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SPANX

SPANX

BLOGGER: RENEE FISHER

I bought a lovely dress to wear to my son’s wedding last September.  I had to wear Spanx with this dress.  Most people know about Spanx.  I know about it because my former best friend Jean became a model, dumped me and now Spanx is her best friend.  I also know about it 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 (then altered down) dresses.

All of this instilled in me a Spanx Anxiety Attack.  First off, you could make Spanx out of steel-infused nuclear polymer and I still wouldn’t look like those people in the magazines.  Several years ago, I went to Macys and tried on a pair of Spanx.  Sure enough, my belly totally disappeared, as promised, but I immediately developed a midriff bulge that went all the way up to my neck.

When I got home from London, I went to Nordstrom. I brought the dress with me to the store.  Not knowing which particular body area would be in crisis mode at the time, I gathered up all the available styles of Spanx they had.  The only one I didn’t choose was the one with long legs.  This was, after all, a knee length dress, and while the Spanx would make my legs look great, I wasn’t sure how attractive it would be to appear to be wearing a wet suit.

The nice salesgirl led me to a dressing room and unlocked the door for me, assuring absolute privacy and protecting the general public from mistakenly entering my 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 while trying to pull on a rubberized garment .

OK, let’s discuss. I start with a warning: The following might be too graphic for small children and too emotionally damaging for younger women who fear the aging process.  The three-way mirror may be my friend (and I emphasize the word “may”) once I have completed putting on my clothing, but it is not something I enjoy when I am struggling to encase my torso in a space age tube of fabric.  The first one I tried on had no built in bra—the Girls got so smashed down that it took me several minutes to locate them.

Another style had a bra (hallelujah!) but stopped a few inches past my waist. The moment I put it on, it started to roll up. I was sure that it would be at my breasts by the end of the ceremony and up to my neck by the time we made it to the reception.  Subsequent styles had various other characteristics that didn’t work (don’t ask).  I 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.

I chose the best two and marched out twice to show my husband who had been patiently waiting just outside the entrance to the dressing rooms.  I let him choose the one he thought looked best with the dress; he preferred the one that was made like a leotard.  I paid the $85, and, while the salesgirl was ringing up the purchase, thought for $85 I should be able to pay someone to stand in for me in the wedding photos.

“I’m really discouraged,” I told my husband as we 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 my son’s wedding, I put on the Spanx and noticed for the first time that the garment seemed to be missing a critical opening.  Without this critical opening, I would have to take my dress off and remove the Spanx entirely in order to use the rest room.  Basically, I would have to be naked.  As this seemed an item entirely too significant to have passed Quality Control, I 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.

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

I decided to be cool, calm, rational, and methodical.  That plan lasted about five seconds.  The rest of the time I spent contorting myself so as not to wet my Pale Grey Mother of the Groom Dress Constructed Of That Kind of Fabric That Shows Every Single Drop of Anything That Could Possibly Get On It.  Had I failed, I would have had to spend the entire reception in the bathroom stall and have food delivered to me under the stall door.

The wedding reception was fabulous, and, on my next trip to the rest room I surrendered and did what I had tried to avoid doing during the first trip.  I’m not sure what the other women in the rest room thought to see a pile of clothing on the stall floor.  I suspect that if I showed the Spanx to my husband he would have said, “Oh, you did this incorrectly,” or something like that, with that same voice he uses when he says, “You pushed the wrong button on the printer,” or “You were holding the remote backward (or upside down or sideways).”  I will never ask him—I simply refuse to have a man explain my undergarments to me.  Instead, I will go on a diet to lose ten pounds and never wear the Spanx again.  When that fails, I will go to my seamstress and have her alter the Spanx.

Renee Fisher is a Realtor and writer who lives in the Washington, DC area.  She is the co-author of two award-winning books about life after 50 www.invisiblenomore.com and is the DC Boomer Humor columnist for examiner.com DC-Boomer-Humor-Examiner.

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Tags: body, boomer, control top, diet, fifty, forty, girdle, imagineage, midlife, sixty, spanx, trend, underwear, weight, women