I Wanna Wear White!

Will it ever be summer this year? I mean real summer, as in wear-white-pants-summer? Sandals-even-at-night summer? You-dont-even-care-that-your-arms-are-bare summer? Don’t know. So far, it’s been “unseasonably cool,” as the weatherpersons like to say. What’s cool about it, I say. As for the amount of rain we’ve had in June: when you start to see animals going two by two down Fifth Avenue, you know you’re in trouble.

Weeks ago, I took out all my summer clothes and laid them on the bed. It’s a big bed. My goal was to sort them out, hang them up, and move the winter stuff to the other closet.

The task was so daunting (it seems I have more summer clothes than winter clothes, which makes no sense), that I gave up, took the stuff off the bed and put it all into shopping bags. I figured that I would go back to sorting it out when the weather got warmer, it stoppped raining, or the clutter made me crazy— whichever came first. Guess which.

But with the clothes out of the bags, I discovered that I have seven pairs of white pants. Yes, seven. And I can rationalize this in a heartbeat.

Of course, women can rationalize anything when it comes to their wardrobes . . .

I love white pants. Yes, yes, I know they’re not slimming. In fact, they often make you look more hippy than hip. But I wear black pants nearly every single day of the fall, winter, and spring, and by summer I’m sick of them! Black pants are so damn practical, aren’t they? They go with everything, and if you wear black shoes or boots a lot (don’t ask me how many pairs of those I have but you could check it out in My Shoe Story), they elongate the leg (oh joy) and yes, they are slimming (pass the ice cream).

But white pants are so . . . summer! They’re crisp! They’re chic! They’re great with colors! They’re dramatic with black tops! They make me feel so young! They would also make me feel “as though Spring has been sprung,” if only it would already.

It’s so cold in New York that I saw people at the theatre** the other night wearing heavy jackets and boots. In the middle of June! And you could practically feel the vibrations from the shivering tourists, because, poor babies, they had brought clothes for warm weather. White pants even. Who knew.

In spite of this revolting weather development, I can’t bring myself to get rid of a single pair of my seven white pants. By the way, I’m not even counting the two pairs of white yoga pants that are strictly for lounging and the white gauzy ones for the beach. Of the seven, two are pretty old, but I still like them. One pair is new, and not that great, but I paid good money for them last year and refuse to throw them out. Yet. One pair are jeans, bought a few years back after I had surgery and was very, very thin. Hardly worn. But one lives in hope. One pair is cropped. One pair is flared. And the last is not really white, but a very pale shade of cream that goes great with my favorite striped tee, which is dark red and cream. Okay, so that tee is not exactly new, but as some wit once said to her erstwhile younger lover, “I have t-shirts older than you!” Deal with it.

So here I sit at my computer, in pants not white and not summery, black even, with the cold, cold rain falling outside my window. What’s new? It has been raining for forty days and forty nights.I have to go out to dinner tonight, and I can’t wear white pants. I can’t wear a skirt either, because my skirts all go with sandals, and sandals are out of the question in this weather. I guess that white pants are the symbol of summer to me — although skirts and sandals are pretty good in the symbol department, too — so not being able to wear them means that summer is experiencing serious technical difficulties this year. It also means that I’ll be wearing black pants tonight. Again.

(**The play I saw that night didn’t leave me cold: It was the hilarious comedy, The Norman Conquests, which I reviewed for
www.womanaroundtown.com )

About the pants: Am I alone in this?
Any other white pants aficionados out there?
Anyone else longing for summer to kick in?
Let me know.