Scoliosis and the shopping saga

I'm living proof that the "Jewish American Princess" stereotype is a bunch of hogwash: I hate, hate, HATE clothes shopping!!! And I'm bad at it, too. As a consequence, I've been dressing largely in Land's End for years.

Every now and then, though, one of my less fashion-challenged friends has mercy on me (not to mention my husband, stuck with Ms. Dull Dresser), and takes me clothes shopping. This time, my girlfriend really outdid herself--knowing that I'm working for an Orthodox Jewish organization, she suggested that, instead of hitting her usual Long Island haunts, we go to a New York City neighborhood with a high enough percentage of Orthodox Jews that we were bound to find longer skirts. Suffice it to say that I did a certain amount of damage to the family budget, but I'll be lookin' good for the High Holidays, and longer, with my new year-round skirts.

A trip is planned later for tops (of which we hope that modest ones are much easier to find than skirts), but therein lies a tale. We went over to my girlfriend's house, and she handed me a bunch of tops to try on, just to give me an idea of what I might be able to buy that might turn one of the skirts into an instant "simcha" (special-occasion) outfit. Sigh. I'm trying not to shoot the messenger, but there are disadvantages to shopping with a physician's assistant. She told me that the trouble I'm having getting tops that fit properly is not that my back is bent from front to back, but, rather, that it's bent in an s-curve from side to side. In official medical terminology, I have scoliosis. She further informed me that scoliosis is probably not amenable to correction by a chiropractor. My chiropractor had already told me that, but I guess I hadn't realized the implication. Looks like I'm likely to be a pretzel as an old lady after all. Bummer.