You Go, Girls!

A personal layaway plan and three fancy dresses later, Terri confronted the fact that her husband, at least in the first 23 years of their marriage, had never been the out-on-the-town type. "But I just said, 'Look, you're going to have to figure out where to take me,'" she recalls. He did, and Terri's next purchase was a denim cowgirl dress encrusted with pearls.

"Basically, I don't shop anywhere else. Their clothes come from Dallas and Las Vegas, and those places are further ahead than Denver. Ahead," Terri concludes, "is where I want to be."

Most Glitzy Glitz clients, like Terri, are described as family--whether or not there is any genetic connection. Bob Fetters, who has dropped by the store for a chat, seems to know the regulars as well as his wife and mother-in-law do. He greets by name Sarah Bjornsen, a twenty-year-old veterinary assistant who models for the store on occasion. She is here to renew her fascination with a crisp white evening gown, but first she sits down for a brief discussion of the Internet. Bob's been researching several of his pet interests, among them obscure Irish genealogy and Viking longboats. If he doesn't get a flat-rate server, he says, he'll go broke paying the phone bill. Mid-reply, Sarah spots a leopard-print chiffon scarf. She immediately goes to the phone and calls her mother.

"Mom will be right down," she tells Josie and Gunhild. "She needs this scarf."

"Hmm," Josie says noncommittally. Even if fate brought the chiffon scarf to this place, true glitz rates more than an impulse purchase.

"Well, this will be fun," Gunhild says, settling herself in a chair among the rhinestone cowboy shirts. "Life is short. None of us come out of it alive."

Josie raises an eyebrow at her mother, as if to say, from a chiffon scarf to Life? In the space of one short sentence?

"Yes," Gunhild says aloud. "Life is exciting, and life is short. Meanwhile, let's have fun.