I never wear dresses once it gets cold. I love dresses, don’t get me wrong. I just really really hate pantyhose. As a shortish roundish woman, I am in constant battle with too long legs wrinkling at my ankles and rolling down control tops creating abdominal and buttock ripples. I remember reading in Erma Bombeck’s book, “At Wit’s End,” a scene of her trying to get them on, only to find the crotch had migrated down to her knees and tied her legs together. I laughed so hard in recognition that my kids, little at the time, came downstairs to see if I was alright.

So one gets to wondering how people manage them. I mean, lots of people do manage to wear them, on a daily basis, even, without my problems with hairs getting caught in the weave, or ankles turning elephantesque or circulation cut offs. Maybe being slimmer helps. Maybe if I shaved my legs more carefully, they’d pull less.  Who knows? I’m no longer willing to try. I wear pants instead. I have some “stay up” stockings but doubt their advertisements and live in fear of them puddling around my knees.

How do bank robbers do it? You always see them wearing pantyhose in movies and such as disguises. But I don’t think it’s that easy. There’s the choice of the proper colour and tightness to smoosh their faces to unrecognizability but not so tight or dark that they can’t see.  And they’d have to explain their presence to Aunt Elma as she picks out her solid tights…

There’s the risk of the control tops rolling up to pull their faces into joker-like grins. And what do they do with the spare leg? Do they leave it dangling flaccidly down their back? Wouldn’t this give the cops a place to grab them as they run?

They can’t buy a pair and cut off the legs, sharing with their partner, because the nylon would roll up horribly. And stockings are pricey, and if they are stay-ups they have hard elastics around the tops that could lead to facial damage. Heaven forbid they use knee highs – the elastic at the top of those are tight enough to restrict arteries in the leg – they’d probably die of strangulation just as they got the loot.

A public health nurse I worked with used to tell kids to test the stretchiness of condoms by pulling them over their heads – I imagine the feeling would be rather like that of pulling knee highs over one’s head. Tight, hard to breathe, and the potential for rippage at inconvenient moments.

Maybe this is the reason for the switching by the criminal event to Balaclavas and Halloween masks. All I know is I, as a non-criminal female, am sticking to pants til the sun warms again and I can go bare-legged.

I’m pretending it’s an environmental choice. After all, they did find all those tiny nylon bits in mussels of late. And besides, now I can toss the razor away til March. It’s all good.