Only In New Jersey

--could you walk up to the Chanel counter at the mall (I had a Lord & Taylor gift certificate to spend) and have the following exchange with a woman wearing so much black eyeliner, pale lipstick and base, that she looks like an aging understudy for the lead Kit Kat Club waitress in the retirement cast of Cabaret. Or, really, let's be honest, the head waitress at the airport Marriott circa 1967.

Me, sheepishly: "I'm looking for a particular lipstick color: velvet dusk."
Chanel Lady, disgusted: "We don't carry that color any more. That was discontinued a long, long, looong time ago."
Me: "Um, I know it existed in 2000, that's only seven years ago."
Chanel Lady: "Well, for us, that was a long time ago, we're a very forward thinkin' company."

Right, no flies on you, Chanel Lady. When I think cutting edge, avant garde pioneers in make up, I think Chanel.

Me: "What about all those ladies who are 90 and have been wearing the same shade for 70 years and have come to expect some level of consistency?"
Chanel Lady: "We just force them to change with the times. It's good for them."

Oh, boy. I bet they just love that. All those society ladies on the upper east side charity circuit putting on their Chanel suits, incidentally the same ones they've been wearing to DAR meetings since 1961, with their strings of pearls, and their final net helmet hair and their shiny Chanel purses. I bet they love being told by their personal assistants that they have to change their lipstick color because it's good for them. Builds character. My mother, who is a scant 65, is apoplectic over the new light bulbs. I can just imagine how amenable a vain woman in her eighties is to being strong armed into changing lipstick colors at this point in her life.

Me: "Yes, yes, change is good."
Chanel Lady: "That's what we at Chanel believe."

If Chanel had any idea you were including them in the royal we, Coco would roll over in her grave. And that's when she said what she said that made me demote her from Chanel Lady to Chanel Broad.

Chanel Broad: "Isn't your old lipstick all smelly and rancid by now?"

Did she just say rancid? Did she mean with dark moldy spots and maggots slithering about? Does she think that I pull it out of my purse and smell it first then jerk my head away in disgust before applying it anyway? Couldn't she have used the term "tired"? I pictured Coco committing Harri Kari in her smelly, rancid grave, with maggots slithering about. Her number 5 parfum doing little to smooth out the situation.

Me: "Um, no. It's not smelly and rancid."

And with that I bought another color. A lesser color. A lousy color. Way to go, Coco. You would be so proud.