Don't Try This at Home!

     My nephew got married over the weekend, and I spent the past two weeks preparing my Winter in Chicago body for the Spring in California wedding.
     You probably know that the current fashion is to go without hosiery.  This is fine if your legs are young.  It is also fine if you are too old to care about fashion. I am at that awkward in-between age.
     Over dinner one night, I asked some friends what to do with my 53-year old legs.  There was universal agreement that I could not wear nude hose.  Then I rolled up my pants leg and showed them my scaly, corpselike limb, and a hush fell over the table.
     My friend Deb showed me her legs after a treatment of Jergens Natural Glow self-tanner.  While the color was slightly unnatural, it definitely looked better than the natural color I was sporting.  I drove directly to Walgreens and purchased the body lotion and lathered myself up.
     Although the smell was putrid, I did succeed in dying myself a darker color.  After three days, I was a glowing bronze!  My co-workers commented that I looked tan and rested.  The Jergens instructions read that I should "use until desired color is achieved" and "reapply as needed," so I stopped using the cream and waited to see what would happen.
     That's when my suntan started to rub off on my bathroom towel.
     I was left with the horrid appearance of a disfiguring skin disease.  I tried to use the Tan-in-a-Tube again but  the dark patches became orange while the pale skin seemed to get inexplicably whiter.  Now that my "tan" was splotchy and uneven, there seemed to be no way to get back to a solid skin tone of any color.
     I immediately bought Spanx Super Shaping Sheers in black and asked God to forgive me for ever disparaging the miracle of pantyhose.
     But now I had a brand new problem: MY ARMS.  Of course my dress was sleeveless, and there was no time to find a long-sleeved cocktail dress (if such a thing even exists.)  My arms looked like an impressionist painting, but not in a good way.  More like Monet's impression of leprosy.
     My only hope was my new best friend, the loofah.  I scrubbed myself raw searching for my old pale, pasty grayish-white arms underneath my tie-dyed exterior.
     I had some success---I found a fabulous Eileen Fisher shawl on sale at Macy's for half price. My skin was particularly ugly in sunlight, so I wore the shawl for the outdoor ceremony and until it got dark and everyone was drunk.
     It all turned out fine.  Shockingly, my hosiery was not the talk of the wedding.  I had forgotten the other maxim of being a 53-year old woman: Unless I came to the wedding wearing a Nazi uniform, no one was looking at me.