Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Saturday, Feb. 03, 2007 - 9:30 p.m.

Dear Jean Makers:

Why on God's green earth would you think I want to stuff my size 10 ass into a pair of tight stretch denim jeans? Seriously, why??? I used to have a size 5 ass. I do not want to wear jeans that make my ass look even wider and like it has two sticks coming out of it that support me and cause me to be mobile. I want my ass to look normal. And preferably not quite so fricking large. I also don't like to wear tight jeans, whether they are of the stretchy denim or the plain old hold your ass and thighs in denim that I prefer. I like to wear loose jeans. I think girls who wear loose jeans look much sexier than those who leave nothing to the imagination, including where the business portion of their anatomy lies. I don't want to show the business portion of my anatomy, be it asscrack or the more frontal part, figuratively OR literally. I like my girly bits and the function thereof left to the imagination of those who will feel compelled to imagine them, NOT sticking up above the band of my jeans or stuffed with denim until there's a big ol' denim arrow in my crotch that says "This End Up." Please make at least one freaking style of nice, normal, bootcut jeans that do not stretch, bulge, curve out and then close to a ridiculously narrow knee, or otherwise call attention to my monumentally huge ass and my girly bits. PLEASE.

Thank you, Katie.

::sigh:: Guess what I spent my afternoon doing?

After the hideous experience of zipping up countless pairs of jeans that did nothing so much as draw attention to my ass and thighs in a very unflattering fashion, I finally found a brand called Apartment 9 that isn't as bad...if I wore jeans in a size 10, instead of a size 8. Size 8 fit, but it also made me look like Trigger, with a near case of camel toe. I think we can all agree that's fairly disgusting and no one wants to see it, so I went up a size to the 10's, which I realize are actually too big for me in stretch denim and will probably be falling off of me an hour after I've put them on, but at least they look reasonably graceful and not like a streetwalker with a questionable sexual past, so I guess that's something. I also bought a pair of Levi's 342's, which I am sure I will come to regret, but which the other girl in the dressing room - an adorable little size 3 - assured me did not make my ass look the size of Montana. I hope she was being truthful, because at that point, I was beyond being able to tell anymore; my ass and thighs looked huge in everything I put on. And it's sort of ironic that part of the allure of stretch denim is that it enables you to buy a size smaller than you normally wear, but I ended up actually buying a size larger. ::sigh::

After the horror of trying on jeans for 3.5 hours, I needed something to soothe my soul, so I did what any self-respecting girl in my position would do.

I went shoe shopping.

But not for just any shoes, my friends; oh no. I went looking for one brand in particular. The Holy Grail of shoes. The coolest, most perfect shoe in the entire known universe. A shoe that spans the fashion gap from emo to geek and Saudi Arabia to France. A shoe with decades of perfection behind it and the memories of a billion junior high basketball players to keep it going forever and ever and ever.

That's right, my friends. Converse All-Stars. AKA Chuck Taylors, Chuck Taylor All-Stars, Converse hightops, basket ball shoes. In optical white, the only color that ever really matters, with the dark red band around the top of the outsole, the navy band midway down the outsole, the blue star seal on the inside ankle, and a diamond-studded crisscross pattern on the bottom of the sole.

Converse All-Stars. The most hallowed shoe in the history of time. The shoe of my childhood and many a happy, happy memory. I can still remember Shoe Day in gym, the day the Converse All-Stars arrived and sat waiting in beautiful, even rows, piled high on a table just inside the double doors to the gymnasium, each with the name of its recipient written in black Sharpie on white index cards stapled to the front of each box. The smell of the rubber, the feel of the canvas, the brandspanking newness of them, the stiff white that gradually mellowed into soft cream, and the way they squeaked on the wood floor of the basketball court. I remember the coolness of getting a new pair of shoes, of belonging to a select group of people, all of us wearing that shoe, part of the uniform, that identified me as a basketball player. An athlete. Someone who DID. God, I loved those shoes. I loved them then, and I love them now, and it's the coolest damn thing that I finally have a pair of them again, after so many years of Nikes and Reeboks and low fitting shoes that never quite felt the same as those glorious canvas hightops. It is because of those shoes that I wore nothing but hightop and canvas sneakers for years, long after the days of basketball and Shoe Day had passed. It feels awesome to have them on my feet again. I can't imagine why I waited. They rule. :)

Peace out,
Katie

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