Roll Up Them Biscuits, Girl...

Back when I was a kid, the fashion trend was high waists and crop tops. Most of your shorts ended roughly mid-thigh. Most of your tops ended mid rib-cage. That’s because back then, the sexy soft (but flat) belly was in and that dip of the waist was what you wanted to show. Short shorts were called “Daisy Dukes” and they landed well below the curve of your ass cheeks—because ass wasn’t the name of the game. Sexy was about the silhouette and just a little hint of skin.

I spent most of those years thinking I was fat. I want a time machine to go back and slap that little-girl me in the ass and say, “Enjoy it now, kiddo, because one day….one day…..” I couldn’t cram my butt into Daisy Dukes today without Vaseline. My boobs would probably try to escape through the bottom hem of a crop top. And my silhouette is more Bada-Boom than Peek-a-Boo. Suffice it to say, today’s fashion trend is so far out of my grasp that I have to just laugh.

The first time I laughed out loud about my total and complete inability to participate in current trend was Bonaroo of 2016. I’m there, with one of my oldest friends vending at her booth. I’m decked out in harem pants and a bikini top and a big ass hat, looking precisely like the middle-aged lady of the 70s that I am rapidly embodying. And all these 18-22 year old girls are totting around festival in tiny stretch shorts….with the ass cheeks cut out. Not as in the shorts are so short the cheeks are peekin’. As in, shorts in the front, no ass cheeks in the back. Complete cheek visibility. Up to the hip.

Not to be judgy-judger (maybe a little) but where I come from, those are called underpants y’all. They are thongs pretending to be outerwear. They are yeast-infection incubators. They sunburns just waiting to happen on a massive scale. Whyyyy, y’all? Why?

We started calling them “biscuits”. As in, grrrrl, you better roll up them biscuits and get them out the oven. I even kept a tally. I saw so many biscuits that had they been actual biscuits we could have fed half the dang South. I really didn’t get it. I still don’t. Having your ass hanging out is not sexy….or comfortable. Its just lazy, in my opinion.

I’m not going to wax poetic about how it was “back when”--I’m not quite that old. Plus, we did a lot of stupid, stupid fashion shit. (Fingerless lace gloves, anyone?) But I am going to be this woman: Girls, show just enough skin to feel sexy, and let your eyes be the first thing they see. If you just present them with a feast of tits and ass, they might never look up into your face and see you. So if you are on the hunt and looking to be seen, pick your favourite piece of you that doesn’t give away all your secrets. Show that. A little leg and a high neck. A little shoulder and long pants. A deep V neck and long sleeves. There is a trick to it.

Because sexy isn’t what is seen, its what is to be discovered.

And I gotta say, getting a little fat has forced me to find new ways of leaning into feeling sexy. It becomes more about my eyes and my smile and my demeanor. It becomes finding clothes that say Bada-Boom on an understated scale and knowing that the most sexy thing about me is not my appearance, but my way of making people feel. I wish I had learned that lesson earlier; It would have saved me from a lot of truly uncomfortable nights in clothes that looked great but felt awful. It may have paved the way for this current transition to come easier.

Who knows?

But what I do know—and can say with great certainty—is that many of those biscuits stayed in the oven way to long and got burnt, burnt, burnt. You should never burn the biscuits—they really only need 20 minutes in the heat, y’all.