August 12, 2010

In Search of Panty Hose


Photo, The Budget Fashionista

I've struck out finding panty hose at three stores. I'm looking for the old-fashioned kind of panty hose, the kind you pull over your rear end screaming in agony the entire time "Why, Why did I visit Krispy Kreme?"

I don't mean the kind with red garters that Madelaine Kahn wore in Blazing Saddles, in her iconic channeling of Marlena Dietrich.

The stores are now carry a few brands of panty hose, and mostly knee highs. Knee high are fashion accessories worn by seventy-five year old women wearing purple microfiber pants, a red shirt, and SAS shoes with rubber soles.

You don't sincerely understand the urgency of my need for panty hose. It is hot and I want to wear dresses to work. Telling makes me feel like I'm sitting in a rocker in a yellow-checked gingham dress tying a bonnet under my chin.

But I have flesh the color of wedding cake. I am so white that I light up a room. Here in Indiana we have a term for it.

Pasty white.

Like Elmer's Paste you ate in first grade, only with periodic age spots. Periodic is not the right word, but it just sounds funny so I'm leaving it.

(Ever think words are funny on their own merit? How about underpants? Now that's one darn funny word.)

Back to our story. No hose anywhere. Most of the stores offer this "tan in a can" that you can spray on body parts. I know that young women tan outdoors, frequent tanning booths, or smear this all over appendages. (Appendages, another funny word.)

I cannot use this stuff. I had my moments in an early decade with a substance called "QT" -- this greasy, gooey, gaummey stuff might be what John Boehner slithers on each morning. It turns pasty teenagers and House minority leaders orange.

I tried coloring my own hair once with less than spectacular results. Let's just say it was an abject failure and leave it at that. Trust me on this.

As a kid spending much of my summer at the lake, the sun and my lack of tanning was a problem. This was long before we were concerned about SPF numbers.

I learned a difficult lesson after trying baby oil and iodine to tan. I didn't. And I burned badly. And I am now very careful so I don't pay the price. My mother and brother both have had bouts of skin cancer (words not so funny.)

So what to do? Can't find hose -- my white legs stick out below summer dresses like drinking straws out of sweet tea.

In our Poor White Trash above ground pool, this was an easily solved problem. I swim in a full-length graduation robe. Problem solved.

I am determined to wear summer dresses to work, and I (picture me standing like Scarlett O'Hara at the end of Act One in Gone With the Wind), "I will never be pasty again."