Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9412240009
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGIE FISHER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Not that this was a bunch of Pecksniffs who find it morally repugnant that members of their sex should try to improve on what Mother Nature gave 'em. Oh, no.
It was more the ample evidence that, excluding this writer, Mother Nature had given them a gracious plenty, and attempts to augment it would have been carrying coals to Newcastle.
More, these were not females of an age eagerly waiting to get out of training bras and hoist their cleavage. These were women - mothers, grandmothers - who feel they've already served a life sentence in 18-hour brassieres, and want to be free of such booby traps.
We had barely crashed for a getaway weekend at a Smith Mountain Lake condo before we unhooked our bras and got out of them and into comfy old sweats. One thing led to another:
Earrings off.
Sensible shoes, kicked off.
Which got us started on swapping war stories, and, though I exaggerate, it went something like this:
One recalled walking all the way from Hotel Roanoke to Victory Stadium for a Tech/VMI Thanksgiving football game in 4-inch-high stiletto heels. That's the kind of foolishness your feet will never allow you to forget.
Someone else remembered a workday spent hobbling lopsidedly after the high heel on one shoe broke off on a cobblestone street. And there were tales of sprained ankles and broken toes when a high heel got caught in something.
Can you believe, we asked each other, that we once bought these weapons of self-destruction, and endured them for fashion's sake? But, my, my, they did make your legs look great, didn't they?
Remember when we wore three layers of crinoline slips, starched to the nth, and when we got in a car our skirts would shoot up over our heads? Remember falsies?
And those strapless dresses with so much steel and wiring to hold 'em up that they would have set off metal detectors at an airport, had metal detectors been around in those days?
Somebody announced she'd read that waist cinchers are making a comeback. Groan, groan.
Someone said her daughter had wanted to order one from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalog, but she'd sent her to the drugstore to buy an Ace bandage instead. Why not? Cheaper, and probably more comfortable.
The conversation turned to pantyhose that won't stay up, and pantyhose with control, meaning so rigid they injure your solar plexus.
Then someone said girdles - the ultimate torture chamber, masochism's own fashion statement - are back in vogue, too.
Aw, c'mon! Too much!
We wondered if this flesh-eating, bone-crushing tyrannosaurus rex of underwear had been brought back to life in haute couture's Jurassic Park of horrors by some crazy fashion-setter. Madonna - she of the heavy-artillery B cups - came to mind.
We were aghast. What in the world is the younger generation coming to? Why this retrogression?
We thought women were supposed to be getting smarter. Don't these young things understand what the women's liberation movement of their mothers was all about?
So we ate cookies and cheese and crackers, and drank a little wine, and played a little bridge, and told a few sexist jokes.
A group of women - fortysomething, fiftysomething, sixtysomething, seventysomething - who have, or who had, careers, babies, stretch marks, who've known good times and hard times and cellulite.
Smart women - really smart - some of whom might once have had Barbie-size waistlines, but who are now happily protuberant. They're not about to ever again put their bodies through contortions to meet some cookie-cutter notion of the perfect feminine figure.
We let it all hang out - in the company of friends so good that nobody even tried to hold in her stomach.
Hey - that's what friends are for.
by CNB