Editor’s Note: Marie Brenner, author of Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, is also contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women

Okay, I admit it. I am a sample-sale dabbler, a Texas discount retailer’s daughter who takes primal pleasure in combing the racks. Hillary, where are you? Here, at the mother of all sales, New York City’s once-a-year Posh Sale to benefit Lighthouse International, you find the ultimate focus group: women – and men – in search of the $30 Armani jacket, staring with longing at those Jimmy Choo stiletto boots with killer lace cutouts. Once a year, thousands of shoppers land on East 60th Street to fight their way through truckloads of designer castoffs at a wisp of their cost. Is the mob reacting to a fear of a tanking economy or just out wallowing in the thrill of a buy? I am clearly not alone. When I arrive for the evening preview, the line snakes around the block.

But what is it about a table marked Kim Cattrall shoes?

"You have got to be kidding," my friend Christine says, when I show her what I am about to commit. "Put that down right now." Next to me in the communal dressing room are a TV executive, a famous writer and a public-interest-law foundation head. We push for mirror space with the size-2 in the thong draping herself in a wisp of Dolce & Gabbana. "Put that back immediately," I hear someone say of a royal blue pantsuit. "That is sooo Hillary." Not a good sign.

Here it all is, a personal Rorschach test — racks of vintage donated purple velour raincoats, Chanels that could have been worn by Piaf and gold leather pants. And could I explain the quirk that makes me sure the black crepe pants with the leather sawtooth rickrack will turn me into Katharine Hepburn? I’m saved once again, this time by wowOwow’s own Joan Juliet Buck. "Not in this life," she says. In the dressing room, I snap on a short black jacket. "Now, that’s better," the woman next to me says. "Where did you find it?" I don’t have the heart to tell her it is my own.