How does one decide what to wear to the orchestra?

We almost didn’t go to the orchestra.

At about noon I had a panic attack so big I almost exploded into a thousand little fragmented shards of glass and Steve, who had no idea what was happening, just had to try to hold me until I got to a place where he could help me remember how to breathe again.

The last straw after a tough week was a conversation that needed to be had because not having the conversation would have been much less considerate in the long term, but honestly in the short term it took a little courage and a lot of energy and for those reasons it may have been the thing that actually brought on the big cry that I needed to have.

Worth it, though.

Steve asked me if I still wanted to go to the orchestra. I said no. Then I said yes on the condition that I could literally wear sweatpants and a carhartt bomber jacket. He just smiled and said that would be fine. We went to the fitness center because not going would have been worse. It was good to move.

Then we got home and had to actually decide what to wear to the orchestra – $21 for each ticket I had purchased so far in advance that I had almost forgotten this concert was even on the books.

I tried on the wrong outfit first. It was a long red dress with a frankly unwise amount of cleavage and bare arms, high healed shoes, dangly gold-colored sparkly earrings shaped like fish skeletons, a gold-colored necklace featuring a pendant with a line drawing of a rose, and red nail polish. A femme version of me exists and is possibly quite stunning, but she doesn’t actually surface often and crucially this was not to right outfit for me to wear this evening.

So I ditched the red dress and high heals in favor of black jeans, a well fitted black blazer to match Steve, and combat boots. But I kept the gold-colored necklace and dangly earrings shaped like fish skeletons, of which I am growing rather fond. I kept the nail polish, too. This was significantly more comfortable than the dress would have been, on a lot of different levels.

We drove to the parking garage and walked in to the little café outside the hall and had a glass of wine. Steve told me a little about the life of Nietzsche, a philosopher who lived with significant mental and physical disabilities for most of his life and whose writings aggressively critiqued anything he believed to be life-denying.

The orchestra’s performance of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” from Strauss was powerful, moving, and cathartic. It is one of those big climactic pieces of music where everyone knows the first six bars, partly because it was featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. During the intermission I took of my boots and curled up sideways in the chair in the theater and rested my head against the back of the chair and put my legs across Steve’s lap and looked up at the paintings on the walls of the hall and looked up at the chandelier.

Listened to Italian pop music all the way home.