And now, Morgan the Magician will Attempt to Urinate While Encased in Spanx

An oldie for the newbies

                         The photo before you, taken at my niece’s wedding a few years ago, when I was but a babe of 71, marks a historic moment in my life: It was the last time I ever wore the hideous troika of Spanx, heels, and contact lenses. The photographer must have been working with a very fast lens, one of those things that can capture a bullet in mid-air before it splatters the head of whoever is chasing Brad Pitt, as they caught me in one of the rare moments I was not blinking. Dry eye, as your ophthalmologist may have told you, is one of the delights of aging.

                      I spent most of that wedding in the ladies’ room, pouring gallons of Systane into my eyes, because my eyes were so dry that my contacts were sand-papering my eyeballs. No liquids were leaving my body because, as many of you ladies know, the use of the toilet, when wearing Spanx, is contra-indicated. 

                         The rule with Spanx, once you leave the house, is never unhook. A Spanx crotch, at least the model I was wearing, closes with three hooks, and no matter how much hot yoga you do, re-hooking in the confines of a toilet stall is impossible. Maybe a professional escape artist, who could free herself from the subway tracks while chained, handcuffed and padlocked, could do it but I have my doubts. It would be an ABC Sports special.

                      Tonight, Morgan the Magician, the greatest contortionist in the world, will re-hook a Spanx Extra Firm Control Boostie-Yay!® Bodysuit while locked in the confines of a 2’ X 3’ public bathroom stall. She will not be doing the Sideways Yank – itself, no easy move, requiring tremendous upper arm strength and carrying a high risk of leakage. 

                   Here we go, it’s starting! Morgan has quickly unhooked the Spanx and now – can we zoom in with that second camera? – she’s executed a perfect, spatter free urination and wipe. Wait -- I can’t believe it -- Morgan is going in for a second wipe. That’s nerve. The longer you remain in unhooked Spanx, the greater the risk they snap up your torso like a Slinky on meth. Then it’s goodnight, PEN Literary Awards Gala, hello, Taxi.

                        Now for the hard part: Closure.  Morgan has connected the first hook, no wait, it’s in the wrong eye, that mistake is going to cost her. She’s trying again, but, oh, no! The crotch has twisted. Morgan is panicking, she’s standing up, straddling the toilet – oh, no I can’t look -- MEDIC!!

                      Where was I again? Dress up hell: Spanx, high heels -- I’d put on a pair right now, but I’d never make it to the end of this column -- contacts lenses. Oh, right, chronic, age-related dry eye and its little friend, Blinking. 

                    Blinking, I can tell you from my five thousand years of dating, is one of the most distracting, irritating, unsettling things a person can do. I once had a date with a guy who was funny, smart, and charming, but who blinked at a rate of three per second. I assumed he was nervous and it would wear off but it was so distracting I could think of nothing else, it threatened to hijack the conversation.  

                       “…and then, for a while, I did a lot of crime reporting, -- your eyes are driving me nuts, could you throw a jacket over your head?”

                        And the thing was, I knew that with my 70-year-old eyeballs, which were atrophying like prunes even as we spoke, and my contact lenses, that I was sometimes a blinker, too.

                       Glasses, given the era I had grown up in, were not an option.

                       “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without glasses!”, was entrenched in the movies of the 50s and early 60s. Bookish, which is to say sexually repressed women, were always being told by some man to take off their glasses. If it was absolutely essential for a near sighted women to put on her glasses to, say, read the directions on her perfume bottle, she did so only after turning away from the man. It didn’t matter that the woman was so near sighted, she’d walk into wall. Clumsy women were adorable.  

                       I also might have been traumatized by an unfortunate eyeglass deciison I made when I was seven or eight: A pair of red cats-eye glasses, studded with rhinestones.  Apparently, I was a pawn of glamour, even then. Seeing pictures of myself in those glasses makes me cringe, though I’ve seen photos of Roz Chast as a little kid and she had a similar pair, so that makes me feel better.             

                       Anyway, after the pain of the contact lens wedding in Nashville, I had no choice but to find glasses. I went to a fine old mid-town Manhattan store my ophthalmologist recommended, where a sign in the shop claimed Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh had been customers. I wasn’t sure this was the best marketing. Was the shop’s prescription for Earhart’s goggles the reason she went missing?  (“There ahead, my good navigator, Howland Island –OOOPS!”)  And Lindbergh was a notorious anti-Semite, who was given a medal by Hitler and who, while married, had children by three women in Germany. He did, however,  pull off a nice landing in France.  

                        Happily, the people in this optometry shop had some very cool stuff, some of it resembling the tortoiseshell sunglasses which fused thirty years ago to the top of my head.  I bought a pair of painfully expensive, but very beautiful and very functional glasses. They’re progressive, so they adjust from reading to driving distance, and transitional, which means they darken in the sun.

                            This is one of my favorite features. It means that when I am on a bus on a bright, summer day and a woman whips out her phone to show me her grandchildren, because I’m a woman her age and therefore must be dying to see them, I can feign adoration while actually dreaming of the spectacular sex I will get in my new glasses.

                       Because, as I told you last time, I have no interest at all in being Granny.