That Special Touch owner Terry Kutsko broadcast an announcement Oct. 15 on her shop’s Facebook page.

“After 10 fantastic years of owning That Special Touch, I have decided to say goodbye,” she wrote at the time.

The message got 15,000 hits, Kutsko said, and an outpouring of comments from saddened patrons.

The store’s inventory went on sale and word on the street was that the shop would shutter its operation for good, Kutsko said. The lease on the space at 544 Washington St. was up Dec. 31, and Kutsko had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in February.

It was time, she said, to focus on her health. She needed to find a buyer, or the beloved bridal gown shop would close.

On the precipice of the New Year, Kutsko had another announcement, one riddled with exclamation points and infused with a happy tone.

“I’m so excited to announce That Special Touch has a new owner and will REMAIN OPEN!!,” Kutsko wrote. “I’m happy to congratulate Traci DeBord on purchasing the bridal shop! She will continue to run it in the same special way that everyone has come to expect, and you will receive the same personal service that we’ve always been known for. We still have some loose ends to tie up, so it will be a few more weeks before she begins taking orders again.”

Something old

Through That Special Touch, Kutsko has outfitted hundreds of brides. She’s dressed up hundreds of prom goers and put plenty of grooms in their tuxes. Although clothes are her focus now, That Special Touch started off as a floral shop. Kutsko had more than 20 years of experience crafting floral arrangements for weddings, working for Petals and Vines. One day, she found herself flipping through the classifieds section of the newspaper. An interior designer was selling off her fixtures, along with a cash register. She opened up shop in the Zaharakos building.

“I had one dad — I was doing flowers for him,” Kutsko said. “He was in the shop and he said to me, ‘I just want to give you one piece of advice. Do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t promise what you can’t come through with.’”

The advice stuck with her as her business grew. To supplement her floral business, she ordered a few dresses. Then she ordered a few more. Then she added tuxes.

When Zaharakos expanded, Kutsko moved to the 500 block of Washington Street. Eventually, she took over the storefront next to her. Now, That Special Touch has five dressing rooms and is pleasantly stocked with wedding dresses, prom dresses and tuxes.

“I never really planned to have this whole big bridal shop,” Kutsko said. “It just really grew over the last 10 years.”

When Hillary Apple was preparing for her wedding, she saved for last her visit to That Special Touch.

“I kind of knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t going to feel right buying a dress anywhere else,” Apple said.

Apple had purchased her prom dress at That Special Touch — a gold-colored dress with gathering that reminded her of the formal gown Belle wore in Disney’s animated “Beauty and the Beast.”

“Terry provides high-end looks, but it’s not too expensive,” Apple said. “It feels like you’re in a high-end bridal salon, but you’re treated more like family.”

For as much happiness as her dresses generate, Kutsko feels the magic every day.

“I think the dresses themselves are gorgeous,” she said. “When the right girl puts it on, that’s when the magic happens. I know that sounds kind of corny. When you can match a person with the right dress and make them feel fantastic about themselves, that’s the best thing.”

Something new

Her cancer diagnosis didn’t spell an immediate end for the shop. Kutsko spent 2015 battling the disease, which was found in her breast, lungs, liver and on her spine. The cancer, she said, is now inactive.“I’m doing a ton better,” she said. “I just really want to work on building up my endurance and feeling super healthy. I’m going to have to continue to fight this.” A few years ago, Traci DeBord had purchased her wedding dress at That Special Touch. Actually, the dress was a prom dress — shorter than the typical wedding dress, and executed in ivory with black accents. The MainSource Bank employee liked the shop’s Facebook page and, when she saw Kutsko’s post about the search for a buyer, remarked to her husband that it would be fun to own a bridal shop. And then she continued to think about it. DeBord met with Kutsko and, by Dec. 29, had worked out a deal. DeBord would leave her financial job and buy the dress shop.

DeBord, who has a blended family of four boys, has always wanted a little girl to dress up.

“Now I get to do that every day,” DeBord said.

She will take over Feb. 1.

“I think I’m going to feel a sense of accomplishment, but also a little scared,” DeBord said. “But I have the comfort of knowing that Terry is just a phone call away.”

It is a special shop that Kutsko is handing over.

“Sometimes, at the end of the day, when you’re turning the lights out, you just look around the shop,” Kutsko said. “It is really just a magical business.”

readmore:www.marieaustralia.com/evening-dresses

http://www.marieaustralia.com

As with everything else in American life, the national government is just another commodity packaged for mass consumption. We're all being spoon fed a spectacular narrative which by its very nature is designed to evoke the passions.

Every day, someone gets on TV and says or does something which provokes outrage, drawing the viewer in like the iridescent lure of an angler fish, and keeping them hooked just long enough for the hypnotic messages of the corporate sponsors to burrow their way into the collective consciousness between "newscasts."

It is precisely for this reason that these frivolous displays SELL like hotcakes. There's no government going on here. There hasn't been for who knows how long? All that is left is BUSINESS. Raw and unfettered. The United States of America is now nothing more than a 'reality' show, and boy, I tells ya, the revenue stream is OH, SO LUCRATIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ººº

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit,
according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world,
and not according to Christ.

Colossians 2:4-8 (NKJV)

His Nietzschean trip moved from Comic toward Tragic:
Deleuze’s delusions flew out the fenêtre
Airborne and ****** on philosphy’s magic
(the nihilist suicide’s raison d’être…)
Propelled from the window, transcending the Ontic,
his organless body in textual flight,
a schiz-flow beyond on a voyage turned frantic.
His thought – a nomadic adornment for speed,
multiplicitly viewing a thousand plateaux
was a force for unhinging the doorways of light
and a plea for postmodern decoding indeed.
His frame soon encountered pure striated space
in the form of the pavement caressing his face.

He joins other smokers of Gallic tabac,
other esotericians of cognitive frenzy
(those mullahs of madness, those sultans of Whack…)
Sorely missed by his victims, disciples and friends
he is mourned, misinterpreted, copied, dismissed
– but for semioticians he heads up the list.

Another brave Frenchman, some guy named Debord
a bespectacled Marxist (who missed all the marks)
made the mediums’ message a radical bore
dialectically fading the lights into darks.
Indirectly disrupting pop-culture with Punk
and other anarchic phenomena-junk,
he too chose to leave with a nihilist bang –
while we whimper and suffer down here with the gang.
The old situationist’s last situation:
an agit-prop funeral short on elation…

So to French de-constructor-philosopher-ravers
and all who rejoice while society wavers
I offer these lines, like a quick coup-de-grace
and be warned – they’re now viewing the Good Lord en face.

"Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord
a founding text of the Situationists
it's like social media was invented
to intensify what he's talking about
our reality is a manufactured representation
of course Guy Debord's life
was yet another glorious failure
his canny analysis changed nothing
but it can be argued that glorious failure
is the way to go
otherwise you're not thinking big

I did conspire to love you.

2. The moon was happy with us.

3. Baudrillard’s concept of “Object Fetishism” is more relevant than Marx’s.

4. Thank you.

5. Trees are closer to heaven than the angels. (I know, you already know that, but I like the line).

6. You have the most beautiful sorrowful eyes.

7. The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. (RILKE 1912)

8. Locomotives fall in love going in opposite directions.

9. Certain earthquakes do not like themselves.

10. The more one contemplates the less one lives; the more one accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less one understands ones’ own existence and ones’ own desires. (Debord 1967)

11. I did plot to love you.

12. The black crow on the wire is not me.

13. Umbrellas can be opened inside. (Only black; counter intuitive, I know).

14. Your touch; my body remembers softly.

15. I did love you.

16. Clocks sometimes stop for no reason.

17. Even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that contains a desire or its reverse, a fear…Everything conceals something else.
(CALVINO 1972)

18 Sometimes letters sent, never arrive.

19. Only you ever made me blush.

20. In the end, everything is just a dream.

21. This poem will maximize your interval times.

22. Love is ambiguous, at best a “Contamination”, from the Latin *** tangere. “leaving a tactile print.”

23. I will let you go.

24. I will publish this poem

25. I will always love you.


Sincerely Mr. Leibow