MANDY FLYNN: Haute couture? Au contraire

The woman sitting on the bench in the middle of the long hallway chuckled as I stopped for the second time to pull the hem of my pants leg out of the back of my shoe.

“I hate it when that happens,” she said, then followed up with as profound a statement as I’d heard in quite a while.

“Whatever happened to stirrup pants?”

I chuckled, myself, and told her I hadn’t thought about stirrup pants in years. But if I’d had the time, I’d have sat down beside her and told her I was sorry, but I had to disagree with her statement that stirrup pants were always just right. Oh, they were not.

Not always.

Let’s set aside a moment the fact that a great many people under the age of, say, 27 probably don’t even know what stirrup pants are. They are just that – stretchy pants with elastic bands at the bottom of each leg that went under each foot, like stirrups. They’ve been worn for decades for different reasons, mostly utilitarian — by horse riders so their pants would stay tucked in their boots, and later by snow skiers for the same reason. Then, some ding-dong in the 1980s decided to declare stirrup pants the new “it” thing. Did I ride horses? No. Did I snow ski? No. Did I own stirrup pants?

Tragically, yes.

I say tragically because the first time I wore my cream-colored stirrup pants, I discovered my legs were about an inch longer than my pants. By lunchtime, the stirrups had pulled the crotch of them nearly to my knees and, were it not for my mint green oversized furry sweater and my strategically tied white Members Only jacket around my waist to help hold them up, it would have been full moon by sixth period.

I would have surely fainted from embarrassment and been saved from concussion only by the grace of my perfectly feathered head bouncing off the humongous shoulder pads in my sweater.

I shudder at the memory and I also wonder … did we not own a full-length mirror the entire time I was in high school? Sadly, I fear it would not have made a difference.

I didn’t have the best of luck with the styles of the 1980s. My feet got sunburned while wearing jelly shoes, leaving a red and white checkerboard pattern across my toes after I’d peeled the hot plastic away from them. Once my favorite orange and yellow sweater that I coolly draped over my shoulders and around the popped collar of my golf shirt (Please, I never played golf) got singed on a Bunsen burner during chemistry.

One of my favorite geometric aqua and plastic earrings the size of a small baby’s head unknowingly fell out and my friend’s grandfather’s dog picked it up and started to choke on it. And my fannypack? Let’s just say I had three or four. They really are quite handy.

To the woman sitting on the bench in the middle of the long hallway who laughed at me because my pants kept getting stuck in the backs of my shoes, thanks for sending me down 1980s memory lane. Actually … no thanks. I’d just as soon forget about the time my neon green slap bracelet malfunctioned, popped backwards, and nearly took my eye out.

I hate it when that happens.

Visit lifestyles columnist Mandy Flynn’s website, www.mandyflynn.com.