Last Wednesday, I was watching American Housewife when Taylor (Meg Donnelly) entered the Otto kitchen wearing a retro gray, purple, and turquoise color block Arizona Jeans sweatshirt from JCPenney. "Hey, that's my shirt!" I exclaimed. The husband looked up from his phone dubiously. "If you don't believe me, I'll show you!" I sputtered with all the righteous indignation of a third-grader in the '90s whose Yo! MTV Raps trading card collection is being called into question. ("You don't have LL Cool J and Dr. Dre!" "Do too!") Then I raced upstairs to grab the sweatshirt. When I returned, the husband nodded, then restarted the show, paused it, and took this pic without me even having to ask. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The husband is a prince among men.
This isn't the first time I've seen one of my garments on the small screen. The Middle's Sue Heck had a pair of my Target pajamas, and The Goldbergs' Erica wore my L'Amour by Nannette Lepore crop top, also from JCPenney. I guess ABC likes JCP, that mecca for middle class shoppers, even when it's on life support. Later during the Housewife episode, Greg (Diedrich Bader) took the thread a step further when chiding wife Katie (Katy Mixon) about one of her stunts:
"I had to take all those tops back to JCPenney and explain why there were no tags and why they smelled like deodorant."
It wasn't so long ago that Mixon was doing JCP commercials with Splitting Up Together's Jenna Fischer, then after that show got cancelled, Single Parents' Leighton Meester. Then Parents was canned too. Will Housewife, which has bounced around timeslots for years and was, this season, forced to recast spooky and snarky youngest child Anna-Kat (easily my favorite Otto), fare better than these sacked sitcoms and their preferred yet doomed department store?
Only time and ratings will tell. In the meantime, I'm going to wear this sweatshirt like it's 1990-something. And reminisce about my troll collection.
Because I never owned a single Yo! MTV Raps card. That was the neighborhood kids and my sister.