And She Spanx, too.

Life in the Boomer Lane bought a lovely dress to wear to First Son’s wedding last September.  She had to wear Spanx with this dress.  Most people know about Spanx.  LBL knows about ithem because her former best friend Jean became a model, dumped her and now Spanx is Jean’s best friend.  LBL also know about Spanx because the 5’9” Hollywood celebs who weigh 95 lbs but who have “no eating disorder of any kind whatsoever under any circumstances uh uh no way,” all say they wear Spanx under their size 000 (and then altered down) dresses.

LBL went to Nordstrom.  She brought her mother-of-the-groom dress with her.  Not knowing which particular body area would be currently in crisis mode, she gathered up all of the available styles of Spanx they had. The nice way-younger-than-her-children salesgirl led her to a dressing room and unlocked the door for her, assuring absolute privacy for her and protecting the general public from mistakenly entering her dressing room and seeing what a 62-year-old-woman looks like, sans bra, doing a St Vitus Dance in front of a three-way mirror, trying to pull on a rubberized garment .

LBL starts with a warning: The following might be too graphic for small children or too emotionally damaging for younger women who fear the aging process.  The three-way mirror may be her friend (and she emphasizes the word “may”) once she has completed putting on her clothing.  It is not something she enjoys when she is struggling to encase her torso in a tight, space age tube of fabric.  The first model she tried on had built in bra.  The Girls got so smashed down that it took LBL several minutes to locate them.  When she did, they appeared to be attached to something other than her chest.

Subsequent styles had various other characteristics that didn’t work.  LBL finally had to admit that no style, no matter how uplifting, how packed with tight space age polymer, how much coverage it afforded, could turn back the clock to those glorious tiny bikini days.  She chose the best of the horrible. She paid the $85, and, while the salesgirl was ringing up the purchase, thought that for $85 she should be able to pay someone to stand in for her in the wedding photos.

“I’m really discouraged,” she told her husband, as they exited into the mall.  “What happened to my body?” “I don’t know,” he said, but if you find yours, look for mine as well.”

On the day of First Son’s wedding, LBL put on the Spanx and noticed for the first time that the garment seemed to be missing a critical opening.  Without this critical opening, LBL would have to take my dress off and remove the Spanx entirely in order to use the rest room.  In other words, she would have to be naked.  As this seemed an item entirely too significant to have passed Quality Control, she searched again.  Sure enough, there was an opening, but it was so small and constructed in such a strange way that it would have required an accompanying video to explain its use.

LBL was fine during the ceremony.  But, the minute she arrived at the reception, she had to pee.  She quickly calculated how long the Mother of the Groom would be required to be at the reception, and the answer was considerably longer than she would be able to contain myself.  There was no getting around it: She headed for the rest room.

LBL was determined to be able to pee without wetting her dress or the Spanx. Had she failed, she would have had to spend the entire reception in the bathroom stall and have food delivered to her under the stall door.  A subsequent check of the dress showed her complete brilliance in executing the urinating maneuver successfully.  LBL stood up, so pleased, that she wished someone were in the stall with her to appreciate what I had accomplished.  It was then that she noticed that she had completely missed the toilet.  Her first act as Mother of the Groom had been to walk her son down the aisle.  Her second was to mop up the bathroom floor in the building where the reception was held.