Pulitzer prize.

Today, we need to discuss how uncool I am. Actually, I think nearly every one of my blogs has a final, unwritten sentence; “Moral: Quinn is the least cool person you know”, but today we are going to specifically discuss how deeply unhip I am. I’m not even unhip in the I listen to Kraftwerk, eat salted licorice from Denmark and code until my chair becomes part of my spinal column/So geeky I’m oddly hip sort of way. I’m so lacking in cool that my very presence in a place works against whatever cool thing might happen.

More times than I can count, I have attended a party populated by three people, two of them the bartenders, and left out of boredom only to find out the next morning that the party was “…raging! Incredible! People having sex in the foyer!...” a half-hour after I left. For a while, I attributed my never attending a cool party with my lack of patience. Finally, though, I realized that cool simply wasn’t going to enter the room as long as I was standing there asking if there were deviled eggs.

Only once have I collided with cool. In my early twenties, I was working in commercial casting, and I was invited to a party celebrating the opening of a new modeling agency. Knowing something of models -- how they would show up for a 10:15 am audition promptly at 4:30pm, sometimes even the same day -- I arrived two hours after the event started. I was the first person there. I chatted with the bartenders and the cleaning staff for an hour or so, and then hid in the storeroom for another hour reading a book I had secreted in my purse. My absence from the floor must have confused the Gods of Hipness because when I finally left the storeroom the club was alive with beautiful, young, tall people and their agents, who were none of the above. I drifted around for an hour, drawing no attention whatsoever, which is what happens when you are five years older and a foot shorter than anyone else in the room.

Oddly enough, no matter where I drifted, no matter how hard I worked to use the wakes six foot-tall fifteen year-olds create to travel throughout the room, I would inevitably end up wedged between a wall and a model named Misty. Misty had gotten her hair cut for a big shoot. When they first did it, she cried, but once they blew it out, she liked it a lot. Her booker screamed when she saw the hair cut. SCREAMED! But now she liked it.

This was becoming like that six-month period where no matter what time of day I turned on HBO, the same scene from “Lambada, the Forbidden Dance” was playing. I knew it was time to go. I pushed my way through the now-packed club, and reached the door. The bouncer offered to stamp my hand, assuming I was off to smoke and return for more hair stories. I shook my head.

“Nope, thanks. Going home.”

I heard a moan of disbelief. Glancing down the wall, I saw easily seventy-five people waiting to get into this club so they too could have the joy of buying eight-dollar beers, feeling old and pudgy and hearing about the haircut of a stranger named after a weather condition. Their very longing to be where I was made me stop briefly in my tracks. I had been going out long enough at this point to realize I had lightening in a bottle; I was inside the party of the night. This is what hip felt like. Hip felt boring and self-involved and expensive. I left without regrets.

Moral: Quinn is the least cool person you know.

Even knowing this about myself, I can still stand in awe of exactly how something I am becoming. I say “something” because I have no idea what the following information makes me. Everyone is allowed to contribute their own adjective.

Daughter was paging through a catalogue we had gotten, found something and ran to show it to me.

“Mommy,” she said breathlessly, “we should get these!”

I looked at what had drawn her attention and smiled. It could be cute for spring. Matter of fact, it might be really cute! Then, the reality of what I was considering took my breath away.

Readers, I am considering coordinating Lilly Pulitzer mother-daughter outfits. My greatest concern right now is not that she will look adorable and I will look like an ass, which would be a justifiable anxiety. My greatest concern is since Daughter and I have completely different coloring, I won’t be able to find a pattern equally flattering to both.

My second concern is that I might have told some friend to beat me to death if I ever did a mother-daughter outfit, and have forgotten extracting the promise.

I’m certainly no innocent in the Pulitzer oeuvre. In fact, I am known in many circles as The One with the Tropical Pants. Christmas Eve service at church, I found the soloist to compliment her singing. She took my hand, looked at me closely and brightened. “Oh, I know you,” she said. “I just didn’t recognize you without your pants”.

It can be safely said, Lilly Pulitzer and I are like this. But a pair of pants with monkeys or another pair with trailing fluorescent vines is one thing. Being the human equivalent of Garanimals with your own child is another. And yet I cannot stop thinking about how cute it would be.

And consider this: Daughter wants us to look alike. Within a matter of minutes, relatively speaking, not only is she not going to want us to be a matched set, she’s going to beg me to stash myself between the mattress and the box spring when her friends come over. Shouldn’t I be grabbing these moments wherever I can?

Right now, I’m uncool. If I buy an outfit which matches my daughter’s outfit, I think I reach a whole new level of uncool. But I’m loved, and Daughter and I can both wear one particular pattern where the primary color is bright pink.

And there’s this lovely matching necktie for Consort…