Why don’t they have an express lane at Jo-Ann Fabric?! I mean, I was in there Saturday. All I needed some thread to match a button that had fallen off one of my sweaters, and the thread on the other buttons was a shade of blue I just didn’t have in my sewing kit. Isn’t that always the way?
I find my thread, no problem. Sure, I had to nudge aside an old lady checking out the fake flowers, and I may have hip-checked a kid playing with the ribbons (just kidding), but so far, so good. What I didn’t take into account was the fact that it’s a Saturday in late September, and folks decorating for fall and gearing up for Halloween, if you can believe it!
I get to the check out, and of course, it’s stacked three deep. And I’m not talking about people with one or two items in a hand-held basket. No, in my lane (the shortest one of the three they have open) I’m behind not one, but two Miss Crafty Crafts. That’s right! Two women, flushed with shopping fever, massive carts just loaded to the gills with all manner of fall decorations and Halloween paraphernalia, both of them clutching a fist full of coupons.
Don’t get me wrong. Me and my pals, the Women Who Run With the Moose, are big into crafts. I have been that woman with the coupons who needs a price check because she happened to grab the only glow-in-the-dark singing pumpkin without a price tag. But I was not that woman on Saturday. I was the woman with a single spool of thread in one hand and her cash money in the other. I was the woman with a to-do list a mile long. I was the woman who needed to pee. Bad.
A gal one lane over from me sighed, threw the five buttons she was holding down in a bin of discounted beach balls and stormed out the door. That seemed to snap the woman directly in front of me out of shopping la-la land. She saw I had only the single spool of thread, and nicely let me go in front of her. My bladder did a happy dance.
“Thank you!” I told her. “You’ve done your good deed for the day.”
I barely made it to the bathroom at McDonald’s. In fact, I was so traumatized by my ordeal, I had to have a hot fudge sundae. Purely for medicinal purposes, you understand.
Jo-Ann Fabric, get with the program. An express lane. Please!
That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!
IDA’S PODCAST: Jo-Ann Fabric Hell
Coming Up This Fall
September 29 & 30: Makin’ Whoopie!, The Footlights Theatre, http://www.thefootlightsinfalmouth.com/ Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm, Falmouth, ME
October 17: Book Reading, Alfred F. Totman Public Library, http://www.totman.lib.me.us/ 6:30pm, Phippsburg, ME
November 4, 11, 18: Makin’ Whoopie!, Calumet Women’s Weekends, http://www.calumet.org/womensweekends 7:30pm, West Ossippe, NH
Check out my full schedule here: http://www.idaswebsite.com/schedule/