Dearest and most esteemed readers, 

In honor of all the slutty Nurse/ slutty cheerleader/ slutty Dorothy Gale/ slutty witch/ slutty zookeeper/ slutty teacher/ slutty nun/ slutty bride/ slutty slut costumes complete with visible garter belts and stocking tops we'll all be seeing tonight and tomorrow night, I give you this oldie but goodie from February 12, 2008, originally posted on my now-defunct MySpace blog.  Happy Halloween, everyone!

Leeandra

 In honor of the upcoming feast of St. Valentine, today I would like to discuss things that are supposed to be romantic and sexy, but are actually quite irritating in the real world. To wit:

1. Bathrooms lit by candles. This is neither romantic nor sexy. This is bullshit. I have had one of these for the past three days. My bathroom has no electricity or heat due to a short in the Depression-era wiring which melted the plug of the space heater. My landlord is "getting around" to fixing this.

Now, granted, I am not doing things according to the book (Cosmopolitian). This bathing beauty is shivering and showering instead of luxuriating in the (filthy) tub. Also, the candles are not classy white beeswax columns but have misspelled Spanish on them alongside pictures of either the pope or various saints getting cooked alive on spits/ tied to a post and shot with a thousand arrows/ flayed alive. Also, I have supplemented the ambiance of their flickering glow with a large Rayovac flashlight balanced on the toilet. Still, there is not enough light to adequately shave my legs by, so I have nicks and cuts and patches of black fuzz all over my shins. Which brings me to...

2. Garter belts and stockings. I normally wear support-weight hose because regular-weight hose tears too easily. The problem with supp hose is that they roll into a tight little rope around my waist. I have ranted about this before. I want supp-weight hose in a thigh-high style with a wide elastic band at the top so you didn't need garters (they make these in regular weight).

Lo and behold, a few weeks ago I found the Holy Grail (in Wal-Mart, of all places). I bought a pair for $5.96. The package promised exactly what I was asking for. The size I bought was to fit people between 5'6" and 5'10" and from 110 to 165 pounds. The photo on the package showed the stockings as coming all the way up to the woman's crotch.

Today I take them out of the package. Unstretched, they are the length of tube socks. I put them on. With major pulling and untwisting, they come up to mid-thigh.

Bob and I were going to go to Wal-Mart anyway before I had to go to work. We go downstairs and around the corner to the car. The left stocking works its way to kneesock level. We get in, I fix the stocking and decide to buy some hose at Wal-Mart.

We get to Wal-Mart. Halfway through the parking lot, the right one goes. I go back to the car and just take the damn things off. It was cold and windy in New Orleans today. So I'm wearing a winter coat, wool sweater and skirt, heels that give me blisters without stockings--and running around bare-hairy-sliced-up-legged.

I get to the hoisery section. It seems they are out of pretty much every color of pantyhose in my size EXCEPT navy blue. I do not own anything navy blue. It makes me look like I have TB. So I go to the old-lady-underwear section and look for something to hold my stockings up. I find one garter belt in my size, which comes with a free pair of back-seam stockings (which I've always thought looked cool and sexy in a 1940s kind of way).

Bob drops me off at work. I go into the bathroom to put my damn hose on. Now, despite the ease with which Elizabeth Taylor puts on her stockings in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I spend ten minutes trying to hook everything up. Finally, I figure out it's easier just to hook everything up and then pull it on like hose. That's when I discover that for some reason the back garters are shorter than the front garters, which, given basic physiology, should be the other way around. So I unhook things and put the belt on backwards. Now the garters are the right length, but it won't stay hooked around my waist for some reason. So I turn it inside out and backwards (for those of you who are masturbating along at home to this whole scene, I was also wearing a baggy-ass pair of cotton Hanes underwear that used to be white but now is a dull gray and has holes in the elastic).

I get everything all in place and go out to the front of the gallery. A customer walks in. I begin the sales pitch. Pop goes the right front garter. Customer doesn't notice anything, but after he leaves, I go to attend to this. While walking to the back of the store, pop goes the left back one.

Figuring that the elastic at the tops of the stockings is just too thick for the garter clips to handle, I switch to the stockings that came with the belt. These last all of ten minutes before the same problem develops. So, I fix everything up, hang a "Back in Five Minutes" sign on the door, and go down to Walgreens to hopefully buy some hose.

The same garter malfunctions happen on the way to Walgreens and while standing in the checkout line. (All Walgreens had in my size and a normal color was "control top" hose, which combines the runnability of regular-weight hose with the tight-little-rope-around-the-waist effect of supp hose. But I bought a pair.) On the way back, right in front of the Hotel Monteleone, the clip at the waist on the garter belt comes loose.

So I make it back to the shop with my stockings bagging at my ankles (though not, fortunately, visibly coming out from under my skirt) like a crazy bag lady's, and I go into the bathroom to change. I take it all off, put the "control top" hose on (which promptly runs AND rolls into a little rope at my waist), and stuff the back-seam stockings and garter belt into their box because I AM GETTING MY DAMN MONEY BACK.

That's when I notice on the back of the box it says "Real Sexy Fun for wear on 24/7." Aside from the dubious sexy fun of wearing the same pair of stockings night and day for a week straight, I have never understood the whole idea of dressing for sex. I mean, who really does that?

(A fella I know once wrote a "confessional" poem about a couple of sexual encounters in which he wore nothing but a silk smoking jacket a ala Hef. Now, I never for a minute thought this was anything but a personal jerk-off fantasy masquerading as autobiography, but really, how does that scenario work? Do you hang around starkers in your silk robe for your lady friend to come by? Do you wear it on the walk, drive, or (in this person's particular case) public bus ride over to her love nest? Do you wear street clothes till you're together, then strip naked, then dig around your dresser/backpack for your smoking jacket to put on, THEN get down to business? HOW IS THIS SUPPOSED TO WORK? Then I learned (much to my expectation) that said person did not actually own a silk robe, but (much to my surprise) was saving up Camel Cash to redeem for an official Camel cigarettes "silk-like" smoking jacket. Of course, chain-smoking and going through the trash at the bus stop in order to score free-by-mail-in-rebate polyester man lingerie IS pretty damn sexy, but only if you realize it isn't. Which this person never did. But I have digressed.)

Anyway, maybe I'm wrong here, but I thought the whole reason garter belts and stockings were sexy was that the woman wearing them could have sex with them on. Um, I'm no real expert on these sorts of things, but THIS PRODUCT WON'T STAY ON THROUGH WALKING. Come on, political prisoner in Chinese sweatshop, have some pride in your work! Make a better fetish item!

Anyway, you all now have spent entirely too much time thinking about me naked and/or in my underwear. Happy Valentine's Day!