The Dress Looks Nice on You

I have a recording of a live show from 11/16/2004 in Toronto, and on it Sufjan tells this story. Since its a little different from the one posted above, I thought I'd type it out for those who are interested:

"Quick story, maybe you've heard this one before. After we moved out of Detroit we moved up state to a small town called Alanson, there was only 300 people. It was very boring. And that's where I went to high school. When I was a freshman, about 14 years old, I met this girl named Robin. She was four years older, she was 18. She had curly hair, and she had these big blue eyes, and wore these really cool glasses. And she had a car - she was a senior - so I was really cool all of a sudden, 'cause I was this kid who had this older girlfriend. And we used to drive around northern Michigan, we'd go to the lakes, we'd go to the sand dunes. And her favorite thing to do would be to drive down to Traverse City, two hours south, it was the nearest big city. And we'd go to Traverse City Cherry Capital Mall. Traverse City was the cherry capital of the world because it had all these cherry orchards. And it had a big mall there, and it had all these old stores where you could buy clothes, and you could buy ice cream, and popcorn, and you could buy shoes. And everything was discount - and that was her favorite thing to do. So she would buy these blouses, and these jeans that were already pre-ripped with holes in them and patches on the knees, 'cause that was really popular back then. And, her fashion sense was sort of... Victorian meets Cyndi Lauper - I think that's what was popular then [laughter]. So she would drag me around the mall and try on all these things and come out of the dressing room... One time she tried on this complicated dress that had a paisley design on the top, and then it was kind of a floral on the bottom. [laughter] It had the big shoulder pads, because that was popular then. And it had this complicated collar; it had zippers and buttons. She came out of the changing room and just stood there and look liked umm... [laughs] she kind of just looked like a big mix of wallpaper. Kind of like a scrapbook collage. And she said, 'how does it look?' She was very expectant. And I said, 'It looks very confused.' [laughter] And she gave me that look that women give you, that uh... 'silently deconstructing you' look -- that's that look. So years later, I figured out what you say to a woman when she comes of the dressing room."

Hope you enjoyed that!