LET’S TALK : Cabin fever? Hah! Wintertime’s real curse is Insanityhose
Posted on Sunday, January 20, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/214324/
So here we are in the dead of winter, a season usually spent trying not to envy pals, relatives and co-workers who blow town for warm-weather vacations; hating the hue of pale gray; and doing the pantyhose-avoidance dance.
Men are fortunate. For them, the closest thing to hosiery is socks. And the biggest problem they may have with socks is losing their mates in the dryer, getting a hole in the toe and possibly having to wear those peculiar-looking sock suspenders. Women are forced to deal with a garment that has been such a thorn in the side that I’ve a new word for them: Insanityhose.
The problem: Too many of their manufacturers feel no shame whatsoever in charging the price of a four-star restaurant dinner for a pair of translucent, itchy thingamajigs that never fit right anyway and may not even get out of the package good — let alone survive their maiden voyage — before developing a run or a hole and causing the wearer to lose her religion.
It’s in the wintertime that The Insanityhose Problem becomes hardest to avoid.
I was raised by a mother who didn't believe dresses or skirts should be worn with bare legs — ever. But the older I got, the more I began to hate insanityhose (all the aforementioned ills are magnified a few bumbazillion times for the full-figured and / or bottomheavy ) and the less I began to care what society thought. As it happened, society came around to my way of thinking: Summertime skirts and dresses, sans insanityhose, became more acceptable, and to wear sandals without them became a fashion rule. Summers became seasons of insanityhosefree bliss.
But cold weather continued to bring with it the task of schlepping back to the store to hunt through the invariably picked-over insanityhose selections for a desired size and color, then hoping they’d last at least a couple of wears before developing the obligatory run.
As women like myself get yet older, crankier and yet more unwilling to blow our good money badly, we balk at insanityhose altogether and resolve to make it through the winter doing the Old Lady Thang.
The Old Lady Thang is based on the old stereotype of the “mature” woman who wears knee highs with her skirts — usually with the tops showing — or wears pantyhose that are so thick, they could easily be stretched across a frame and used as a small trampoline.
I’ve turned to both stereotypes, with two variations. Variation No. 1: knee-high trouser socks with a well-belowknee-length dress or skirt. No. 2: Tights. They may not last all winter, but a gal can at least get them out of the package without fear of puncturing them with a fingernail. And even that can backfire sometimes. There’s always going to be that occasional pair of tights that think they’re insanityhose and tear up just as quickly and accordingly.
But the double-barreled iron grip of traditional Southern belle-ism and the insanityhose makers is loosening more every day. Arkansas has even become the land of Wintertime Flip-Flops Wearing. So it’s not surprising to see bare legs in church in the wintertime. Some of us simply asked the Good Lord to look the other way while we wore pants into the sanctuary, and to our relief the act did not result in a trapdoor opening up in the floor beneath us and sending us tumbling down to That Place.
The Good Lord knows what we’re going through. I’m convinced insanityhose was not his idea anyway. We have enough issues to deal with. Such as how to score a wintertime trip to Barbados. Silky-sheer, reinforced, control-top E-mail: hwilliams@arkansasonline. com