle school for me. All the other children wore athletic garments, such as T-shirts and shorts, to gym class\u2014we didn&amp;#039;t have a standard uniform, and we could wear what we wanted. But I was living with my grandmother at the time, so I would dress like a miniature grandmother, like Rue McClanahan from The Golden Girls.  read more &amp;amp;gt; read more &amp;amp;gt; read more &amp;amp;gt;       First Name   Last Name     E-mail Address   Phone Include area code     Address No PO boxes please     City   State   AlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareD.C.FloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming    Zip Code     500-Word Story          Yes, I would like to receive the ELLE.com newsletter    Yes, I would like to receive the ELLE.com newsletter discounts, and other offers from carefully selected third parties.       Elle magazine and Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron present The Love, Loss and What I Wore Contest  What item of clothing makes you remember your first love, your worst love, your best friend, your mother? What were you wearing when the most embarrassing thing in the world happened? Or the most wonderful? What clothes changed your life or your identity? Bras, bikinis, bomber jackets, tube tops, stillettos\u2014whatever. Tell us your story in 500 words or less and you may be selected to win a trip to New York to see your story adapted and performed for one night in Love, Loss and What I Wore, the new off-Broadway play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, and starring a cast that includes Samantha Bee, Kristen Chenoweth, Tyne Daly, Jane Lynch, Rosie O&amp;#039;Donnell, Rhea Perlman, and Rita Wilson. Please submit your entry by October 31, 2009 to Elle.com/WhatIWore. The winner will be announced by December 7 on ELLE.com.  1. HOW TO ENTER: To enter, write an essay in 500 words or less.  2. Email your entry to Elle Presents Love, Loss, and What I Wore at Elle.com/WhatIWore. Include your name, address, and daytime telephone number. Entries may be submitted on or after 12 Noon, ET, on September 21, 2009 , and must be submitted no later than 12 Noon, ET, October 31, 2009 . Only one entry per person or email address may be submitted.  3. This contest is open to legal residents of the 48 contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., 18 years of age or older as of time of entry, except the employees of the Sponsor, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. (&amp;quot;Sponsor&amp;quot;), Ann Taylor (collectively, &amp;quot;Contest Entities&amp;quot;) and members of their immediate families.  4. All eligible entries received will be judged by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron. Entries will be judged on the basis of creativity, quality of writing, and stage adaptability. Judging will be completed, and potential winner(s) will be selected, on or about December 1, 2009. Sponsor reserves the right not to award all prizes in the event it receives an insufficient number of eligible entries that meet the minimum judging criteria set forth above as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Judges&amp;#039; decisions in connection with all matters concerning the Contest shall be final and binding.  5. Your entry must be your own original work, and may not have been published previously, entered in any other contest or have won any other award.  6. Submission of an entry grants Sponsors the exclusive right to edit, illustrate, abridge, modify and publish the entry for any and all purposes in any media whether currently in existence or hereafter invented (including but not limited to print and digital media) without further compensation to the entrant or winner.  7. One winner will receive a trip to New York City to see his/her story adapted and performed for one night in Love, Loss and What I Wore, the new off-Broadway play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron. The prize includes roundtrip economy class airfare for winner from a major airport nearest winner&amp;#039;s residence, one night hotel accommodations at a hotel selected by Sponsor, and tickets to the play. All other expenses, including food, room, and other hotel services and ground transportation, are the responsibility of the winner. Winner must be available to travel at the time the story is scheduled for performance. 8. Winners will be notified by telephone, mail and/or email on or about December 1, 2009. Each winner will be required to comply with all instructions in the prize notification letter and may be required to sign an affidavit of eligibility, a liability release, a publishing rights release and a publicity release (where permitted by law). If the completed signed forms are not received within 14 days of the date printed on the notification, prize may be forfeited and the entrant with the next highest scoring entry will be selected as the alternate winner. By accepting the prize, winner agrees that Sponsor/Contest Entities, its/their officers, directors, agents, and employees and Nora and Delia Ephron will have no liability or responsibility for any injuries, losses, or damages of any kind resulting from participation in the contest and/or the acceptance, possession, or use of any prize and they will be held harmless against any claims of liability arising directly or indirectly from participation in the contest or the prizes awarded. By entering, participants warrant that their entries are original and that Contest Entities&amp;#039; use of any material submitted will not violate any rights of any other person or entity, including, without limitation, any copyrights. Participants further agree to indemnify and hold Sponsor and Nora and Delia Ephron harmless from any claims arising from the Contest Entities&amp;#039;s use of entrant&amp;#039;s or winner&amp;#039;s submissions.  9. Entries will not be acknowledged or returned. No telephone calls will be accepted. Contest sponsor is not responsible for late or misdirected entries or technical malfunctions and may suspend, modify or terminate the contest in the latter event. In the event of early termination, judging and selection of winners will take place using all eligible entries received prior to termination. Entries will not be returned to entrants.  10. No substitutions or transfers of prizes by the winners will be allowed. Sponsors may substitute a prize of equal or greater value.  11. Liability for any applicable taxes and any other expenses not expressly included in the prize will be the sole responsibility of the winners. Any required tax reporting forms will be furnished to the IRS.  12. By entering this contest and/or by accepting a prize, you agree to accept these contest rules and the decisions of the judges, which are final.  13. This Contest is subject to federal, state and local laws with venue in New York County in the State of New York. By entering, you agree to be bound by these rules and you give your express permission to be contacted by Sponsors by e-mail and/or mail. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.  14. For a winners&amp;#039; list, mail a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Winner of The Love, Loss and What I Wore Contest, ELLE Magazine, 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. Residents of VT may omit postage.  15. The sponsor of this contest is Elle magazine, a publication of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, NY         In the Soup By Meg Ryan Kind of Blue By Rosie O&amp;#039;Donnell Body by Gram By Samantha Bee I&amp;#039;ve worn a lot of stupid things in my day, but the hands-down stupidest thing I ever wore\u2013other than the bib overalls and little blue blazer I had on the first time I went skiing\u2014was the white cotton tunic and capri pants that I wore last year to a garbage dump in Phnom Penh. The truth is, I have no fashion sense\u2014never did. For many years, I blamed this on my mom&amp;#039;s death. Then again, I blame pretty much everything on that\u2014my weight, my addiction to television, my inability to spell.  One outfit perfectly encapsulated middle school for me. All the other children wore athletic garments, such as T-shirts and shorts, to gym class\u2014we didn&amp;#039;t have a standard uniform, and we could wear what we wanted. But I was living with my grandmother at the time, so I would dress like a miniature grandmother, like Rue McClanahan from The Golden Girls.  read more &amp;amp;gt; read more &amp;amp;gt; read more &amp;amp;gt;  In the Soup By Meg Ryan I&amp;#039;ve worn a lot of stupid things in my day, but the hands-down stupidest thing I ever wore\u2013other than the bib overalls and little blue blazer I had on the first time I went skiing\u2014was the white cotton tunic and capri pants that I wore last year to a garbage dump in Phnom Penh. It&amp;#039;s important to know that it was the middle of monsoon season and that I wore sandals, as did my friend Daphne. I don&amp;#039;t know what kind hers were, but mine were an open-toed Merrell, I think. I can&amp;#039;t remember, exactly, as I have since set them on fire. We&amp;#039;d been in India and, last-minute, decided to visit a friend who runs several schools and an orphanage in Cambodia offering children who work in the dump relief from hideous circumstance.  To this day he claims he did not technically take us to the dump. He still says he only took us to the outskirts of the dump, the suburbs, as it were, the middle class of the dump, where people lived in huts or shacks\u2014hovels? I had no idea what to call them; nothing qualified as shelter in any way that I understood. It was a garbage Oz, a waste wonderland with phantasmagorical mountains of trash, four and five stories tall, a loony maze of scavenged metal sheets, plastic bags, and what? Cars? It was impossible to guess what any of it had started life as. Only Dr. Seuss and Satan could have come up with this. It started to rain and I thought, Okay, this is it\u2026I am standing here in open-toed sandals, and at this very moment I am contracting a disease not yet known to man, a hybrid medical horror. Once I die from it, it will bear my name. It will be what I&amp;#039;m remembered for, my true legacy. Something will finally trump that scene in When Harry Met Sally. As we wormed deeper into the dump, I came to feel grateful for the rain because at least my eyes had stopped burning. Then again, there was a new black gooshiness between my toes, so I checked the impulse to be thankful and wondered aloud where the rodents were, as I hadn&amp;#039;t seen even one. Our host informed us that in fact there weren&amp;#039;t any! People ate them here. I thought about crying. To stop myself from crying, I thought about how I would burn my clothes. The whites would ignite then curdle on the window ledge back at the hotel. Daphne and I would have to be really careful not to breathe in any of the smoke because if we didn&amp;#039;t die from &amp;quot;Ryan Blight&amp;quot; we would surely perish from the respiratory disease you get when you burn clothes worn to a dump in your hotel room.  Our host had come upon a toxic puddle that he was now attempting to ford. He leapt to a little mound in the middle and then splashed to the other side. I leapt to the little mound and then to another little mound, which turned out to be an empty pretzel bag. One of my legs sank to the knee in the hot, green little sea. I sploshed out and stood openmouthed, speechless on the other side. I looked back across the wake of neon froth I&amp;#039;d left to my friend. We were both silent. Soon enough, Daphne unleashed an unparalleled sound, somewhere between a grieving blue whale and a furious seagull. She shook her fists at the torrential skies, cinched her eyes shut, and shrieked, &amp;quot;I! Want! Boots!!&amp;quot; This frightened our host. He gathered himself, though, and trotted off. Silent again, Daphne and I stood across the foamy avocado waters from each other. I waited calmly for my foot, shin, and calf to liquefy. Now I would surely die, but probably just of plain old gangrene. Beautiful Daph looked off into the middle distance, presumably in shock. If I weren&amp;#039;t so limp and close to death, I would have found it all infuriating. Had we known what he meant by &amp;quot;suburbs,&amp;quot; we would have worn gunite jumpsuits with screw-on helmets and iron gloves. One of us most certainly would have added a chain-mail scarf for flair. I became aware of people staring from the mad Seussian portals. It could have been because I was blond or because I was clutching a new camera, but, most likely, it was that both of us were sopping. My tunic and capris had all but disappeared into my skin, taking the poisons from the puddle in with them. I was naked save a noxious gray film. Daphne, who had started the day in a paisley cotton sari, now sported what looked like a psychedelic full-body tattoo. Then my unfailingly game travel partner, my longtime friend, started to laugh, and I started to laugh, and then all the Cambodian faces peeking out with their surprisingly white teeth laughed. They were probably laughing because they felt sorry for us. We were the ones all in a knot and against everything, after all. We laughed because we were to be pitied here, because joy and suffering are only relative and for some reason we were all together in Phnom Penh&amp;#039;s dump and everything really was so superbly, so supremely, so Seussically stupid. Our host returned with huge black nuclear winter boots that sort of looked like tires. He splashed across the phosphorescence to my psychedelic friend, who put them on and tossed her own shoes to an old woman nearby. The little woman held Daphne&amp;#039;s shoes to her cheek and flashed a merry thumbs-up. Kind of Blue By Rosie O&amp;#039;Donnell The truth is, I have no fashion sense\u2014never did. For many years, I blamed this on my mom&amp;#039;s death. Then again, I blame pretty much everything on that\u2014my weight, my addiction to television, my inability to spell.  In my fantasy world, had my mother lived, I would be thin. I would be extremely well dressed and I would never need spell-check. I would know what went with what, and everything I tried on would fit. Mom and I would shop together at the places that moms and daughters go\u2014a department store, an outlet mall, the flea market. I would wear a lot of tasteful makeup, too. And I&amp;#039;d know how to pick out a bag\u2014a purse, a pocketbook, whatever. It could all be so different. My mom and I would lunch someplace while shopping. It would be at a caf\u00E9 where we would have salad and like it. We&amp;#039;d laugh about how great our lives turned out and make plans for all the things we were still going to do.  But that is all a dream, because my mother did not live. She died when she was younger than I am today.  The fact is that no item of clothing has ever moved me in any way\u2014except one. After my mom died, all her clothes were removed from the house while my dad took his five motherless children to Belfast, Ireland. It was 1973. I guess he thought we could best recover from the trauma of her death by living in a war zone. The IRA was nowhere near as scary as what had just happened to our lives. When we returned, we found her side of the closet barren. The last of her was gone. In 1981 or 1982, my dad got remarried to a lovely woman. She was a schoolteacher named Mary May. After the wedding, she moved in. That first morning she was there, I was eating breakfast with a few of my siblings when my new stepmom walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. She was wearing a long mauve velour three-quarter-sleeve zip bathrobe with a thick vertical white stripe down the center surrounding the zipper. No one said a word. We all looked at one another as Mary happily made her way to the stove to put on the kettle. My mother had had the same exact bathrobe\u2014in blue. Electric blue. What are the chances of that, really? The unspoken rule in my house was that my mom&amp;#039;s name was never mentioned after her death. But that morning, I knew the rule was about to be broken. My siblings silently left the kitchen. I was alone with Mary. Sensitive to the fact that this was her first day as a married woman, I was unsure of how to phrase it.  &amp;quot;Ummm,&amp;quot; I said. Always a great way to start. &amp;quot;Ummmm\u2026Mary. My mom had that same bathrobe in blue.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh,&amp;quot; she said and nodded. And that robe disappeared. Gone. Never to be seen again. Sent away to the same place my mother&amp;#039;s clothes went, I assume. No one ever mentioned it. To this day, that bathrobe is the only piece of clothing I can actually see in my mind. I have no visuals of prom dresses or favorite sweaters or shoes I couldn&amp;#039;t live without. Clothes are just something I use for cover, leaving room for one electric blue memory. Body by Gram By Samantha Bee One outfit perfectly encapsulated middle school for me. All the other children wore athletic garments, such as T-shirts and shorts, to gym class\u2014we didn&amp;#039;t have a standard uniform, and we could wear what we wanted. But I was living with my grandmother at the time, so I would dress like a miniature grandmother, like Rue McClanahan from The Golden Girls. I used to go to gym in a one-piece leisure suit with a leather belt\u2014it was dry-clean only. It was sort of like sweatpants fabric. A cashmere unitard with puffy sleeves is basically what I wore to gym. A full-length cashmere sweater with legs. And a belt! Navy blue with a brown leather belt. My grandmother would be like, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t sweat\u2014it&amp;#039;s dry-clean only!&amp;quot; and I would be like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not going to sweat. I don&amp;#039;t even know how to sweat. Let me belt it up!&amp;quot;  I would say anything to get out of gym. I had chicken pox when I was 10 and forever since I&amp;#039;ve had a little bump on the back of my head that never went away. It&amp;#039;s really nothing. But I showed up on rope-climbing day in my sweatertard thinking, This is it. I don&amp;#039;t have any more excuses. I made the teacher feel the chicken pox on the back of my head and told her I thought I had a tumor and it was bursting out of my head, and that I&amp;#039;d been advised by the doctor to abstain from all physical activity. &amp;quot;Really,&amp;quot; she replied. &amp;quot;You didn&amp;#039;t mention this all day until right when you&amp;#039;re supposed to climb a rope and ring the bell at the top? And now you have a brain tumor? You went to class all day and you&amp;#039;ve been here all week and I never heard anything about it, but today, at this moment, we are concerned about the brain tumor bursting out of your head?&amp;quot; So I sat and quietly read a book in my sweatertard, while all the other children climbed a rope, like normal children. That outfit so perfectly sums up what I felt about gym and any kind of physical competition. Because you can&amp;#039;t work out in an outfit like that\u2014it&amp;#039;s impossible. It&amp;#039;s ridiculous. And even now, my dislike of all athletic activity is perfectly embodied by the dry-clean-only outfit my grandmother made me wear to gym. She felt the same way I did. We just wanted to do our Jack LaLannes together. On a beach in Hawaii. We were not about jogging. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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