Reader Jackie from the very cool blog Shimoda's Dream tells me someone who makes quinceanera dresses in my area may be able to sew up a riding habit for me one of these days.

Although, with the price of gasoline spiraling upwards, I don't expect that there's one in my future any time soon. I'll be buying school shoes for kids and scratching along with everyone else trying to pay the horse hay bill.

Whoa. I would have enjoyed one of these when I was fifteen--

I admit, I had to look up the word "quinceanera". Here's the wikipedia definition. I think I've seen this here in Santa Fe, I just thought the young woman was going to a dance, not to church! The closest equivalents to the quinceañera in the English-speaking world are the sweet sixteen, Bar or Bat Mitzvah for Jewish children turning 13, cotillion, or, in more affluent communities, the debutante ball for those who turn 18.

Anyone out there have a debutante ball?

The closest I got was having a roommate in college who'd had a "coming out ball" (which from her description of the event, I believe is the same thing) in Cincinnati. Apparently, she was formerly introduced to society. I was invited to her home for Thanksgiving once, and it was all very civilized and lovely, with peacocks strolling on the lawn and a horseback ride through the autumn foliage in the afternoon. Her mother took us downtown for an afternoon of shopping and then lunch in a place where the ladies lunch in a department store. Are there still cute lunch places with linen, china and crystal in department stores? Certainly not here in Santa Fe, the city that has one single escalator. I recall high tea at Harrod's in London once when I was eighteen, but we were all students, all wearing blue jeans ...

I'll take this kind of girly right of passage any day over this.--

“The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing” – and which culminated, for at least one father and his daughters, with a dreamy walk in the night around a lake, “was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed,” said the Times article.

Ugh.

When I read about these Chastity Balls a few weeks ago in the NY Times, I had a very visceral and unpleasant reaction,(you may wish to take dramamine, or something stronger, before clicking), but I'm not going to write about that now, except to say that instead of a young woman making her "debut" to the world, this seems to me a form of abuse, where girls are nothing more than their father's property to be cloistered away until such time that they are passed along to a man in what appears to be a surprisingly medieval future. Pure tyranny, as Judith Warner observed recently. Too much big bad sun god stuff, for my taste, thank you very much.

Nope. My lips are sealed. I'm still in happy pink fluffy dress land, resplendent with white cake and sugar frosting, and perhaps, if you're lucky,

la luna.