Babydoll dresses...I just don't know about them any more.

Pros:

They are feminine and in style and totally hide your beer gut.

Cons:

They scream vulnerability. Cutesieness. Weakness.

Walking around looking like a whoreish 8-year-old does little to advance the feminist cause. Worse still, it implies pandering to the darker side of heterosexual male sexuality, the side that makes some men obsessed with very young women/girls only. There's a reason why you don't see many babydoll dresses on the lesbian scene. It's because lesbians don't care what men think. 

I had my babydoll break-down/epiphany last night.

I was wearing a beige babydoll with pouffy sleeves covered in little yellow hearts (even describing it makes me feel slightly nauseated. Why Caroline, why?). I had cranked up the paedophilia factor by  teaming the dress with a pair of knee-high cream socks and and a schoolgirl bag. The look was pure, unadulterated Harajuku kiddie porn.

I was at the Moon Upstairs/Citay/Howling Rain show at the Echo and around me dozens of other girls were sporting a similarly gamine look - tent dresses, pouffy sleeves, vintage and lots of lace and embroidered details. No-one was rocking the full-on Lolita look quite as hard as I was though. I looked around and realized why—there were no babydolls.

Instead, the look was predominantly earth mother/flower child, with dresses still über-feminine but  longer, more diaphanous.

Standing next to all these hot, bad-ass Joni Mitchell chicks, I felt ashamed of myself and my cutesie, under-age barf-fest of a get up. "I'm not a submissive person," I thought. "So why am I dressing like one?"

I spent much of the night pondering the question, and figuring out what the hell I was going to do—half my wardrobe is made-up of babydoll varietals. How can I be babyboll, yet still walk away with my  wymyn cojones intact? 

This is what I came up with: 

1. Go mod—babydolls can be bad-ass if worn with with go-go boots and Vidal Sassoon haircut

2. Pouffy sleeves are the enemy. Avoid at all costs.

3. When in doubt, channel 1990s Courtney Love and add red smeared lipstick, smudged mascara and needle trackmarks.

I don't have much time to work on my smack addiction right now, so I'll play it safe and throw the worst of my pouffy-sleeved mysogynistic disasters where they belong - on the fire.

(Photo courtesy of shopbop.com)

Luckily, shooting the video quickly gave way to eating, drinking, and eventually lighting a stogie with David...inside the restaurant. (I know! Scandale!) I was working my way through the Cuban, when who should walk in but Daniel Boulud.

Daniel freaking-master-chef Boulud! Seriously folks, this is huge. I had never been starstruck until the moment I introduced myself, shook his well-seasoned (ha!) hands and took a photo of him and David. Plus, he's super-nice and super-normal.

The NYC-based chef was in town to shoot a TV special and he had come in with Grace's Neal Fraser after fliming at the Beverly Blvd restaurant. The kitchen had run out of food, so they grabbed a couple of bottles of red from Bin's phenomenal wine collection, headed out to the patio and hailed the bacon-wrapped hot dog vendor for some midnight sustenance. Top chefs love bacon dogs. Awesome.