Greetings my lovelies,

Apparently I’ve reached the stage of rewatching old television shows where I spend less time following the plot and more time asking questions nobody involved in the production ever intended me to ask.

This time it’s Gossip Girl.

I’ve been rewatching it lately, and holy hell, I had forgotten how completely ridiculous these people’s lives were. These are supposed to be teenagers.

Teenagers.

Yet they’re wandering around Manhattan attending galas, drinking cocktails, manipulating billionaires, blackmailing each other, sleeping with everybody within a five-block radius, and having relationship problems that require flowcharts.

When I was their age, having an exciting social life meant somebody’s parents were gone for the weekend. These kids are negotiating corporate takeovers between algebra classes.

And don’t even get me started on the adults because they’re no better. Actually, in many cases they’re worse.

Everybody has slept with everybody, married somebody else’s somebody, dated somebody’s parent, lied about something enormous, hidden a child, discovered a child, lost a fortune, regained a fortune, or attended a charity gala immediately after committing some kind of emotional felony.

It’s magnificent. Completely ridiculous.

But magnificent.

Then there’s Blair, who is my favorite, by the way. Blair and Chuck. I adore them both. They’re manipulative, dramatic, scheming, occasionally terrible human beings, and somehow I’m still sitting there rooting for them.

As far as the adults go, it will always be Rufus and Blair’s mother, Eleanor, for me.

Lily makes me insane.

She’s beautiful. She’s elegant. She’s polished. And she has this incredible ability to be controlling, secretive, and completely convinced that whatever she’s doing is for everyone’s own good. She can blow up half the family’s lives before lunch and somehow still look like she’s on her way to a charity luncheon.

Meanwhile, Blair Waldorf could be fleeing a burning building and somehow emerge with her headband perfectly positioned, her tights coordinated with her handbag, and every hair exactly where she intended it to be.

And then there’s Serena.

Beautiful girl.

But Serena’s hair perpetually looks like she got ready in the back seat of a convertible traveling 75 miles an hour down the Jersey Turnpike. Every time she comes on screen, I want to reach through the television with a hairbrush.

And can we talk about television “teenagers” for a minute?

Who the hell looked like that at seventeen?

Nobody I knew.

These people are supposedly worried about homework while looking like they should be arriving at a movie premiere. Of course, the actors themselves were older, which explains quite a bit, but television really did have us believing high school students were walking around looking like fully grown adults with professional hair, makeup, wardrobes, and bodies.

Well, professional hair in almost everyone’s case.

Serena, honey, we still need to talk.

How do you have that much money and nobody owns a comb?

Blair would NEVER.

Then we have Dan with his perpetual brooding. He makes me crazy. Is that man ever genuinely happy for more than seven consecutive minutes?

Nate too.

So much brooding.

Apparently being young, gorgeous, and filthy rich is exhausting.

And then there’s Georgina.

I loved Georgina too, which probably says something about me. Give me the women with attitude. Give me the badass demeanor. Give me the woman who walks into a room and immediately makes everyone else nervous because nobody knows what the hell she’s about to do.

I’m entertained.

But while watching the beginning of Season Two, everybody heads out to the Hamptons, because of course they do.

And it isn’t only the Hamptons throughout this show. It’s Europe. It’s private jets. It’s parents disappearing to China or going on tour while leaving teenagers behind to apparently manage their own lives, relationships, scandals, households, and occasional corporate crisis.

Excuse me?

Apparently rich teenagers cannot simply spend summer sitting around someone’s backyard eating hamburgers like the rest of us did.

No. They summer.

That’s a verb when you’re rich.

Eventually we arrive at the White Party. Everyone is dressed in white, looking fabulous, wandering around this gorgeous Hamptons estate as though this is a completely normal way to say goodbye to summer.

And immediately my brain went somewhere else because I remembered something my mother and grandmother used to say:

You don’t wear white after Labor Day.

Wait a minute.

Why?

Seriously. Who the hell decided that?

I grew up hearing it like it was an actual law of nature. Summer ends, Labor Day arrives, and apparently every white pair of pants in America must immediately report to storage.

Nobody ever explained why. It was just one of those things women knew. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. Don’t mix certain colors. Your purse should somehow coordinate with your shoes. And somewhere, somebody’s grandmother was judging your pantyhose.

And I followed those rules to a T.

Seriously, I had it all coordinated. The shoes matched the clothes. The purse matched the outfit. Even the makeup matched. The hair was always styled, and pantyhose were simply part of getting dressed no matter how hot it was outside.

And let me tell you something about New Jersey summers: people love to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

No.

It’s the humidity and the mosquitoes.

You’re trying to look cute while the air is approximately 97 percent soup and mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds are carrying away small children.

Actually…

Maybe I’ve been too hard on Serena.

New York City in the summer? Heat, humidity, pollution, walking everywhere?

Okay, Serena. I’ll give you a little grace on the hair.

A little.

Blair still managed it.

There were RULES.

So naturally, because I can no longer simply wonder about something and move on with my life, I went down the rabbit hole.

And it turns out Mom and Grandma didn’t invent this particular piece of fashion law just to torment future generations.

The whole no-white-after-Labor-Day thing really does go back to the old American social season, particularly around the late 1800s and early 1900s. Back then, wealthy families would escape hot cities during the summer and head to places like Newport and the Hamptons. Their summer wardrobes changed along with their location. Out came the lighter fabrics, linen, breezy dresses, white clothing, tennis clothes, and all the other things one apparently needs when one is wealthy enough to use the word summer as a verb.

Then summer ended. Everybody packed up their seaside lives, returned to the city, and the summer clothes went away. Darker, heavier, more formal clothing came back out.

Labor Day eventually became the unofficial dividing line.

Summer is over. Put away the white.

Apparently fashion needed a calendar.

There was some practicality involved too. Before air conditioning, lighter-colored clothing made sense during hot weather. White linen in July? Lovely.

White clothing while trudging through dirty, horse-manure-covered city streets in cold, rainy weather?

Maybe not quite as lovely.

But—and this is the part that makes me laugh—there was apparently some good old-fashioned rich people bullshitmixed in too.

Fashion historians have suggested that some of these rules became ways for established wealthy families to recognize who understood the social codes and who didn’t.

Basically:

“Oh, darling. She’s wearing white after Labor Day.”

Clearly new money.

Wait.

What the hell is new money?

I want some.

Apparently Mean Girls existed long before Regina George.

They just had servants.

And suddenly Gossip Girl makes even more sense.

Those characters aren’t simply wearing expensive clothes. Their entire world revolves around knowing the rules: where to be, what to wear, who gets invited, who doesn’t, what family you’re from, where you summer, which table you sit at, and whether your headband adequately communicates that you are currently plotting someone’s social destruction.

Blair Waldorf would have THRIVED in the Gilded Age.

Actually, she probably would have taken over the Gilded Age.

And the White Party fits perfectly into that world. White parties themselves have taken on all kinds of forms over the years. They’ve been fashionable social events, charity events, cultural celebrations, and just really beautiful parties where everybody wears white because, let’s face it, a crowd dressed entirely in white looks pretty damn spectacular.

Of course, modern pop culture gave the White Party another association because of Diddy, and considering everything connected to that name now…

Yeah.

We’re not going down THAT rabbit hole today.

I’m trying to have fun here.

But watching the Gossip Girl White Party made me realize something else: I kind of love the idea of a formal goodbye to summer.

Not necessarily only the rich-people-standing-around-a-Hamptons-estate part. Although if someone would like to invite me to a gorgeous mansion and hand me a mocktail, I’m willing to reconsider my position immediately.

Hell, invite me to a good old-fashioned backyard barbecue where we can actually sit outside without grilling ourselves alongside the hamburgers we’re about to eat.

I’ll take either one.

It’s the ritual of it. One season is ending and another is beginning. Everybody gets dressed up, gathers together, and acknowledges the transition.

Although, let’s be completely honest here.

I would love the fancy version too.

I can’t lie. Give me the opportunity to put on a beautiful outfit and spend an evening at some ridiculous Hamptons estate just to see what that world is actually like, and I’m going.

I’m curious.

I want to see the house. I want to see the clothes. I want to see the furniture. I want to see what they’re serving. I want to wander around quietly thinking, Holy shit, people actually live like this?

Then I’ll come home.

There’s something kind of lovely about that.

Of course, here in Tucson, Labor Day does not mean summer has ended.

Labor Day arrives in Arizona and summer says:

“That’s adorable.”

We’re still walking outside into air that feels like somebody opened an oven directly into our faces. People elsewhere are pulling out sweaters and talking about crisp autumn mornings while those of us in southern Arizona are standing under the air-conditioning vent whispering, “Soon.”

Meanwhile, here I am in my long, flowing yellow skirt and a tank top, looking at all the beautiful fall clothing I know damn well I cannot wear yet because I live in Tucson.

A woman can dream, can’t she?

I want pumpkins. I want cool mornings. I want open windows. I want my dark elixir of sanity outside without spontaneously combusting. I want spooky season.

Arizona says, “Best I can do is 100 degrees.”

So if anybody is going to tell me I can’t wear white after Labor Day because summer is supposedly over, they can take that complaint directly to the Sonoran Desert.

Good luck.

Even the Emily Post people have basically moved on from the old rule.

Apparently Emily never lived in the Southwest.

Today the advice is more about wearing fabrics appropriate to the actual weather and season than banning an entire color from September through May, which makes considerably more sense—especially when you live somewhere that September hasn’t received the autumn memo.

And fashion itself has changed. We have winter whites now. White jeans. Cream sweaters. White coats. People wear white all year long and somehow civilization continues.

Coco Chanel famously wore white year-round.

If Coco could ignore the rule, I think we’re safe.

Still, I find it fascinating that I heard the same rule from both my grandmother and my mother. That’s how these little cultural things survive.

Nobody sits you down and gives you a lecture about Gilded Age resort wardrobes and social class. Your grandmother simply says, “You don’t wear white after Labor Day.” Then your mother says it. Then you grow up knowing you’re not supposed to do it without having the slightest fucking idea why.

And forty-something years later you’re sitting in Tucson watching Gossip Girl, sipping your dark elixir of sanity and staring at Serena’s unbrushed hair, when suddenly your brain goes:

WAIT. WHY CAN’T I WEAR WHITE AFTER LABOR DAY?

Welcome to my mind.

There are no straight roads here.

But maybe that’s why I enjoy rewatching these old shows so much. I’m not watching them the same way I did the first time.

I’m 56 now. I’ve lived more life. I’ve changed. The world has changed. Things that once seemed glamorous sometimes look ridiculous now, and things I barely noticed the first time send me down an entire historical rabbit hole.

I look at these fictional teenagers living their absurdly wealthy Manhattan lives and think about how different that world is from mine.

And honestly?

If that’s really how the ultra-wealthy live—the constant social climbing, appearances, competition, who was invited where, who’s wearing what, who slept with whom, who’s feuding with whom—I don’t want that part.

But let’s not get carried away pretending I wouldn’t enjoy any of it.

The clothes?

Yes, please.

Some of that furniture?

Absolutely.

Europe?

Do you even have to ask?

A beautiful Hamptons house where someone else is responsible for maintaining the pool?

I’ll start packing.

The backstabbing, scheming, social climbing, and having Gossip Girl announce my personal business to the entire Upper East Side before I’ve finished breakfast?

No, thank you.

Give me my dark elixir of sanity. Give me Ronnie and our fur babies. Give me my house, my plants, my games, my writing, my witchy shit, and a little peace.

But if we’re being completely honest, you can also give me Blair’s wardrobe, some of Serena’s wardrobe, and quite a bit of Lily’s.

I’m not unreasonable.

And as for the white-after-Labor-Day rule? Mom and Grandma were right that it was a thing.

They just neglected to mention that the Fashion Police aren’t actually coming.

So wear the white jeans. Wear the cream sweater. Wear whatever the hell makes you happy.

Unless you’re Serena van der Woodsen.

Then please, sweetheart.

BUY AND USE A HAIRBRUSH.

Until next time, my lovelies.

Blessed be.