The Good Panties

If you stumbled upon this looking for images of women wearing sexy lingerie, shoo. Go on. Go feel yourself up somewhere else. This is not for you.
That last post got me to thinking about underwear. OK:  “panties.” I hate that word, don’t you? It sounds creepy, like the word that would keep repeating itself over and over in your head if you were some Victoria’s Secret fetishist or some guy who breaks into houses and does nothing but steal all the underwear out of the dirty clothes hamper.
Say it with me:  ewwwwww.
Or it makes me think about lamb chops. Now, I do not eat lamb chops, and I don’t know what the panties on lamb chops actually ARE, but I know lamb chops have panties (I just googled it to make sure, and jesus:  there were only two references to “lamb chop panties” that didn’t make me run screaming from the room. Here’s one very minor reference), and that’s creepy.
Anyway. So The Good Panties. Do you have them? You know the ones:  they’re new and still have the elastic god intended and aren’t faded. There are no—horrors!—holes. Or stains.
And here let us just stop for a moment and consider this:  stained underwear is worse than wrong. It is an abomination. There is absolutely no excuse—NO EXCUSE—for it. If you have any, go get it right this minute and cut it into little tiny pieces and put it in the garbage, under the coffee grounds.  Shame on you.
Years ago, one of the Kings of Comedy did a funny bit on Menstrual Panties. You know, those old, faded, stretched-out ones you wear when you just don’t want to risk ruining that thong from Victoria’s Secret (and, darlin’, you already know how I feel about thongs:  if you tell me you love them and wear them and that they’re comfortable, I’m going to hook you up to a lie detector and ask you this:  if you were somehow guaranteed never, ever to EVER again see another member of The Sex You Find Attractive, whichever one that might be, and would never, ever been seen nekkid by anyone, ever, would you still be claiming to love the thong? If thongs suddenly became a sign of subnormal intelligence and asexual repulsiveness, would you still be singing their praises? I’m willing to bet, um, “No.” I firmly believe, from having listened to way too many women proclaim their love of The Thong, that they think just saying they love them somehow elevates their desirability. It’s just sexy to say you love thongs and would never wear anything else.
OK. So maybe you’re telling the truth. Maybe your anatomy is somehow so completely different from that possessed by the rest of us that that little string of elastic crawling up your butt doesn’t bother you. Maybe so. Then, I’m guessing, you also wouldn’t mind wearing this straitjacket and these stilettos for 19 hours a day? And this fencing mask and this orthopedic brassiere? Here, let me help you staple it in place.)
Where was I? Oh:  The Menstrual Panties. We all have those, at some point in our lives, don’t we? Well, maybe not you guys. But the rest of us. When your underwear starts to wear out, you push it to the back of the drawer and pull it out on The Really Bad Days.
OK. So you’re allowed to keep those, if you need them. But if the underwear has any stains on them anywhere? Ditch them right now.
Because here’s what I’ve learned over a lifetime of wearing underwear:  the best stuff, the comfortable and marginally sexy and really fun stuff, is cheap:  you can buy white 100% cotton bikini underwear, meaning it’s good for you (nylon is from the devil, in case you missed that memo) and doesn’t have that elastic up around your waist where you have to roll it down so it doesn’t show over the tops of the Mom Jeans, as if anything actually COULD be that high. Plus:  the potential! Because here at the Voodoo Cafe, underwear is the most perfect little thing to dye.
See, dyeing a shirt or a bedspread takes up the whole washing machine. You’ve got to figure out enough for a load of dye, and it’s going to use up a lot of water, and blah, blah, blah. It’s like a full meal.
Underwear is like a potato chip. You can have just one, or you can have the whole bag. But there’s no cooking involved. OK, so the metaphor kind of breaks down. But you know what I mean, right?
You can dye underwear in buckets. So you can set up half a dozen buckets of difference colors and tie-dye a couple dozen pair of underwear all at the same time.
I’ve converted my husband. No, not to panties. Please. You’re thinking, “Holy shit. First she’s all with the damn ear cuffs, and then the poor dude’s wearing pink shirts and socks, and NOW she’s talking about panties. Will the horror never end?”
No. I’m talking about boxer briefs. Am I the last person on the planet to know about these? Sure, I knew about boxers. And I knew about briefs. But it wasn’t until I set out to convert The EGE to cotton that I discovered these fabulous hybrids.
For years, my husband has worn spandex shorts under his clothes. You know, the stuff basketball players wear and that you can sometimes see below their shorts. He always wore these. I hated them. While they ARE spandex and so fit quite attractively, they are made from Fibers Unknown to Nature. They’re just creepy.
When I set out to find something else, something cotton (I can get him to try new clothing, which he hates, only if I bribe him with color. If I can make it acid green or burn-your-eyes-out orange, he’s like, “Great.” Otherwise, he’s going to stick with the same shirt he wore to play baseball in his senior year in high school.
I’m not making this up. He has it. He wears it.)
And then I discovered boxer briefs. Good enough fit to be sexy and still comfortable. I’m happy. He’s happy. Well, OK, he’s content with them now:  at first, he was all like, “So what’s wrong with the spandex?” Like y’all do: holding up your tired-ass underwear with the unraveling threads and indeterminate color that may have once been blue, turning it this way and that like you do when you’re looking at an engine or something—if it’s not visibly on fire, it must be OK.
And—best of all, these boxer briefs are 100% cotton = dye-able! So now he can have The Good Panties, too, only the guy version. Which we would never, ever call Panties. We do not use the word panties in this house, unless we’re singing along with Barry White. He gets a pass.
Anyway, so there’s something to think about:  you can buy good quality white cotton underwear for everyone in your family and dye it. You can still head out into the world in your khaki and your head-to-toe black, like I know most of y’all do, but underneath, your underwear will be livin’ a life of its own.
I’m going to figure out a way to get y’all to wear some color even if I have to sit here in the middle of the day and talk about underwear for an hour. The Things I Do for You People.
Just whatever you do, do NOT google “panties.” Good lord.
And, just in case it crossed your mind, do NOT send me your tired old whities and a list of color choices. I love y’all, I really do, but  there has to be a line somewhere.