Pants de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

It’s so good to be back. Today’s subject is fashion; jeans to be exact.  I mean, who doesn’t love a good ‘ole pair of jeans?

Once I graduated from the generic dungarees with iron-on knee patches of childhood, my jeans of choice were the classic Levi 501’s. Funny how loyal I was to that youthful, rugged, everyman denim look that all my friends were rockin’. Peer pressure perhaps? Problem was they never fit quite right. In today’s vernacular, if it’s “all about the bass” I had always been cursed to abide in the ample mid-range camp where handles of love abound. With one size up “baggy-butt” or “side-spillage” the only options available, I opted to fit (no pun intended) in the best I could. I guess I could have gone south and struggled into three or four pairs of tighty-whities to beef up the bass. That’s a joke. Don’t own any white Jockeys. And besides, I prefer the term Superman underwear. But I quickly learned an extra-large t-shirt would cover a multitude of seams…er….sins.

These days (cool way of saying “Why back in my day…“ without sounding like an old geezer) it appears as though filling one’s denims to overflowing doesn’t have quite the stigma it once had. Encapsulating a super-sized portion of McMuffin into some type of skin-tight clingy material is de rigueur. That’s so nice. I’m really glad this generation has abandoned the body self-image hang-ups in favor of letting it all hang out. Good for you. Why should skinny people get all the good clothes?

Just recently my wife and I went shopping for a new pair of pants for yours truly. She suggested I try on some different jeans. Different? Jeans? I felt faint.

Okay, lest you think I’ve been wearing 501’s all this time, relax, I am way too vain to go into middle (don’t laugh) age without kicking and screaming all the way. I have since switched to 514’s in various colors. There was a brief, passionate fling with Jordache in the late 70’s. A couple parts of my anatomy still ache to this day just thinking about it.  So with slightly less cajoling than it took to get Ben Affleck to don the Batman attire, I tried on some new super-slim jeans that cost about as much as a new car. Dang! They fit like a glove. Cotton with spandex or something.  I felt ten years younger. My wife winked her approval. Oh, yeah, so did the salesman. No comment.

Did I buy them? Well, sort of. Went to Nordstrom’s Rack and got a similar pair for less than the price of a Roman holiday. One can be hip and also frugal dontcha know. And being a musician means that even at my (younger than Keith Richards fer sure) age I can wear just about anything cool and not get much snickering.  Well, not too much.

K.G.