The Straight Skin-ny

Caution: "Typical Male" Alert!

Back on July 4th, CNN ran this online story: How Much Skin Is Too Much At the Office? It dealt with the problem of women (and, somewhat less often, men) who wear inappropriately revealing clothes to work. Most offices have dress codes that proscribe things like bare backs or shoulders, too-short skirts, or necklines scooping down to the navel for ladies; and muscle shirts, bicycle shorts, or ratty cut-offs for men. It's all part of projecting a professional image appropriate to the business.

Many years ago when I was living in Berlin, I was in charge of day-to-day operations of a US Government office which worked closely with German agencies to process refugees and resettlers from around the world. One day, I sent one of our staff members - a young lady - home to change after she appeared for work dressed in a hot pink track suit. Clearly, it wasn't appropriate dress for the office.

But what's appropriate depends, of course, on the venue.

One of the nice things (for a man) about competitive ballroom dancing as a hobby is that you get to spend a lot of time around lovely, fit ladies in beautiful dresses, showing a lot of skin. Latin dance costumes, in particular, can be pretty impressive for their very low costume-to-exposed-flesh ratios. It isn't necessarily all great, though.

For one thing, ladies apply makeup to to attract a judge's attention from across a crowded ballroom. At a distance, they look stunning. Up close, they can look like clowns. That's not a criticism, it's just one of those things they have to put up with for being the girl.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is tattoos on women. Now, I'm no fan of tattoos on anybody, men or women, but I think they can be particularly unfortunate form of decor on ladies. I think putting a tattoo - especially a large and garish one - on a beautiful woman is a bit like painting a handlebar mustache on the Mona Lisa. To me, it looks especially bad when the lady is wearing a beautiful ball gown for which she probably paid well over a thousand dollars, and her bare back and arms are sporting tattoos that make her look like a NASCAR entry.

Santa Cruz license plates (tattoos at the small of the back, which peek out over the waistband of pants or the bottom of a dress's back) are bad enough. Yesterday, though, at the Virginia State competition, there was a lady wearing a gorgeous gown with an extremely low-cut back, which exposed a huge, whole-back, multicolored tattoo. Maybe it's just me (and yes, I'm a curmudgeonly, middle-aged geezer-in-training), but I thought the combination was awful. The lady was beautiful, her dress was beautiful, her hair was done up just right, but for me the overall effect was ruined by the enormous tattoo, which didn't even complement the colors of the dress.

Sigh.

When I lived in Germany and was working on my Masters' degree, one of the assistants at our local library was a wonderful young lady named Renee who helped me track down all sorts of arcane references for my various research papers. Renee was the quintessential punk, with her hair a different (and vivid) color every week (often different on each side, or front and back, or with a contrasting racing stripe down the middle), safety pins as earrings (and I can tell you a very funny story about that), skirts little more than wide belts, and tattoos everywhere you could see. One of the funniest things I remember from that time was watching Renee work the checkout desk with the library director, Mrs B, who was the very stereotype of the librarian - elderly, wire-rimmed glasses, white hair pulled back in a severe bun, as conservative as you could get.

Now that was culture shock.

But I digress.

Ladies, before you get that tattoo, think twice. It really doesn't do anything for you. Spend the money on some jewelry or nice clothes, rather than on that body art that may end up being, in the words of Jimmy Buffett, a Permanent Reminder of a Temporary Feeling.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - Letter-writing project update: John's letter is finished and will be mailed today, making me 4-for-5. Andrea, Amanda, and Mike have already received their letters, and I've received Andrea's reply. The letter to my daughter is next. Want a letter of your own? Send your snail-mail address to bilbo_the_blogger (at symbol) yahoo.com and I'll add you to the list. Act now. Scribes are standing (sitting, actually) by!

B.