American Thighs

by Jill Conner Browne

  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 official 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, an
d 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.

  Asset-Preserving Tip

  It’s important that you have a GOOD photo of yourself made at every stage of your life on account of you just never know what’s around the corner. I’d almost go so far as to suggest that ANY TIME you happen to have a Good Hair Day that coincides with a Good Makeup Day and a Day You’re Feeling Thin and are also Dressed Pretty Cute you should have a picture taken—just in case. Keep all the good photos of yourself in one easy-to-locate spot—in plain sight on the coffee table in the living room probably would be best—and give instructions to several people you trust COMPLETELY that, should you be suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by Death, they are to go immediately to the Good Photo stack and choose from there the VERY BEST one to use with your obituary.

  It does not matter if you haven’t vaguely resembled that photo for the last twenty-five years—the best photo IS the best photo and, as such, is the appropriate one for your obituary. The remaining good photos may all be put into frames and displayed at your funeral—but of course, only if you are going to be cremated or feel totally confident that those trusted photo-selecting friends of yours can also be counted on to be certain that your casket remains closed at all times. You certainly don’t want everybody standing around your poor dead, defenseless body making COMPARISONS between it and your formerly darlin’ self depicted in the photos.

  If, on the other hand, you still look extremely darlin’ at the time of your death, THEN you WILL want your casket flung wide open and all the photos in juxtaposition with your lovely, albeit dead, face so that everybody will make those comparisons and be just pea-green with envy. You’ll hardly even mind being dead under those circumstances—seems totally worth it to me.

  Once again, though, it cannot be overstressed, those friends must be 100 percent trustworthy under any circumstances—even if you happen to die when y’all are in the middle of a tiff—you have to be able to rely fearlessly on their ability to rise above what was surely a petty trifle and do right by you in this, your hour of greatest and final need.

  You might give them some degree of discretionary leeway about the open-casket thing. Say, for instance, you had just healed up perfectly from the best face-lift ever performed on a living human and your face is absolutely FLAWLESS but you hadn’t quite gotten around to whipping the rest of yourself into a comparable condition of cute when you just upped and died. Your friends might then be allowed to present the good part for viewing while sealing off the rest of the crime scene—by ordering a special casket for you—one with a nice face hole at the top.

  There Is No “MAN” in “MANPRIS”

  For some unknowable reason, I recently read a fashion article about men’s fashions—in a woman’s magazine. It made references to “man sandals” and “man bags” and CAPRI PANTS FOR MEN, which are apparently called “manpris.”

  Excuse me—I can stand for some men to wear some sandals—depends on the guy, depends on the sandal—but it’s a VERY fine line they walk in those open-toed shoes, in my opinion—assuming that you are like me in your preference for manly-looking men.

  There is no such thing as a “man bag.” It is a PURSE, and if the nicest thing you can think of to call me is “old-fashioned” for having that opinion, then I’ll take it and whatever else you can dish out. If he’s gonna carry a purse, then he can tote the Tampax and I’ll leave my bag at home. I am just not interested in my man carrying a simple clutch, no matter how much it might complement his ensemble. First of all, my man won’t be wearing an ensemble—if he is wearing one, he is somebody else’s man—my mistake.

  Then the whole “manpris” thing. I am SO sorry, but there is not a straight man alive who could NOT look ridiculous in a pair of Capri pants. Think of any even moderately masculine guy in the world—any of ’em—and then imagine him in a pair of Capri pants. You’ve just gone from Tom Brady to Ethel Mertz—no way around it. If you see a guy in Capri pants, please take his picture and e-mail it to me. We’ll put him up in the Gallery at www.sweetpotatoqueens.com and start our own version of “Glamour Don’ts!” If you spot one carrying a purse, wearing sandals AND capris—you will win some kind of prize—but you can’t stage it—it has to be a TRUE Sighting.

  When I used to frequent the YMCA on a regular basis, my day started there at five in the a and m, not exactly the time of day when you necessarily want to see what are normally considered, in polite society, to be the private parts of any gentleman with whom you are not well acquainted to the point of extreme fondness. Right off, I can’t actually think of WHAT time of day WOULD be conducive to your wanting to goon some strange guys’ naughty bits, but for sure, five am is just way too early for it.

  Nonetheless, there was a man—an older, very tan man—who was an obsessively regular attendee at that time of day. For an older dude, Robert was in pretty fair shape, but, of course, not NEARLY as good as he IMAGINED he was when he got dressed every day for his workout. Come to think of it, out of all the fabulous-bodied men I have seen in my life—and I’ve seen me a few—I cannot think of a single ONE that would, in my opinion, look GOOD working out in a pair of women’s underpants—even if they were, like Robert’s, a nice shade of maroon.

  Where he found MAROON women’s underpants, I will never know—perhaps he just bought the big white ones and Rit’d ’em in the sink hisownself—but they absolutely WERE nylon women’s underpants and he wore them—with a tank top T
UCKED IN—and SANDALS—into the weight room—at five am nearly every day of the world.

  On the days that he DID NOT wear the maroon panties, he wore a sky-blue tank-style short UNITARD and the ubiquitous sandals. Every couple of weeks or so, he would shun the panties and the unitard in favor of a pair of white hot pants, also with a very small tank top—and sandals.

  The man did not appear to own a pair of athletic shoes and I don’t believe he had ever HEARD of an athletic SUPPORTER. The hot pants at least were snug—bwahahaha—they were “snug” like paint on a fender—but they did keep things sort of hemmed up, if you know what I mean. The panties and the unitard were most commodious and allowed for free movement of all the contents. But all of his outfits were at least three inches on the bad side of WAY too short. Thanks.

  Along about the time that a bunch of us, men and women, would be winding up our workout with some ab exercises on the big mat on the weight platform, Robert would arrive to do his “warm-up” routine—which consisted of standing about two feet away from us, with his back to us and doing some indescribable “exercise” that involved a whole LOT of bending over. There was simply nowhere in the room to look except at Robert’s mostly naked behind. Helluva way to start the day, I gotta tell you.

  In case you don’t already know this—there is one always reliable way to discern—if you’re really all THAT curious—whether someone has gotten that shoe-leather tan in a tanning bed. Get them to take off everything but their underwear and bend over right in front of you. If they’ve been in a tanning bed, their legs will be uniformly dark brown except for a horizontal white stripe right below each butt cheek. This is formed when one lies on one’s back in the tanning bed and one’s butt cheeks get mooshed down on the top of one’s thighs—that little strip under there is hidden from the rays and remains blinding-white. So if you REALLY MUST KNOW, this is a fool-proof test—which does not, however, preclude its use BY fools.