How to Feel Very, Very Old

I'm sure that's the thing you want most in the world, right?

When I was a kid, in the olden times, my high school—a public school in a suburb of Cleveland—had a dress code. We weren’t allowed to wear jeans or torn pants. Skirt length, in particular, was heavily regulated: If your hem was shorter than your fingertips, measured with your hands hanging at your sides, you were busted. If I remember correctly, anyone who flunked the hem test was sent home to put on something of approved length—or maybe one of the teachers would lend you a coverup? Or did the school keep a few dowdy skirts in a closet somewhere for wayward girls? I never got arrested for skirt violations, so I really don’t know.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Like just about every girl my age, I was an expert in skirt-rolling. As soon as I left the house in the morning, I rolled my waistband like a Venetian blind until my skirt was hitched up to my preferred micro-mini length. Somehow, those of us rollers concealed the giant wad of skirt that gathered around our waist as best we could, but in reality we just walked around looking like we had inner tubes surrounding our bellies. We were so focused on getting our skirts sky-high that nothing else mattered. The course of the day involved a lot of rolling up and rolling down, to avoid the scrutiny of teachers who felt duty-bound to eyeball our skirt length and inform the proper authorities if there was an infraction. Fortunately, many teachers didn’t really give a damn, so you could usually waltz through the day with your belly wad and your thighs exposed without indictment.

Thighs were a very big deal in those days. We had grown up seeing Twiggy with her mile-long legs bared, and thus the die was cast. Mothers wore skirts that hovered tastefully below the kneecap, worn with nude stockings and sensible heels. Even bathing suits sometimes had little modesty skirts, too, covering a whisper of thigh, at least implying that the wearer was trying to remain covered, thighs unexposed. In the meantime, we youngsters cut our summer shorts shorter and shorter, in hopes that the ragged hem was above the bottom flap of pocket. It was not a good look but a robust statement of thigh-positivity.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

After “Flashdance” was released, in 1983, thighs again got the spotlight: As soon as Jennifer Beals blew our minds, everyone fancied themselves a flash-dancer/welder (that was her gig, right?) and started wearing leg warmers to make the point. The silhouette was thoroughly bizarre: Gigantic calves, with their extra padding of woolly leg warmers, topped off with an exposed thigh and then the hint of a skirt. Wow, did we ever look ridiculous! Nothing like the sight of someone in pink knitted leg warmers at the grocery store; file under “cognitive dissonance”.

Then thighs kind of disappeared. Mini-skirts gave way to midi skirts and then big baggy pants. And pants keep getting baggier. I used to bet my bottom dollar that pleated pants would never return to fashion because that extra, functionless fabric seemed like no one’s idea of beauty, and now I have to say never say never, because all I see in the fall collections are pleated pants.

But every generation, it seems, has its signature exposed body part. These days thighs have vanished, giving way to the midsection. I can guess someone’s age by whether or not their top is cropped. When I first started seeing cropped tops, I tried them on and yanked at them in the mistaken belief that they were just accidentally a little short, or my pants were too low, but surely no one intended for me to have a swath of four inches of flesh showing between the top of my pants and the bottom of my top. Boy, was I wrong. That is precisely what was intended. Suddenly, one was hard-pressed to find a shirt that dropped below one’s belly button. I don’t have the world’s worst belly button and my midsection is presentable enough, but I had zero desire, ZERO—may I repeat? ZERO— desire to bare my midriff. I think it feels icky, like a midsection wedgie. No shade on those who embrace it, but I shan’t. And I’ll admit this: The advent of the crop top was the first time that clothing made me feel old.

SHOW NOTES

—I had terrible cell service while I was in Greece, and in order to get any WiFi I had to walk down some crumbling stone stairs to the cafe in town and hope that the bandwidth wasn’t being hogged by one of the local kids watching YouTube, and even then it was hit-or-miss. All the insanity of the recent news cycle was hard to follow. I was frustrated and then not so frustrated—it was a relief to not be able to doom-scroll endlessly, an unexpected mental break. Highly recommend.

—I’m totally hooked on audiobooks but I now have a huge bone to pick: Why do narrators have to do accents when the characters are speaking in English?! I was listening to Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History. Throughout the book, the narrator changed into a horrible French-inflected accent when reading the French character’s lines. I eventually gave up on the book because the accent was so annoying. The fact is it was an American reader pretending to sound French, which just made my skin crawl. When I’m reading, I’m not “hearing” the characters speaking in accents. I’m sure someone thinks this makes the reading of the book more like performance, but I would like it to be like hearing a book. I’ve just started listening to Richard Powers’ The Overstory and almost died when the chapter focusing on a Chinese American family began and the narrator started doing a cringe-worthy Chinese accent. Am I wrong on this? Isn’t it kind of awful????

—Everywhere I go, I get compliments on this Apple Watch band that I bought myself for my birthday a few years ago. It was pricey but boy, was it worth it.

—Due to lingering jet lag, I’m keeping this short. Happy weekend, champs!