American Thighs (11 page)

When I was that size, they had not even INVENTED anything smaller than a 5, and a 5 was too big around and about nine yards too short, whatever it was. Those size 5s looked like they were made for third graders with tits.

Anyway, I'm in the Vogue dressing room and I've got on the FABULOUS striped-y midriff top and, positively quaking with hope and dread, I slowly stepped into the matching striped-y HIP-HUGGER pants—and I could not believe what my very own eyeballs were showing me—they fit as if my body had been painted in multicolored stripes and the paint had pooled on the floor around my feet. They were tighter than my actual skin—but in a good way—they were cut so low, they nearly showed my appendectomy scar—and they were even LONG enough to wear tall sandals with—this was an outfit straight out of
Tiger Beat
magazine. I could imagine Ann-Margret wearing this outfit on a casual date with Elvis after a long day on the set of
Viva Las Vegas
. I could imagine ME wearing this outfit…somewhere, sometime, with somebody—maybe one of Herman's Hermits or the Dave Clark Five.

Of course, I bought it.

I was so stupidly excited, I took it HOME and could not WAIT to try it ON for Mama. Wish I had a snapshot of THAT face. She didn't say a word though, just pressed her lips together REAL hard and did something she just almost NEVER did. She went and got Daddy. The reason she never did that was because, of course, he generally thought whatever Judy or I were doing was darlin', smart, and/or funny so he was not exactly what you'd call your Big Guns. This was one time he did not fail to back her up, though.

I was still in my room, preening before the mirror in my new skank suit, and he took one look at it and said in a voice I rarely if ever heard from him—very firm and very stern—“You are not going out of this house wearing that.” And he walked away amid my banshee imitation.

I reasoned, pleaded, cajoled, and pitched all manner of fits, hissy and otherwise. I remember the pleading and cajoling and fit-pitching parts pretty clearly—I cannot for the life of me recall what my line of REASON was when I attempted to logically explain why I should be allowed to go out and about in my new hooker outfit—but whatever, none of it worked anyway. He was immovable—which also NEVER before happened that I can remember.

He did get fairly worn out with the subject after God knows how long—I was nothing if not relentless and finally he got up from wherever I had him corralled for the nag-fest and he went
into his room and closed the door. That REALLY never happened—unless, you know…

I, of course, had gone into MY room and closed the door as well—with a good deal more volume—and proceeded to thrash and bang around in there just to let them know that I was still in the game. Presently, he called to me from behind his closed door and said he would make a deal with me that would allow me to actually go out in public in my ho-suit. (I don't recall what he actually called it but it meant pretty much the same thing for sure.)

Giddy and elated, I yanked open my door and rushed out into the hall and was dancing around like a little kid who needs to pee, anxious to make this deal, whatever it was, so I could get on out there and BE SEEN in my new duds. Still from behind his door, he said, “Okay, I'm gonna come out and the two of us will walk down the street together and if that seems okay to you, then I guess you can wear it wherever you want to.” ALL RI-I-I-IGHT! COME ON OUT!

And the door slowly opened and there he stood. The sight is still seared irreparably into my retinas. He was standing there—in a sleeveless white skivvy shirt (now called a wifebeater) and it was stre-e-e-etched over his big ole belly and tucked firmly into a pair of TIGHTY-WHITIES. And he had on black nylon socks and FLIP-FLOPS.

I nearly aspirated my tongue. The man wore boxers—I never knew him to OWN a pair of those hideous white things—
and I've always thought that they are truly terrible things in general and on anybody—but to see them ON MY FATHER—oh, my eyes, my eyes! And the slippery socks—with the flip-flops—how could he even get flip-flops ON with socks?

He stood there just as calm and quiet while I peeled myself off the wall and tried to resuscitate myself, then he asked, “Well, are you ready to go?” And to this day, I wonder what he'da done if I'da said, “Yeah, sure.”

Hiding in Plain Sight

The operative word in that subhead is
hiding.
I'm not sure that the current fashion trend of “full disclosure” or, more accurately, “full exposure,” is altogether a good thing. In recent years, there has been a fashion trend involving skintight clothing that admittedly looks pretty fantastic on any lithe and lovely Larva, but unfortunately, way too many of us who do not fall into any of those three categories are becoming fashion victims and causing undue retinal damage to innocent onlookers.

My sisters, in this, as in so many other cases, Size Does Matter. And although I am all for Normal-Sized Women—meaning, I am so tired of 0s and 2s—really and truly, if we are NOT one of those, we have got no business wearing skintight garments out in public. Okay, I'll go as high as a 12—but only if you're over five feet seven. Whatever your size, there are no of
ficial body parts called “rolls” and/or “gobs.” If we have those, they are not anatomically necessary nor are they part of the original equipment—they are add-on aftermarket accessories and they have no place in the inevitable spotlight that Lycra outfits put them in.

Fashion, although an entertaining diversion, is not mandatory, but I think a case could be made for any attempt at legislating good sense, if not good taste. Meaning that if one does not have a body that is in ANY WAY similar to the bodies a garment was designed for—one should not necessarily adopt that particular fashion. Just because they MAKE a tube top in size 3X does not behoove us to squeeze ourselves into it.

Although I have never been accused of being a “clotheshorse”—I'm much more of a “clothes roadkill”—even I am faced with occasions that require me to put on something besides my thirty-five-year-old Umbro shorts, Teva sandals, and a T-shirt—and I have found that there ARE garments that are reasonably current fashionwise that I can utilize to simultaneously flatter any good parts and conceal all the bad ones and none of them is skintight.

Here's a little something I use to guide my fashion choices: when I am so fat the SHEETS feel tight, I don't wear Lycra.

Okay, I Did Have at Least One Good Day

And thankfully, I have an unretouched photograph to prove it! Back before the earth cooled, when I worked out all the livelong day at the YMCA, I did have what most considered to be a Passable Body—even for all but the brightest daylight—say high noon in July—that direct overhead light can be most unflattering, right up there with fluorescent, although, of course NOTHING is QUITE THAT BAD. But anyway, once upon a time, a long, LONG time ago—I looked pretty okay.

And along about that time, somehow or other, I got a call from a Dee Gorton, a photographer who did a lot of freelance work for various and sundry national publications, and he was shooting something for
Health
magazine about various forms of exercise but he didn't want to give them anything traditional. He didn't want to shoot people working out in gyms or participating in classes in dance studios. Somebody had given him my name because I worked for the YMCA, exercised all the time, and was not thought of in any circles as “traditional.”

I met with him and he showed me the one shot he had already done for the piece. It was about yoga and he shot my dear friends Janie and Neil Strickland—who were practicing yoga decades before anybody else around here had even heard of it—and a bunch of their trainees. It was a beautiful picture—all of the people were in either headstands or mountain pose, alternating, and it was set at dusk in the Ruins of Windsor—which
was once the largest Greek Revival antebellum home in Mississippi. Thanks to a careless SMOKER—and really, THANKS A LOT—in 1890, it is now just twenty-three massive Corinthian columns, but it's ranked in a listing of the Best Places in the Country for Kissing—as long as you're not dating a SMOKER, of course—yuck—plus, if not for THEM, you could probably get a ROOM at Windsor and do a whole lot more than just kiss.

It was a gorgeous photograph and it gave me a sense of the way Dee wanted to speak to the subjects through his pictures—so for his depiction of “aerobics,” I set him up with my Idols for All Time, the Golden Girls dance troupe of Alcorn University at Lorman, Mississippi. Most of y'all will remember that I have always felt it was an accident of birth—a cruel twist of fate—that I was robbed of my chance in this life to BE a Golden Girl—being, as I am, too old and too white—but that I did pattern our very first green sequined SPQ™ outfits after their gold ones and that they are and will ever be, in my opinion, some of THE. MOST. FABULOUS. Women to ever walk the earth.

Dee, however, never having been to a Southwestern Athletic Conference football game, had not the remotest hint of an idea as to what he was about to witness when the fourteen bronze beauties lined up in a sparkling array in front of his camera. Since the photo was intended to illustrate “aerobic exercise,” Dee needed the girls to perform—he just had no clue what that actually MEANT. Music was needed, so I pulled my car up close to but out of the shot, opened all the doors, and
prepared to crank up the tape deck. Wouldn't you know it—the only tape I had in the car was “Short Dick Man” by 20 Fingers. (If you were, like, twelve in the nineties and thus have never heard this snappy little tune, then, by all means, get thee to You-Tube and check it out. You may have to try several versions before you get the REAL one—there's a cleaned-up version where they just say “short short” man—keep trying till you find the real one and then try to NOT hum it for the rest of the day—impossible ear worm, sorry!)

I walked over and asked the lead dancer if they knew the song and/or minded dancing to it—she laughed and said yeah, they knew it—agreed with it—and would have NO problem dancing to it, so I sashayed over, hit play, and watched as Miss Lead Girl raised her right hand and gave them a four-count, at the end of which my field of vision erupted with the superhuman gyrations of the fourteen electrifying examples of pulchritude personified.

Thirty seconds later, Dee closed his gaping mouth and actually looked through his camera lens for the first time and began shooting the dazzling spectacle before him. The photo printed in the magazine was only one of the several thousand frames he came away with—it was an amazing shot of the Golden Girls, in perfect unison, just as they arched their backs on the backswing of a pelvic thrust that must have been measurable on the Richter scale—I'm certain Dee's heart stopped at least three times, maybe more, during the performance.

Then it was time to shoot the weight-lifting scene and Dee asked me if I would pick up some semiheavy stuff for him while he took photos and I said sure, why not—so off we go to his farm and off he goes into the woods and back he comes with this LOG, wanting to know if I can, in fact, lift it, which, as it turned out, I could, although, as it also turned out, there is a big difference between giving a big log a trial heave to determine its liftability and actually lifting it to my chest and then pressing it over my head and then holding it for what seemed like fifteen or twenty minutes while he made sure the light was right and then checked to see that there was no debris on my back and then shot a few frames—and doing all that over and over for a couple of hours in 100-degree heat. I could hardly hold the steering wheel to drive myself home.

But I did get a world-beater of a photo outta the deal, I must say. It ran in the magazine and a copy of it now hangs in my living room, albeit in a discreet corner of a narrow wall. Shot from behind, I am holding the big, giant log over my head and it appears that I am totally naked—which, I can assure you, I was NOT—except for my gold earrings, my weight-lifting gloves, and my nail polish. I look at that image of my muscles and my fat-free self and I shake my head in dismay at the very poor comparison to what I see in my mirror today. Soooo sad, so vewwy, vewwy sad. The first time my friend Liza saw the picture, she said that if she had one of herself that looked like that, she'da had it blown up to life size and it would be hanging at the
top of her staircase, like the giant portrait of Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind
. I told her if I still looked remotely like that, I would consider it, but under the current circumstances, people would wonder why I had a big, giant picture of a strange, nekkid, log-holding woman hanging in my house.

As I peruse what passed for splendor in my past as portrayed in this picture—it gives me pause and leads me to offer the following for your consideration.