Crit Panel

This morning I had my Crit panel, none of the people below were on my panel but they were on some panel somewhere, that's for sure. My panel went well. It started out a little wonky when two of the members of my panel informed me that they had not received my work. This made me nervous because I had sent it in a very timely fashion...one of these people didn't receive it because their email hadn't been on my panel list and so, though I wrote their name down, I wasn't able to send them anything. The other insisted that he had checked his email several times with no luck. But when I googled his email address it came right up as having been sent my piece on April 25. So that was his fault not mine, and he actually did a good job of speed reading twenty pages and having a few good things to say about them.
I've heard many a horror story, blah story and eh story about Crit week and I'm not sure exactly what I expected...except that I expected it would go just fine. I think it was one part my work being relatively strong, one part my laissez faire attitude and one part the panel members themselves. I got a few suggestions I hadn't heard before, many that I had and a few appreciative murmurs. There was no extreme negativity or pomposity and that was good because it was 9 in the morning and I would have laughed or fallen asleep. I mean, their comments were far more useful than one particular other who has seen the work. Oh yes and then my pal who was on my board (though her mother was not), who has seen the piece in question like a million trillion times, very much liked my revisions/improvements...which was good because in a way her opinion was one I wanted to hear--you know, cuz she's actually read the whole thing and stuff.

Marshall Field's is a big store. I went there after the second crit on my panel and saw a few dresses but I forgot the nature of upscale department stores where you expect something to be, maybe, seventy-one hundred dollars and it ends up costing four hundred and that's just craziness. So I left without trying anything on. Urgh.