Saratoga News

Sometimes 'fitting in' means not turning heads

By Dale Bryant

Long before Valley Scene--the monthly publication that chronicles the social life of the valley--there were the Sox Girls. In those innocent days before women's rights, the Sox Girls covered the "distaff" side of the news--social events, club news, weddings, engagements, ladies' auxiliaries and feature stories. To be sure, the Sox Girls eagerly embraced the women's movement when it came along and soon brandished the banner of feminism, both in their coverage of women's news and as a personal philosophy.

But before that, the budding Silicon Valley had the Sox Girls to thank for those Mercury News society pages brimming with social news. Long before Valley Scene, the Sox Girls were masters at writing photo captions that suggested people were doing something interesting when, in fact, what they were doing was standing behind cocktail glasses staring at the camera.

I know. I was one of the Sox Girls.

The term "sox" was shorthand for Society Department; it was the word we scrawled on top of our assignments.

Although none of our colleagues was impressed with the "Society Department" label, there actually were people who assumed that anyone who covered the social scene must be, well, someone.

When I was still single, a friend invited me to a dinner party where she introduced me to a law student who had arrived a couple years earlier from Italy. Afterward, he followed me home and proposed marriage in the dark outside my studio apartment. Really. It had nothing to do with love at first sight; his motives were much more pragmatic. It was my social station--the one he perceived went with my job--that convinced him this would be a good alliance.

Boy, was he off base.

The Sox Girls were a motley crew. We were mostly young and broke; we drove old clunkers, and more than one of us was putting a husband through college. True, we wrote about people in elegant gowns sipping champagne from fine crystal, but in our own social lives, we were more likely to drink Gallo Hearty Burgundy from plastic glasses and talk about solidarity in the labor movement.

All of this came to mind because I was reading the fall fashion preview in the newspaper where I got my start as a Sox Girl, and the current fashion editor said long skirts are "in" this season.

It convinced me I should go ahead and order the calf-length black dress I'd been looking at for a trip later this month. This dress, if the description in the catalogue is accurate, can be made elegant or casual with a simple change of accessories. Best of all, this little black dress can be wadded up in a ball and crammed into a suitcase, and look like new with a couple of shakes. What a dress!

In my whole life, I've only owned one other dress--also black--that was so uniquely perfect, although I never could have guessed it would turn out to be such a great dress. It was black, floor-length, simple and graceful. It became the Sox Girls Opera Gown because no less than three of us wore it on three separate occasions to the opening night of the San Francisco opera season.

The truth is the Sox Girls seldom actually "covered" social events other than luncheons, and then only if there was a speaker--usually the wife of someone important. The paper's social columnist was the one who actually rubbed shoulders with the glitterati; the Sox Girls wrote the captions and the headlines and edited her columns in addition to our varied duties.

Once a year, though, one of us was chosen to "cover" the opening night of the opera season in San Francisco. It didn't amount to much more than gathering information for photo captions, but we got to dress up and join in the festivities of opening-night parties. The photographer always wore a tuxedo.

We loved going, but the idea of getting dressed up put dread into all our hearts. This, after all, was fashion-statement night for San Francisco society. And while the Sox Girls were well acquainted with the latest fashions--our boss was also the fashion editor--not one of us owned anything so impractical as an evening gown. We were Cinderellas without a fairy godmother.

When my turn came, I was living in a duplex near San Jose State University; my husband was going to school and working nights at a grocery store. Buying a gown was out of the question.

With every woman at the pre-opera parties dressed to turn heads, I realized I didn't have to compete; I simply had to look dignified enough not to set people to wondering who let me in to their party.

My solution was a dress pattern that promised: one piece, one size-fits-all, wrap-around. And most attractive of all: easy. I chose a heavy black fabric probably meant to cover seats on dining room chairs. Total cost: about $10.95.

It was the only dress pattern I'd ever seen that boasted three armholes. Since there was only one pattern piece, I had to spread it out on the living room and the kitchen floors to cut it out. But the only sewing involved a braided trim around the entire dress, including all three armholes and a couple of hooks to hold the dress closed.

To my amazement, it turned out to be a lovely dress, simple, understated--really understated--elegance.

It became the department's opera dress, and I gladly shared it. After all, how often does a dress cut out on the floor of a duplex in San Jose get to brush up against gowns from the fashion houses of Paris and New York?

I have no idea what ever became of that all-time great dress. Maybe it's hanging in the back of one of the Sox Girls' closets. But I can tell you this: If you saw it behind a champagne glass in the pages of Valley Scene, you wouldn't think twice.

Dale Bryant is the editor of the Saratoga News

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