EVENING BAG
By:
September 1, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
The envelope is made of a lush parchment — the most elegant stationery I have ever held. There in the middle: my name and address in sweeping gold calligraphy. Inside: a second envelope with just my name, “Miss Margaret Inge,” also in gold. Inside the second envelope: an invitation from the Duke of Norfolk to the spring ball in his castle.
The castle is sited in the small town of Arundel in southern Britain. It is also the location of an experimental college program from New England College. What makes it unique is that American salaries have attracted some of the most esteemed dons from Oxford University. It also offers American degrees without required attendance on an American campus — attractive to me because I have already completed two years toward my degree and want to stay abroad.
The invitation comes to me in recognition of my role as president of the school’s student governing body.
This event sounds pretty fancy. It will be the complete opposite of my day-to-day student life, which is dominated by jeans, t-shirts and Friday nights at the pub throwing darts. It throws me into a full-tilt tizzy because the fanciest thing I own is a Faire Isle sweater. At this point in my life, I was 5 feet tall and weighed 97 pounds. None of my schoolmates has an appropriate dress I can borrow, even if they were my size.
A day trip north to London finds me in the department store Selfridges, where I find a simple silk dress on the discount rack that I can alter for the occasion. I pair it with my grandmother’s pearls, which were gifted to me on my sixteenth birthday. I feel more prepared for the ball now, but I am still perplexed about the need for the other things, about which I know enough to know that I don’t have them.
Lucky for me, Arundel and its royal residents have filled the local thrift shop with elegant items. It is there that I spy a white clutch adorned with crystals and sequins. It accompanies me to the ball, serving as the holder for my lipstick, mirror and the invitation. I hold it as I swirl around the dance floor and have a thoroughly marvelous time.
For decades now, I have held on to the bag. Is it time to let it go?
If you were in Maggie’s place, what would you do with the bag? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.