i’ll admit it. i’m an incorrigible laundry optimist. and i’m a cheapskate, and since i have to pay for laundry by the load, that only makes the whole situation worse. i make poor judgments all the time:

surely that red tank top won’t bleed onto the whites again this time.

dry clean only? they don’t really mean that.

reshape and dry flat? well, draping it over the radiator is a shape, right?

anyway, tonight’s laundry mishap was worse, because it’s not my laundry. see, i got roped into taking on wardrobe duties for the show i’m stage managing right now. no big deal, really, i just have to do a bit of ironing pre-show, and wash a load of socks, t-shirts, table linens twice a week. well, that’s where i went wrong tonight — this play is a five-course dinner party, and the cast has to eat quite a bit on stage, and they wipe their mouths on cloth napkins. which i tossed into the washer along with all the clothes. which unfortunately stank of salmon, even tho i shook them to remove any lingering crumbs. which spread the small but potent quantity of salmon oil evenly throughout the load, so when i took the clothes out of the dryer, everything smelled like a stinky fish.

and all this because i was too cheap to put the napkins in a separate load.

on mom’s advice i am now re-washing in hot water with a long soak cycle and a half cup of baking soda added to the mix. the fish smell may go, but will i have shrank everything in the process? putting me in charge of wardrobe just has disaster written all over it. if not tonight, then next week, when a pen sneaks past me into the washer, or i forget to separate reds from whites, or i leave someone’s sock in the dryer…the possibilities are endless.