Pardon my confusion, but my head’s still a little fuzzy from trying to wrap it around the “great dress controversy.”
As a devout avoider of all things social media, I was blissfully ignorant of the “great dress controversy” until last weekend when I was watching “Saturday Night Live” on my television, which is a device used by old guys to inform and entertain themselves. The lead story on “Weekend Update” had something to do with dresses.
“I don’t get the joke,” I said to my wife.
“You’re kidding, right?,” she said glancing up from whatever she was doing on her iPad. “Everybody’s talking about it.”
“I’m not kidding. And I’m sure not everybody’s talking about it.”
Then she called up a photo of a gold and white dress on her iPad and asked, “What color is this dress?”
“Gold and white,” I answered.
“How can you say that?” she exclaimed. “It’s black and blue.”
We argued about that for a while and then I dozed off, because the color of a dress didn’t seen worth losing sleep over. Besides, who cares what color a stupid dress is in the first place?
The answer, it turned out, wasn’t “everybody.” But it was at least 28 million, which is how many people lit up something called BuzzFeed within two days after a photo of the dress was posted. At one point, there were 670,000 people responding simultaneously. There hasn’t been this much fuss over a dress since Monica Lewinsky’s, which may or may not have been blue.
The New York Times did an analysis of the photo which, it claims, “proved” that the dress was black and blue. Celebrities weighed in. Taylor Swift said it was black and blue, Kim Kardashian said it was white and gold. Politicians took bold positions. “I know three things,” bragged Sen. Christopher Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. “1) the ACA (Affordable Care Act) works; 2) climate change is real; 3) that dress is gold and white.”
The dress controversy even managed to work its way into a different controversy.
Referring to the ticket demand for the Israeli Prime Minister’s address to Congress on Tuesday, a spokesman for John Boehner declared: “If Taylor Swift and Katy Perry did a joint concert at Madison Square Garden wearing white-and-gold and black-and-blue dresses, accompanied by dancing sharks and llamas, that’s the only way you’d have a tougher ticket.”
I’m not sure how many people voiced their opinion on BuzzFeed in the two days following the speech.
I’m guessing it wasn’t 28 million.
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