May 22, 2013 Article

The Old Coot is overloaded!

By Merlin Lessler

So here I am at a (wedding, opera, cocktail party, christening – you fill in the blank) standing around with the other men in attendance, looking lumpy. Our pockets are bulging with lipsticks, compacts, credit cards, store cards, wads of wallet photos, car keys, discount coupons, perfume samples and heavily highlighted copies of Men Are from Mars; Women Are from Venus. And why? Because clothing designers won’t put pockets in women’s clothes.

Oh sure, there are some things with pockets, but only as an artistic element, not as a fully functioning compartment. The fashion people aren’t interested in functionality. So, men get all the stuff and jam it in their pockets. We can’t get out of it. We’ve got pockets galore. Four in a suit coat, four in a pair of pants. It’s why we don’t like to dance at weddings. And, if we do, it’s why we dance funny. The weight in our pockets shifts with every dance step and makes us lurch and stagger around and lose the beat. It’s the old two-step. One step is our dance move; the next is the stumble we take to recover our balance.

I first became aware of this pocket deficiency in women’s clothes back when I was a kid, proudly strutting around in a coveted pair of Levi’s. We didn’t call them jeans back then; we called them dungarees. Jeans were what our sisters wore, denim pants with an elastic top, a zipper up the side and NO POCKETS! There I was in dungarees, with enough pockets to handle a jack knife, a yoyo, a five pack of baseball cards, a derringer cap pistol and a frog or two. My sister didn’t even have a place to put a skate key. She had to string it on a shoelace and tie it around her neck. Jeans have changed since then; women’s jeans now have pockets, but still, they don’t function very well. The jeans are too tight to accommodate anything bigger than a credit card.

It’s why men have started using “man purses” disguised as masculine looking brief cases or camera bags. If you peek inside you’ll find lipsticks, compacts and other items we’re lugging around for our wives!