Feeel* (for Feel*)

Hey, I resemble that remark! In a recent article on Slate entitled "Proud to be Dowdy," Hanna Rosin states: "It's an insult, but it's also a superpower. Let's reclaim it." I couldn't agree more. (Although I'm never quite sure if I'm more frumpy than dowdy, or more frowzy than frumpy. And then there's blowsy, sleazy, lumpy, dumpy, and all the rest of the dwarves.) Regardless of what you call it, though, it's all about comfort, and only partially or perversely about "fashion," or even "personal style." I like to be presentable, of course, but it's self-evidently better (to me, if not to the likes of Fernando Lamas, as caricatured by Billy Crystal on Saturday Night Live) to feel good than to look good. Frumpy is also a matter of taste and attitude, and some people can really work the look, like Lena Dunham's character, Hannah Horvath, on the HBO series Girls. Dunham gets a lot of flack for being "fat" and not being ashamed of it, or even much inclined to try and hide her careless curves and Pillsbury paunch. She does look really cute, though, kind of like a big baby, padding around in bare feet and short, shapeless sundresses. Even her tattoos are of children's book characters. (The one she's showing off here is of Ferdinand the Bull, another renegade who knows his own mind.) I've blogged about Dunham before, but you can never have too much dowdy—whether it's apple pan dowdy or apple-shaped and doughy! (Lena, you're perfect and we love you.) Today's typo turned up once in OhioLINK, and 53 times in WorldCat.

(Lena Dunham at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Supporting Characters, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid