Pants

I had to post the previous essay I wrote a few years ago and the embarrassing story because today reminded me of a third incident I can lable as a "pants incident." I seriously get myself into ridiculous fixes.

Sitting in my painting class this afternoon, I settled down on a stool and made myself comfortable for the lengthy critique by resting my elbow on the table to my left and my chin on my hand. We began discussing value, composition, craftsmanship and other elements and principles of art, using words that sound good like rhythm, motion, depth, contrast, and feeling to make our observations about the paintings in front of us. About forty minutes into the critique I crossed my legs and my knee was resting against the side of the table. Later I crossed them them the other direction and put my hand on my knee only to felt something sticky. I looked down and gasped at the red paint that had somehow gotten on my jeans and was now all over both pant legs because of my incessant need to cross my legs.

Now, you must understand something about art classes at BYU. The ration of girls to boys is about fourteen to one (most classes have just the "token boy") so naturally the room erupted with "Oh I have soap--" "I've gotten paint out of my shirt before--" "You should work on that now before it sets in..." or "That sucks." I walked over to this sink contemplating how I was going to get both my knees in the sink while simultaneous scrubbing the reddness out of them. Just then my professor offered an extra pair of pants that she had in her studio and said I could wear them while washing mine. I sized her up--Pint sized. Yep. Definitely pint sized--and thought that if I were to fit into her pants, it would be by some sort of magic. Regardless, she brought in a studio worn pair of tan, wide leg pants and slung them over my arm. I thanked her and walked down the stairs to the ladies room where I skeptically locked the bathroom stall door while staring at these little pants.

By some sort of mercy I got them around my waist without much trouble at all but soon looked down and saw that they were dangling a good 8 inches off the floor. Darling. I walked back upstairs to get my soap and find another room where I could conduct a serious scrub-down in the sink. Besides the stares I got for how ridiculous I looked in my sweater vest, floods (and that's an understatement) and loafers, the search for a sink went rather well. I scrubbed and scrapped and by the time I was done, both pant legs of my previously penetrated jeans were saturated with water up the entire length of the inseams. I began to instigate phase two of the operation: drying.

I walked down to the intaglio studio and had a few thoughts. I briefly entertained the idea of putting my pants on the hot plate (normally used to melt rosin or dry hardground to metal plates used for printmaking) but decided that fires could be a problem and melting my pants might be a bad idea, so I resorted to blowdrying my pants. Over an hour of blow drying my pants.

It was incredible how much traffic that intaglio studio got this afternoon. I got a lot of questions including, "If you're wearing your teacher's pants, what's she wearing?!" and a multiplicity strange looks that I returned with a grin, but the oddest looks I got were from the security guards at the MOA. The last hour of class was spent in the Religious Collection Exhibit and I arrived to the gallery still donning my short, loner, painty pants, but added to the ensemble by slinging my damp jeans around my neck so that a pant leg fell neatly down both sides of my neck. I've never looked so swanky in my life.

Not many people can say that they have worn their professor's pants, but I am grateful for mine's generosity and lightheartedness. It made for an interesting afternoon.