Life these past few weeks has taught Marta Koehne, longtime keeper of a vintage clothing shop in Santa Rosa, that truth is stranger than reality TV.
Koehne answered the phone at her Hot Couture store in Railroad Square earlier this month and a producer with the A&E show "Shipping Wars" lofted an offer:
Would she care to have a film crew on hand as she received and put up for quick sale 540 dresses from the collection of a Southern California man who bought his wife an average of about 1,000 evening gowns a year — for close to 60 years?
Koehne, too, wondered if she'd heard that last part right.
Yes, A&E had caught wind of German immigrant Paul Brockmann of Lomita, between Long Beach and Palos Verdes. He is trying to sell off the estimated 55,000 new and used dresses that he purchased for his Margot since they met in the old country in 1955.
Koehne, 60, said the "Shipping Wars" producer set forth that a truck would deliver to Hot Couture about 1 percent of the dresses — 540 of them — and cameras would roll as she and the driver resolved a scripted dispute.
Then, she would sell as many of the dresses as she could that same day, and be paid a commission for those sales. Then the shipper would return any unsold dresses to the Brockmanns.
Koehne was a mite put off that a so-called reality TV show would coordinate and script the transactions. But the tale of the 55,000 dresses intrigued her, as did the idea of her offering a selection of them on the sidewalk to customers of Hot Couture.
She agreed to play along and a time and date was set for the sale: 2 p.m. Thursday.
Koehne said a few days ago, "If nothing else, it's bound to be a huge street party."
She told everybody she knows about the one-day, made-for-TV dress sale. She spread the word on Facebook and Craigslist.
But Tuesday brought bad tidings. Koehne said the A&E producer phoned to say that the shipping company sent a truck to the warehouse in which most of the Brockmann dresses are stored and there occurred a problem, a real, nonscripted problem.
Koehne said the upshot was that the crew of the delivery truck did not pick up any dresses, so the whole thing was off.
"I am freaking out," she said a bit later. "I have told so many people!"
What to do? Feeling that she simply must have dresses on the sidewalk and ready for anybody who might show up at the shop this afternoon, she gassed up her cargo van Tuesday evening and aimed for L.A.
More trouble. True, non-real-life TV trouble.
Koehne met Paul Brockmann on Wednesday and inspected a good many of his dresses. To her surprise, the "Shipping Wars" crew was there and did some filming.
She liked Paul Brockmann, who is pushing 80. He grew up poor in post-war Germany and from early on appreciated the way a gown moves on a woman, especially when she dances.
But Koehne was sadly disappointed by the dresses that he estimates currently number about 49,000.
Koehne did find a few that she liked, "sort of Eighties, strapless, cute little dresses."
But to her eye, most are ordinary and many are stained or badly worn. She characterized the great mass of what she saw as "1980s bridesmaids dresses."
"I'm pretty sure they were not going to sell in Santa Rosa," she said. "And I would have to pay to ship them back" to Brockmann's warehouse.
So, she said, she politely begged off.
"I told him, 'These dresses are not really right for my store.'" And she drove off at midday Wednesday with not a single dress in her Chevy van.
Reached by phone after Koehne left, Brockmann said he had no idea what her problem was.
"I think I know pretty much what vintage clothing is," he said. He added, "It looks to me like she (Koehne) picks what she likes, maybe not what anybody else would like."
Seemingly annoyed that Koehne split without taking any of his dresses to sell, Brockmann observed that it has been hard selling a few here and a few there.
He said, "I'm looking for someone who's going to buy the whole thing" — the entire lot of almost-50,000 dresses.
Koehne said she wished Brockmann well before she drove off, aimed north and then stopped to scan her cellphone for the numbers of fellow dealers of old clothes in the Bay Area. She power-dialed in search of dresses that she can have on her racks at Hot Couture and ready for sale by 2 p.m. today.
She said by phone shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday that she was almost to the Los Banos exit on Highway 5 and she was feeling much better than she's felt since the TV dress-sale deal first started to go south.
"I know a lot of people in the vintage clothing business," she said. Thank goodness, she added, several in the Bay Area welcomed her to come by their warehouses on Wednesday evening and take what dresses she wanted.
As she drove toward San Jose after nearly 800pointless miles, Koehne said she was feeling certain she'd have 500 dresses ready for today's nontelevised and nonscripted sale.
"I know people are going to show up and expect to see things that are not usually in my store," she said.
Once the sale ends, she'll almost certainly need a nap.
Koehne suspects, from the presence of the "Shipping Wars" crew at Paul Brockmann's warehouse earlier Wednesday, that A&E still plans to make an episode about the dresses.
"Honestly," she said as she drove that evening to pick up what she needed to salvage her sale this afternoon, "I'm not watching it."
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