Chew on this

I wasn't going to post again until next year, but I just had a semi-inspired idea and need to share.

Josh and Emily and I saw For Your Consideration at The Parkway tonight. It wasn't that funny, sadly, but still worth the price to watch Catherine O'Hara try to say "meshugge" and then wind up with collagen lips.

Afterward, we went to old favorite Trio for tea and some ridiculous chocolate thing. In a stereotypical place—although a first for me—a random business plan popped into my head. OK, I was in the bathroom. But just washing my hands when the muse struck, so don't get grossed out.

Emily, who's petite in her own right, has a pair of even smaller sisters. Like, wicked small. When anyone in the family goes shopping, they've been known to ask: "If you see any really small clothes, please buy them for us? Anything double zero. Just buy them."

Back in the day, I worked at a hoochie boutique in Berkeley. Students came in all the time to ask if we had anything smaller than a size zero. I was polite to them, but my rude inner monologue was saying, "No, honey, they don't make numbers smaller than zero."

But when it comes to fashion . . . why don't they?

We have all kinds of retail for rapidly ballooning Americans: Big & Tall, Lane Bryant, etc. But we don't have any specialty stores to accommodate the parallel trend of extremely small adult women. Why hasn't anyone capitalized on this yet? Designers would salivate over it, Hollywood starlets would eat it up, and Emily's sisters wouldn't have to shop at Gap Kids.

So here's a gift for my friends in B-school: Start an upscale chain for the mini ladies out there in L.A. and the Marina. The smaller the clothing, the more you can charge. I even have a name for you—Less Than Zero—although I wouldn't recommend asking a coked-up James Spader to star in the ad campaign. Maybe Kate Moss is available?

Just remember that you saw it here first, or I'll have to sue somebody and change the title of this blog to The Business Casual Businesswoman. It doesn't have the same ring to it.