Dear Luv Doc,
I went to my mom’s house last weekend, and she was wearing barefoot shoes. It was bad enough that she was wearing them in the house, but she refused to take them off when we went to dinner and Kerbey Lane doesn’t have a drive-thru. Can you speak some sense to her? Maybe she will listen to you.
– Mort(ified)
I want to believe Mort, that somewhere in the Middle East – maybe Saudi Arabia – there is a mother covered completely in a burka … and poking out from the bottom of that burka is a pair of red Vibram Five Fingers. Why red? Because red is a whorish color and any woman who would willingly expose the morphology of her toes must be really slutty – and by the way, no offense to your mom, Mort. I am sure she looks tight in a burka and I bet she never uses her vagina for anything other than peeing … oh, and popping you out that one time.
Wow, that was awkward, wasn’t it? Wanna hear something really fucked up, Mort? Back in the late Seventies, my mom used to wear polyester stretch pants. Don’t bother Googling that shit, Mort. All you’re going to find is maybe an Etsy page with some skinny hipster hawking retro bell bottoms. Not the same, Mort. Not even the same planet. The polyester stretch pants my mom wore were from K-Mart, which was a discount chain that had a long history of purveying embarrassing clothing to price-conscious mothers until the Waltons came along and took K-Mart “Klassy” to a whole new level.
Anyway, my mom’s choice of color for her polyester stretch pants was white, which admittedly goes with just about everything except the ample Irish ass of a woman who lovingly gave birth to and raised four boys. These pants surely looked appealing on the Twiggy-esque models in the K-Mart circulars, but on my mom they were a sobering advertisement for birth control.
Rest assured, Mort, my brothers and I and even my father relentlessly harassed her about those pants – I am somewhat ashamed to say – nearly up until the day she died, but my mom never apologized, equivocated, or made any excuse for wearing those pants other than to say “they were in style at the time.”
Lo these many years later, I think I know the real reason: because those pants were comfortable – and because fuck men and their ideas about women’s fashion and fashion in general. Any woman who agrees to ravage her privates giving birth to one or more bowling ball-sized babies and who sacrifices her time and energy raising them to adulthood gets a pass on fashion – pretty much for eternity. So, instead of giving her grief, give her gratitude. She deserves it – and maybe a new pair of shoes.
This article appears in May 30 • 2014.
