Lucy and Ethel,…what can I say?
Not that I’m paranoid, but I live in a world where skirts are devious creatures, trees are aggressive, and chairs conspire to trap me. Embarrassing moments abound!
We’ll start with skirts…and come back to skirts.
If they’re long and flowing (some of my ill-advised favorites), skirts will, at the very least, trip you on stairs. But there’s more…. At my husband’s high school reunion, I wore a lovely 2-piece outfit with a wide flowing skirt. So elegant! As I stood to the side of the dance floor, a kind and gentle fellow I had never met tapped me on the shoulder to alert me that the bottom of the back of my skirt was tucked into my waistband and I might want to pull it out. (I had come just come from, guess where, the restroom!) Years later, I again felt oh-so-elegant in a long flowing skirt when I attended at workshop at the university. I left the workshop, chatted with the instructor, made a comfort stop, walked to my car, drove to a coffee shop where I would be meeting a friend — all the usual. Somehow I kept feeling rather drafty. As I toted my belongings into the cafe, that feeling became even more pronounced. I went to smooth my skirt to sit and realized with horror that it was not there…behind my legs…where it was supposed to be!!! Yikes!!! Slithered as surreptitiously as possible to the ladies’ room where I (again) had to untuck the skirt bottom from the waistband. (Sigh…) I have no idea how long it had been that way. As I said skirts are devious creatures. Short skirts can be embarrassing in soooo many ways (apply imagination). My skirt issues began when I was quite young. At the age of five, I had the most lovely white organdy dress with a wide hoop skirt. I could not understand, at that tender age, why my mother would not allow me to create a wonderful arc with that hoop by sitting on the back of it while riding home from church on the bus. Predating that, another church story actually, was the Bible School 3-year old class’s performance in which we were all singing “The B I B L E, oh that’s the book for me”. Clad in my cute little red plaid pleated skirt with jumper straps over a charming white blouse, I became very nervous and began rolling the skirt up to the waistband as we sang (front row, of course), with my poor mother trying to signal me from the third row to put it down. (The worst case skirt scenario will be described later on in this blog…)
Moving on to trees. Be very careful because trees can attack. Case in point — Christmas Eve a year ago. While my husband was running a last-minute errand, I was fiddling with the decorations on our real live dead tree which was perched, in its water-container base, on the library table by our front window. One decoration too many on the front side, and the tree, twinkling in glee, lurched at me! What to do??!! I could not let it topple, so I grabbed the trunk and held on…for 45 minutes until my husband got home. My arm was not long enough or strong enough to push the tree upright. My phone was, of course, in the other room. I yelled as loud as I could, thinking the neighbors would hear. And they did! They thought my TV volume was turned up very loud and that I was watching a program wherein a woman was yelling for help. For a long long time. Regarding aggressive trees, we have also had two of our 50-plus-foot oaks fall on our house during a storm, and twenty years later had a neighbors’s 50-footer fall in our yard due to saturated ground. (Don’t want to say much about this, as just yesterday, a huge tree fell over — the saturation phenomena again — a couple of blocks away. So shhhhhhh…..I don’t want the trees to know I’m talking about them….)
Chairs are next. During a speech tournament awhile back, when I was judging, I was called upon to judge a semi-final round of Duo Interpretation, an event where two students portray one or more characters each in a 10-minute cutting from a play or novel. Because it was semi-final round featuring six of the twelve top Duo teams, it was held in a huge study hall room so that the competitors who had been eliminated could sit in as spectators. Because Duo is great entertainment, by the time the other judge and I arrived at the room, all except two seats had been taken, and students were even standing around the walls and sitting on the floor. So we had the choice of the two quite small combination desk-and-chair units that were left. I am not a small person, but I had to sit. And, being a role model for the students, I had to somehow manage this gracefully. So I inhaled deeply and wedged myself into the larger of the two options. Not large enough! Pain! And, to complicate matters further, I was the “starred” judge, which meant that I was the one designated to introduce the competitors and call them up to speak…which, given the crowded conditions of the room, would require standing for each speaker. Not a chance!! So the other judge, my friend Sam, bless his heart, realized my predicament and volunteered to do the honors. Had to wait for the crowd to disperse afterward for me to be able to pry myself out of the desk and resume breathing! Whew!
So, continuing the chair-trap theme, I take you back to attack skirts. Let me just say that you should not allow chair traps and attack skirts to conspire with one another. It does not come out well. While at work one day, in my long flowing skirt (why did I like these so much???), I was busily moving from task to task wheeling around in my office chair as I pulled charts and paperwork from the various file cabinets around the room. I had to stand up at one point, only to realize that the hem of the rather sheer skirt material had become wrapped around the caster of the desk chair. Uh oh!! So I tried to unwind it…but it seemed to wind further around the caster. The door to the hallway was wide open, so I was hesitant to try to pull off the skirt lest someone should happen along and look in. Yikes!! What to do??!! So I tried rolling. And tugging. And no one came along, so….I figured I’d try to slip the skirt off over my hips so I could crawl under the chair to free it. No dice! The drawstring waistband had a knot in it. Oh, no. (Did it occur to me to try calling someone to come and help? Of course not! On my own, I was!) Well, then, to get at the bottom of the skirt and the caster, my next clever step was to stand up and lay the chair on its side. So…there I was, sitting on the floor by my overturned chair, stuck to it!! And along came our psychologist, Ralph. He glanced in the doorway and did a double-take. Red-faced I explained my dilemma, and the noble man came to my rescue. He finessed the hem from the caster, freed me, and was sworn to secrecy.
Watch out for trees, chairs, and skirts! They are evil!