There were so many. They were from my sisters plays, productions, dances, choirs, or nowhere. I could never decide which dress to put on. It was like choosing one candy out of a whole grocery store's selection. We would have to try on each one and argue about who got which dress. I always won the fight of the dress ups, I could whip up a batch of tears in three seconds flat, therefore I always got the blue dress.

In the blue dress I was the queen of the clouds. I would float around in my own world, with only me in it. The dress was a light blue, as light as the sky on a very sunny day. Decorating the puffy skirt that began at hips was a silvery, sparkly vine that I believed to be real silver. The back scooped down deeply to reveal my hard earned swim suit tan that I had gotten over the summer as a result of my denying my mother's bribes to make me wear sunscreen. I thought my dress to be lovelier than the "Lisa Frank" poster with dolphins and sea turtles in a magenta sunset with unicorns on the shore.

I was always the princess, my friend Jenn was the queen, and her tag along little sister would be our servant. Jenn and I loaded on my older sister's make up. As I covered my lips and beyond with the bright red lipstick, I felt that I had just become a woman, a full grown woman who wears lipstick.

I would strut down the stairs as if I was the only person of concern in the whole wide world, and with my two friends as my mother and my maid, we would all have a tea party, that my older sister would serve to us. Following the tea party we would turn on some classical music, or assign somebody to hum, and we pretended that the teddy bears were real live princes, and we were all dancing at a ball. When the scene of the ball became a bore, the three of us would climb the stairs and sit on our "thrones" in the play room, with Lauren on a wooden stool, and argue as to who married the prince and who the prince really loved, and all of the other drama that our childhood heads could make up.

I don't know when, it all stopped so gradually, but I lost my interest in playing dress up. My mother finally got rid of all of the dresses, we don't use them any more, she is right, but I will miss them.