The Church Lady

First a disclaimer. Just about everything I write is more or less not true. I exaggerate, change things, and make stuff up. Sure, you may find an ounce of truth buried here and there, but mostly it’s all a pack of lies.

Now that that’s out of the way, I went to Mass today, which is the truth. As usual at our Catholic service a lot of people were traipsing back and forth up to the altar. We had a couple of guest speakers trying to persuade us that the church building needs many, many very expensive improvements. They had a nice slideshow to demonstrate what things would look like after all the work is done, and though it was hard to tell the difference between the old and proposed new, I took their word for it.

I guess I noticed what people were wearing when one of the speakers walked all around the front of the altar to get to the podium, which took about fifteen minutes. She was a younger woman and very attractive. I liked her outfit because she was thin and her fitted black turtleneck didn’t show any cleavage. She had on a subdued wool skirt, tights, and boots – it was a classy look and something I’d wear if I looked like her, which I’m working on with my newest diet.

Then along came the ladies who serve Communion, and they were a diverse group with one thing in common. All of them liked to eat, and none of them owned a mirror.

One in particular stood out. I’ve seen her many Sundays, and she always looks like your normal, standard, middle-aged Catholic woman attending a casual suburban church. Matronly might be the best word to use here, which is a synonym for dumpy. But today she was going for a different look. She had on a top that bared quite a bit of cleavage. Since she liked to eat, the cleavage had migrated south, but this top gave a good chase and ended up about midway down the slope.

But that’s not all. She had on a pair of stretchy pants made of a clingy brown fabric that left nothing to the imagination. Because she liked to eat, onlookers got a full view of what looked like golf balls peppered underneath the thin fabric in her thigh and rump areas.

She topped her ensemble with a pretty taupe colored sweater that I’m sure she thought extended over her hips and bottom, but it gave up about halfway down in the back. In fact, it curved up toward her waist, but that was probably because she kept pulling the front sides down which created the arc in the back.

Call me old fashioned, but I’m not sure this is the best look for church. The young girls wear their low-neck tank tops, but that’s all they own and if you scold them, like I do my daughter, they’ll use their long hair as a cover up. And yes, they wear skintight jeans, but the fabric is thick and so tight it doesn’t reveal anything. Plus they top it all off with long, hooded sweatshirts that make them appear slouchy and kid-like.

Middle-aged women, on the other hand, must have closets full of frumpy clothes that would be so much more appropriate for church. Which brings me full circle to my original comment that these women must not own mirrors.

Now I know I’m going to wake up tomorrow and have regrets about what could be misconstrued as catty remarks, especially involving women at church. But in my defense I’m only reporting what I saw, and in my defense, if that woman didn’t want to end up on this page, she could have dressed in a gunny sack and we’d all sleep guilt-free tonight. So in a manner of speaking, it’s her fault she’s here.

And like I said at the beginning, it could all be a pack of lies anyway. As the humorist Lewis Grizzard once said, “My mother believes that men landing on the moon is fake and professional wrestling is real.”