Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 1, 1995 TAG: 9506010044
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One is the Thigh Machine in the Y's Nautilus Room, the one where you spread your legs open and closed - and avoid eye contact at all cost. A retired school teacher laughed at me once while I was working on that humiliating machine, sweating and grunting.
``I used to do that machine, too,'' she said. ``But I gave it up because it just looks so... vulgar.''
The only other thing worse than trying on a bathing suit is childbirth.
The major difference being that after childbirth and the Thigh Machine, at least you feel like you've lost a little weight.
Bathing-suit selection is a task so awful that you should get paid for doing it. Which is just what I did last week, in order to bring you my Memorial Day Sports Illustrated-NOT! Swimsuit Edition.
(Headline: ``Twice the Cellulite, Half the Cleavage.'')
Starting with Hecht's, I visited four stores, trying on a total of eight suits.
No pictures were taken, no modeling for the saleswoman done.
It's a ritual so intensely private, so horrifically bad, that I kept coming back to two basic questions: Why is dressing-room lighting so much worse than beach lighting? And what demon invented French-cut?
The first question was answered easily at Hecht's, which had the harshest lighting of the four stores visited. There I tried on a blue one-piece tank thing, which had this sheer panel of mosquito-netting in the midsection, exposing that oh-so-sexy feature: the fat-smushed bellybutton.
I looked at my pasty white self for approximately .5 seconds, then turned away - praising the gods for creating beaches without mirrors.
Thinking I could recapture my girlish figure, I headed next to JCPenney, where most of my childhood clothes were purchased.
There I found a more generous selection of non-French-cut items, plus a more generous dressing-room ambiance: dimmer lighting and mauvish-pink walls.
Pink is supposed to calm you; prison designers use it, in fact, for cell walls. By the time I got done trying on the - gasp! - two-piece there, I needed a clanging tin cup to help get me out. It was that bad.
Needing a break, I met my friend Julie for lunch. I ate a drippy cheeseburger; she ate a veggie sandwich. This should tell you something about our respective body parts.
But she, too, hates the annual swimsuit ritual. So much, in fact, that she ordered five last year from a catalog - and sent them all back. It reminded me of the dreaded Land's End SlenderSuit I ordered last year shortly after I had my baby.
From the description in the catalog, I believed I'd look so skinny in it, that I'd actually be invisible when
viewed from the side. In real life, it had the comfort of a girdle and enough bust padding to knock out a linebacker. I sent it back.
After lunch I headed to the Heironimus at Towers, where I tried on a swimsuit that made the claim: ``This suit will maximize your bustline.'' It was a red one-piece with four brass buttons sewn in a line down the chest - and enough padding to float a dinghy.
It felt false, I tell you. But standing there in the dim lighting with Bruce Hornsby's piano noodling from the speakers, I felt suddenly free to try on another suit. I grabbed another two-piece, even.
This one was designed with modesty - and mommy thighs - in mind. The bottoms were cut like jogging shorts, with a red waistband and teeny, hip-reducing black-and-white stripes. The top had the same pattern, but with larger, bust-enhancing stripes.
It didn't look too god-awful.
I put the suit on hold while I walked down to E.I. Randle. I've always had this misconception that the more money you spend on something, the better you'll look. So I tried on a couple of $100-plus suits that reminded me of the little bell-shaped dresses the rich girls always played tennis in in high school.
The saleswoman even had the audacity to put me in the largest - and brightest - dressing room. She laughed when I pointed this out and said, ``You can always unscrew one of the light bulbs!''
I did not look like Chris Evert in the suits.
So I bought the two-piece jogging/swimming/dieting suit at Heironimus and drove back to the office. In my work mailbox I found an auspicious - and suspicious - USA Today clipping with the headline, ``FAT SHOT,'' circled by the editor.
The story, about a new drug that's killing off fat cells right and left in British pigs, claims researchers will be testing human butts and thighs in two to three years.
Hopefully my new suit will last that long, at least.
Beth Macy is a features department staff writer and Thursday columnist. If you have ideas for columns or stories, call her at 981-3435.
by CNB