Meandering Lines
I am walking through Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two Hassidic women announce their presence with enlivened conversation behind me, in my blindspot. I hear them but cannot see them yet. In a few minutes, they will have walked past me, especially if I slow my pace ever so slightly so I can watch them do it and then I will be in their blindspot until I am just actually walking a few feet behind them. This is the game of pedestrian protocol. This is what I understand Auge to mean when he talks about the recognition of the self as self and as other, repeated later in the experiences of walking as the first’ use of space. I listen to their mixed English and Yiddish, which always sounds so lively to me, so bursting with emphatic expression at every word, every word necessary and bulbous with meaning.
I remember the women was one of the reasons I moved to this neighborhood. Before I moved here, I would run to a gym on the waterfront and take group aerobic classes on Wednesday mornings, where only other attendees at 10 AM on a weekday were the Orthodox women, some of them well into their 60’s wearing tennis shoes over their back seamed stockings and long skirts, somehow having fixed their wigs to their heads enough so they wouldn’t fall off during the strenuous cardio up and down we did. In a sea of black skirts and modest cotton jerseys, I was the one who stood out in Lululemon stretch pants that articulated exactly what my body looked like naked. I felt enthralled watching them lift weights and settle into squats ignorant of things like elegance or form, they were unbearably, undeniably strong, those women. All I could think of was how each of them had given birth 4, 6, 7 times. Relative to that ordeal, how hard could an hour of high intensity interval training be? They came to the classes religiously until the gym closed a few months after I moved to the neighborhood, likely for low attendance. But those women were the ones that ushered me in. It was always groups of women that ushered me into a way of life.
I’ve noticed that the Orthodox women are the only other women besides burlesque performers, fetish models and sex workers who wear back seamed stockings regularly. I see them peeping out from sensible shoes, tucked away under those long skirts. The seam is always perfectly vertical and in place, and I know the difficulty, the practice it takes to put it those on without a hitch. In the ocean of beiges that is the color scheme of stocking themselves, it is the seam that is the detail, the fun variable expressing a bit of fun. Perhaps it is a pronounced dark line of black thread, or maybe just a thicker tone of nude, barely indicting demarcation between the right and left side of the calf. The seam interrupts the plane with a bold, undeniable line. The seamed stocking is both a drawing and sculpture, with its lack or practicality, its complete acknowledgement of its ornate and decorative status.
What is it like to put on a stocking? I ask myself…
I don’t remember the first time I put one on, but I remember the first time I saw one on TV, a stocking. I was watching Roseanne on my parent’s television in the kitchen. The television was a small cube staged in the corner of yellow linoleum. It had an unruly antennae and my mother kept a large frightening glass mason jar of home made kombucha behind it.
I remember the scene in Roseanne had to do with the two daughters, Darlene and Becky and the dad, played by John Goodman. But I don’t remember the action of the scene, and event. What I remember is the shot of the girl’s bathroom with a porcelain bath tub and shower and plastic shower curtain clipped onto a metal rod. And draped on top of that metal rod was a set of stockings, probably pantyhose, black and nude, draped there to dry after they had been washed. As I write these words and try to recollect that scene, tempted to watch all the seasons, google all the keywords just to find it, I wonder, is that even possible? Was there really a scene of hanging drying stockings in that 80’s sitcom? Am I making it up? I begin to doubt my own memory, but whether made up or real, that scene with the daughters in the bathroom in the foreground and the stockings drying in the background remains with me. And I myself, many times have washed my stockings in the sink with warm water and gentle soap and then hung them on the shower rod to dry, just like watching the show Roseanne once taught me.
I ask myself how I learned to do it, how I developed an affection for the texture of these sheer strange semi socks that create a thin veneer over the skin of the legs, a layer of protection against harsh touch, against too firey of a gaze. There’s so much I can say about the stocking, including an article I came across these past months that suggested wearing a cut up stocking underneath one’s mask could provide even extra protection against virus. I couldn’t really buy into the data the article claimed to have but I immediately sent it to M, my old manager at the dungeon because I remembered one of the first things she said to me when I was hired was “You MUUST have stockings” and then for years, for decades now she would give me pairs of vintage Cuban healed back seamed stockings as birthday gifts with a little note saying “this is to make money, big money”. These stockings were as much of a totem as they were an actual protective layer, a fantasy, a fetish, a uniform.
Meandering Lines
I am walking through Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two Hassidic women announce their presence with enlivened conversation behind me, in my blindspot. I hear them but cannot see them yet. In a few minutes, they will have walked past me, especially if I slow my pace ever so slightly so I can watch them do it and then I will be in their blindspot until I am just actually walking a few feet behind them. This is the game of pedestrian protocol. This is what I understand Auge to mean when he talks about the recognition of the self as self and as other, repeated later in the experiences of walking as the first’ use of space. I listen to their mixed English and Yiddish, which always sounds so lively to me, so bursting with emphatic expression at every word, every word necessary and bulbous with meaning.
I remember the women was one of the reasons I moved to this neighborhood. Before I moved here, I would run to a gym on the waterfront and take group aerobic classes on Wednesday mornings, where only other attendees at 10 AM on a weekday were the Orthodox women, some of them well into their 60’s wearing tennis shoes over their back seamed stockings and long skirts, somehow having fixed their wigs to their heads enough so they wouldn’t fall off during the strenuous cardio up and down we did. In a sea of black skirts and modest cotton jerseys, I was the one who stood out in Lululemon stretch pants that articulated exactly what my body looked like naked. I felt enthralled watching them lift weights and settle into squats ignorant of things like elegance or form, they were unbearably, undeniably strong, those women. All I could think of was how each of them had given birth 4, 6, 7 times. Relative to that ordeal, how hard could an hour of high intensity interval training be? They came to the classes religiously until the gym closed a few months after I moved to the neighborhood, likely for low attendance. But those women were the ones that ushered me in. It was always groups of women that ushered me into a way of life.
I’ve noticed that the Orthodox women are the only other women besides burlesque performers, fetish models and sex workers who wear back seamed stockings regularly. I see them peeping out from sensible shoes, tucked away under those long skirts. The seam is always perfectly vertical and in place, and I know the difficulty, the practice it takes to put it those on without a hitch. In the ocean of beiges that is the color scheme of stocking themselves, it is the seam that is the detail, the fun variable expressing a bit of fun. Perhaps it is a pronounced dark line of black thread, or maybe just a thicker tone of nude, barely indicting demarcation between the right and left side of the calf. The seam interrupts the plane with a bold, undeniable line. The seamed stocking is both a drawing and sculpture, with its lack or practicality, its complete acknowledgement of its ornate and decorative status.
What is it like to put on a stocking? I ask myself…
I don’t remember the first time I put one on, but I remember the first time I saw one on TV, a stocking. I was watching Roseanne on my parent’s television in the kitchen. The television was a small cube staged in the corner of yellow linoleum. It had an unruly antennae and my mother kept a large frightening glass mason jar of home made kombucha behind it.
I remember the scene in Roseanne had to do with the two daughters, Darlene and Becky and the dad, played by John Goodman. But I don’t remember the action of the scene, and event. What I remember is the shot of the girl’s bathroom with a porcelain bath tub and shower and plastic shower curtain clipped onto a metal rod. And draped on top of that metal rod was a set of stockings, probably pantyhose, black and nude, draped there to dry after they had been washed. As I write these words and try to recollect that scene, tempted to watch all the seasons, google all the keywords just to find it, I wonder, is that even possible? Was there really a scene of hanging drying stockings in that 80’s sitcom? Am I making it up? I begin to doubt my own memory, but whether made up or real, that scene with the daughters in the bathroom in the foreground and the stockings drying in the background remains with me. And I myself, many times have washed my stockings in the sink with warm water and gentle soap and then hung them on the shower rod to dry, just like watching the show Roseanne once taught me.
I ask myself how I learned to do it, how I developed an affection for the texture of these sheer strange semi socks that create a thin veneer over the skin of the legs, a layer of protection against harsh touch, against too firey of a gaze. There’s so much I can say about the stocking, including an article I came across these past months that suggested wearing a cut up stocking underneath one’s mask could provide even extra protection against virus. I couldn’t really buy into the data the article claimed to have but I immediately sent it to M, my old manager at the dungeon because I remembered one of the first things she said to me when I was hired was “You MUUST have stockings” and then for years, for decades now she would give me pairs of vintage Cuban healed back seamed stockings as birthday gifts with a little note saying “this is to make money, big money”. These stockings were as much of a totem as they were an actual protective layer, a fantasy, a fetish, a uniform.
EPB
EPB is a writer, visual artist, performer & researcher who plays in the space between theory and practice. In her writing, she parallels her observations of the art world with academic discourse and the politics of sex work.