Girdle Power

"How's this?" the man in the black velvet yarmulke said to me as he held a long strip of nylon and spandex around my middle. I had sucked my chest in, expecting to have difficulty breathing. To my surprise, I had none, though it was a little tight, and I told him so. He told me not to worry and pulled something else out of one of the bevy of boxes that stood on the shelf behind his counter. A wisp of a woman I presumed to be his wife looked on as he unfurled a slightly looser strip of nylon and spandex and spread it around my waist.

This one felt remarkably comfortable, as though a child had just run up to me and hugged me around the waist.

"I'll take it," I said.

"Thirty-five dollars!" The cash register sounded. I paid the man and went on my merry way to a nearby McDonald's, where I could don my purchase in peace.

The whole scene had felt like something out of a bad gross-out comedy. That morning, I had telephoned Orchard Corsets, one of the few survivors from what I am told was once a a bustling business on New York's Lower East Side, to inquire about a garment I hoped would improve my looks and my posture, and possibly help me lose weight by putting pressure on my stomach and thus making it uncomfortable to overindulge.

"Do you sell girdles for men?" I had asked, tentatively, on the phone. In a culture that regularly puts every sort of freak on television to talk about how much sex he's having with his ex-girlfriend's mother, it's still embarrassing for a man to admit he wants and needs something to shape his middle. Not knowing who exactly ran the shop or what its clientele was, I worried the question might seem odd.

"Yes, we sell cintures and girdles for men," a masculine voice on the other end of the line reassured me.

"Great," I said. "I'll stop by later today."

I grabbed my wallet and headed for the subway. As my train made its way to Delancey Street, I tried to steel myself for walking through racks and racks of lacy nothings into whatever little corner of this shop might be reserved for men's shaping garments. I pictured the gentleman on the phone gently taking me behind a curtain to measure me, away from the glares of women who were there looking for a bridal bustier or just a better-fitting brassiere.

Instead, I arrived to find the store empty except for the man in the black velvet kippah. It had not occurred to me that this was a business likely to be operated by Orthodox Jews--or at least, by an Orthodox Jewish man. Halacha (traditional Jewish law) is greatly concerned with the concept of tznius (modesty) and generally goes out of its way to avoid putting men into physical contact with women who are not their wives. I had assumed the man who answered my call was a stock clerk or someone who was kept out of the way of the store's female customers.

Besides lacking the crowds of women I had imagined, the store was also bereft of any display items. Whatever the store sold was kept out of sight in boxes that had to be requested from and taken out by people who worked there. This did not bode well for me.

Though jarred to discover how different the shop was from what I had imagined, I explained to the man that I had called earlier and told him I was looking for a girdle. Yes, I used that word--girdle. Not a compression tee. Not a tamer. Not "shapewear". A girdle. I believe in calling things by their right names. If something smooths lumps and bumps and holds you in like a girdle, I'm going to call it a girdle, whether it comes with bows and satin panels or not.

To my equal surprise and consternation, the man did not lead me into some mysterious back room where the store's limited stock of male unmentionables lay in wait for that rare male customer who dared enter this den of females. Instead, he took something black with a floral pattern out from the stacks of boxes and put it around my waist, right there where God and everyone could see, and proceeded to whittle away my middle with it. The rest of the story I have already told you.

I have been wearing this girdle--the man called it a "waist cincher" but I still think of it as my girdle--for about two weeks now. When I bought it, I had expected something that delivered dollops of pain up and down my midsection; this is how my mother, and every woman I know old enough to remember wearing girdles on a daily basis, had led me to view girdles. What I have found instead quite surprised me. After I learned how to do up the hook-and-eye fasteners on it, and even more so after I realized I could just step into the thing each day instead of doing up the fasteners each time I wanted to put it on, I have had no problems with my girdle, either in terms of getting it on or in terms of its comfort. Although I feel it around my stomach and waist as I go about my day, it has never once caused me difficulty breathing, even on its tightest setting (it comes with three rows of "eyes"--I presume so that the wearer can adjust it to the tightness of her dress). My clothes look better on me. I stand up straighter and feel much more confident walking down the street.

And I've never once had problems walking, sitting, bending over, or doing any of the 1,001 other things I need to do while wearing my girdle every day. Those ads from 1950s magazines showing women dancing and jumping around in their girdles, which I had assumed were the product of some real-life Don Draper's overactive imagination, now seem infinitely plausible.

What, then, accounts for the image problem girdles and other foundation garments have in the minds of so many people? The best I can figure is that women laden them with unrealistic expectations or outright delusions that enough Lycra and nylon can magically make their size 8 body fit into a size 2 dress. I have no such unrealistic expectations; I wore pants with a 46-inch waist before I bought my girdle, and I wear pants with a 46-inch waist now. The difference is that I no longer suffer from unloved love handles and the sensation that my waist is shifting down.

Girdles cannot make you look thirty pounds lighter. At most, they will give you a little wiggle room in tight-fitting garments. But they can improve your overall look, posture, and confidence. And to that I say: Girdle Power!

A Dispatch from the Not-So-Dead

To all of my regular readers, I owe an immense apology. It has been several months since you last received a dispatch from the Far East Side Minyan. I ought to say that the stresses of graduate school have precluded me from corresponding, but in fact I have had opportunity to blog. I have simply felt as though I had very little of interest to say. In school, my life has not extended much further than the campus library. While this library is located east of my apartment, this fact alone did not create much material worthy of publication.

Well, things have changed over the summer. I had the great privilege this summer of attending an immersion program in Portuguese at Middlebury College. Middlebury is famous for summer language programs that involve what is known as the Language Pledge--a pledge each student in the program takes to use the language he is trying to learn as his only means of communication (exceptions are made for keeping in touch with your family or in the event of a genuine emergency). Besides gaining leaps and bounds in my knowledge of Portuguese, I feel I've learned a few things about myself, and about language teaching. I would even say that this program has reinvigorated my love of and interest in language teaching, to the point that I could imagine myself doing it professionally again. I've also gained a better sense of what was going on in the mind of my students as they struggled to speak in English.

More on my experience at Middlebury will follow, probably on La Lingua Frankly.

From Normandy to Dunkirk

As far as I can tell from what she has told me about her child, my mother never left her home state of Missouri until she went away to college in New Jersey at the age of nineteen. But at the same time, she grew up in Normandy.

Normandy (or, properly, NOrmandy, to indicate the dialed letters) was the telephone exchange given to Nevada, Missouri, the little town where she grew up. To give you a sense of the very different telecommunications environment she lived in, my mother tells me that, as a child of six or seven in the late 1950s, she once picked up the telephone receiver in her parents' home and told the operator she wanted to speak to "Grandma." My great-grandmother, who ran a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, was sufficiently well-known that the operator was able to complete the call without any further information.

Telephone exchange names, which existed from roughly 1910 until the late 1960s in the United States (and apparently appeared in some local phone directories as late as the early 1980s), were designed to solve a problem that never really existed. As more and more telephones were installed in the 1920s, an era before most homes had dial phones, telephone numbers extended in some areas to have first five digits, then six, then seven. Phone company executives felt that six- and seven-digit numbers were too long for operators to remember when connecting calls, so they decreed that phone numbers would begin with a mnemonic word that corresponded to the first two (in Britain and some larger American cities, three) digits. Thus, 736-5000 became PEnnsylvania 6-5000.

As a fan of all things retro, I decided to use one when I set up an answering machine on the landline phone in my apartment (why I choose to have a landline will be the subject of another blog post). This led to a problem: I didn't actually know what exchange my number had been part of before all-digit dialing came to Philadelphia. Searching the internet, however, I was able to find a list of recommended exchange names the Bell Telephone Company put out in the mid-1950s, when telephone numbers across the country were being standardized to two letters, five digits. For exchanges beginning with 38 (as does my phone number), Ma Bell listed five choices: DUdley, DUnkirk, DUpont, EVergreen, and FUlton. So I guess that in addition to living in Pennsylvania, I now also live in Dunkirk.

Why bother with this practice, aside from retrophilia or shock value? I think a good reason for using telephone exchange names is the one the phone companies came up for almost a century ago: they make phone numbers easier to remember. As cell phones have become ubiquitous, people seem to know and remember fewer and fewer phone numbers. I've even met people who hadn't bothered to memorize their own and can only give out their phone number by dialing you from their cell. Bringing words back into phone numbers might be an aid to children who at the very least need to remember Mommy and Daddy's cell and/or work numbers.