Status Updates From Saturday Night (Saturday Ni...

I love Cooney. She’s one of the few, along with Jewel and L.J. Smith, who taught me how to be human.

I object to the villain - as much as there is a villain in this book - being named Christopher. Chrises should always be heroes. I am strange about names, and some more than others.

“The top was very plain, but also very low-cut. When she looked down, it was like announcing that Gary should look there too.”

“His soft dark eyes moved very slowly down the dress, looking at the lace, the softly falling folds of pale pale pink, the tips of slippers showing beneath the hem.”

“Her gleaming satin slippers were pressed where usually only dirty sneakers lay. She had had to yank up the ruffles of peach and rose around her knees to keep it off the floor.”

“…it was very pretty, a good colour: dark peach, flushed like the petals of a rose…” (Kip)

“But at last tonight she had the perfect dress. Old-fashioned, garnet-coloured, the cloth was a heavy velvet. Very romantic, dark crimson, with the narrowest line of pearl beads around the swooping neckline.” (Emily)

“Her mother adjusted the thick sash, moving it a little too high so that Anne twitched with wanting to push it back down. Her grandmother took out the rhinestone star in her hair and moved it an inch farther back, so that Anne could no longer see it, just feel its unaccustomed weight.”

“The sleeves were beaded, tiny tiny beads of exactly the same colour as the dress, so that in some lights you couldn’t tell the beads were there, and another lights, Anne sent rainbows across the room as if she were hung with prisms.”

“The neckline was not symmetrical, and her grandmother had had Anne’s hair done so that it was swept to the side, and offset the unusual neckline, and then bought Anne a rhinestone necklace with an art- deco star that trembled just below her throat, and another one to go in her hair.”

“The dress for this, her first formal dance, was layers of deep electric blue, jaggedly cut, so that the skirt swirled unexpectedly, shifting with every breath, making soft whispery sounds as the brilliant blue fabric slid over itself.” (Anne)

“Through the flimsy bag the dress had an ethereal look to it, like a pink cloud of summer sunset blown by the wind.”

“… undoing the long, long row of tiny fabric-covered buttons in back…”

“The dress was a Cinderella dress. Transforming. In it, she felt herself to be everything the dress was: soft, gleaming, fragile, timelessly lovely.”

“The neckline of the old prom dress dipped in scallops edged with the old gray lace. ‘I look so fragile,’ breathed Beth, ‘as if I’m a museum piece.’”

“Then there were tiny bows of silvery ribbon tipped with pink along the sleeves, dancing from the falling shoulders to the tight, lace-cuffed wrists.” (Beth Rose)

“Such an old-fashioned dress, and yet not one where people would giggle at her; not a dress where people would wonder why it hadn’t been given to the Salvation Army decades ago. There were three fabrics: one of glistening pink, and one of delicate, faintly gray lace (but Aunt Madge said it had always been gray).”