A bit of a pickle

I once got myself stuck in a mint green un-zippered skirt that wouldn’t come over my head.

In Traverse City, Michigan.

At the National Cherry Festival.

In a Porta Potty.

I may have bumped into wall, and I kind of cringe to think of it, because I am capable of eating a lot of cherries in one sitting. I have done it. And while I won’t fully admit to the after-effects, I can only imagine the smelly plights that a porta-potty, unlucky enough to be placed at a festival celebrating easily poppable stone fruits might endure. I’ll just say this: prunes take a lot of flak, but it’s not all their fault.

My senior year of high school, I went through a skirt sewing phase, by which I mean I came home every day from school and I sewed a skirt. By the time I got to the sixth or seventh one, I wasn’t even using another skirt as a pattern anymore. I would just cut four rhombuses, two taller, two shorter. Sew the front together, sew the back together, sew sides, hem bottom, hem top. Bam! Skirt!

There was only one problem. Having already passed through puberty, I had these pesky protuberances above and below precisely where I wanted the narrowest part of my skirt to fit. And so, each of my waists had to be large enough that I could weasel my my way into it, but not so wide that it would fall over my hips.

Learn to sew a zipper, you say? Why, yes, that does have some rational grounding. In fact, even I was not so thick as to not see the logic in the general availability of fastened skirts in department stores. Because to pay money for a skirt that takes you five minutes to fit over your head in the morning, a skirt whose application requires you to pause briefly to breathe before holding your breath again, so that your rib cage won’t expand and your shoulders won’t move as you force a cotton weave to stretch to it’s greatest capacity–to pay for that, well, that would be absurd. But, when your primary objective is to quadruple your skirt collection, ease and wearability be damned—well—then an hour spent learning to sew a zipper means an hour thoroughly squandered. So it was that I showed up to school the last month of senior year, with each day a new skirt.

I have talked a lot about getting the skirts on. I have not so much mentioned getting them off, and I should, for while getting them on was a bit of an ordeal, shedding them was something I usually opted to behind closed doors, where no one was around to hear the grunting or knocking that ensued when I extracted my body from the tightly hemmed bondage. It usually involved undressing from the waist up, so as to not restrict anything in places where it could not be adjusted. Without fail, I would find myself bent over trying to will my shoulders into my ears as my hands tugged at the bottom hem.

So, of course I had some inkling of the endeavor at hand when, at the Cherry Festival, we readied ourselves for a swim. Even though I wore my very appropriately cherry printed swimsuit underneath my clothes and could easily have stripped down to that had my wardrobe involved functional pieces, I marched to the porta-potties. No unintentional exhibitionism here!

What I had not factored into the equation was the sticky nature of sweat and the expanding effect that a hot summer day can have on the skin. What I had not planned on was inserting myself directly into the movie scene where the girl, having forgotten to lock the porta-potty door, stumbles into it and out into the world as she works to pull her skirt over her head. She finds herself strewn on the ground amidst gaping onlookers, her legs askew, her head obscured by said skirt, her cherry-print bikini bottoms exposed for all to see. This is the stuff front pages photos are made of—at least that’s what I would be on the look out for if I were the photographer at the Cherry Festival. A fresh perspective. A bit of an edge.

In the end, we had to cut it off right there on the beach, the failure of my porta-potty mishap hanging from my person. I stood there, hunched with my dad’s pocket knife and seam-ripped the skirt from my hips. All-told, this is rather a sad story. The original handy work was never the same again.

Today, I embark on my summer adventure which once again includes a trip to the Cherry Festival. The cherry swimming suit will surely adorn my luggage. I’m not sure about the skirts yet. You might imagine one would have learned her lesson, but alas, while I have more actual sewing patterns under my belt now, the fact of the matter remains: I have still not learned to sew a zipper.