The Sisterhood of the Traveling Panties
When I sorted through our mail last week there was a lightweight package from my friend Kaye in Kentucky. Before I greedily tore the paper I knew what it was without feeling the luxurious nylon/lycra spandex blend between my fingers. The golden panties!
For the past several years, whenever my college buddies and I get together (which, unfortunately, is getting fewer and farther between considering we all live in different states) we always pass along the same prank gift–a gawdy pair of antique gold high waist panties purchased by Kaye from Dollar General that have been finely crafted from a “light weight fabric” that gently “molds the figure.” They look like something a WWF wrestler or fashionably inept superhero might wear. Kaye heard that I had pneumonia and she knew the powers of the Golden Big Ass Panties would magically heal me (or at least make me laugh.)
My friends from college share my goofy sense of humor. We all met while working for the student newspaper back in the late 1980s. I changed my major my freshman year from public relations to print journalism, which was a bold move for me at the time, and had started writing for the student newspaper as a general assignment reporter at the encouragement of my Basic Reporting professor. I had just dropped out of Greek rush at my college and found friendship among my new journalism buddies. I wasn’t really sure if I was the sorority girl type and frankly the thought of deciding what sorority to go with and basically choosing the girls who would be my friends for the next four years was way too stressful (all that teen angst). I was also in a high school sorority for two years and wasn’t sure I wanted to be in that type of clique again, although many of my friends joined sororities and loved it. I tearfully told my rush counselor that I wanted to drop out and that I would probably rush during my sophomore year. I never did.
The golden panties are just a reminder of my friendships during a time when staying up late at the student newspaper office and ordering Domino’s pizza on production nights and typing stories on prehistoric Mac computers and proofing gallies and cutting out headlines with an X-acto knife and partying on the weekends in one of Mr. A’s old rental houses off of College Street and drunkenly dancing to REM or U2 and worrying about what kind of summer internship we’d get was our life. Now I just need to decide who will be the next lucky recipient of the golden panties. Mwaa haaa haaa haaa.
