Ma Clouthier Gets Made Over: A Good Texas Woman is Hard To Find

Lot's of excitement for ole Ma Clouthier, here. For the first time in 18 months my nails are done and I got a pedicure. For good measure, I got my hair cut, too.

The lack of feminine habits for the last year and one half have been practical. Call me crazy, but I don't like baby poop under my nails or on my nails. Frankly, I just don't like baby poop period and would probably have more babies if poop weren't a bi-product. Since it is, I keep the nails short and wash my hands like a germaphobe obsessive compulsive.

Today I have well-manicured, white-tipped nails that now click when I type. This is annoying. This is the unfortunate side-affect of at least attempting to be a good Texas woman. Why do I even try? I wait until the last possible minute when the finger nails are about to fall off. Even with my hair done, my make-up on and nails and toes polished to perfection, my wardrobe is .... Let's see, how can I put this charitably?

I'm thinking.........

Okay, there is no charitable way to describe my fashion unconscious ways. They include comfort shoes with everything--including church dresses. What can I say? I'm a paradox wrapped in an unflattering conundrum.

Why bother with the superficialities when the foundation is cracking at the seams?

I'm thinking...........

Holy crap! I'm having a Texas Woman existential crisis! I think I just wasted nearly $300 for nothing. Nice hands and feet? Well-done, blonde bouffant? They do look incongruous with Birkenstocks, Jean shorts with the ample ass filling them and plain T-shirt. In short, style and comfort (and tank ass) do not mix. No, they surely do not.

Here's what Manolo says about people like me:

Dear Manolo,

Can you please recommend some stylish comfort shoes for me?

Audrey

Manolo says, ayyyyy! Few things in the language of the English can inspire such cold dark horror in the breast of the Manolo as the phrase “the comfort shoes.”

More atrocities have been committed, by the comfort shoes than all of the Mongol hordes, the oil tankers, and the chainsaws combined.

It is the truism of the Manolo that the word “comfort” allows the shoe companies to believe that they can foist upon the peoples the most hideous sort of the shoes; shoes that appear to be constructed out of the rubberized burlap and dried dung, shoes that would not have been tolerated by our cave-dwelling ancestors.

This it is not to say that the comfort and style are incompatible, indeed they are not.

But rather it is to note that those shoe companies who market only based upon the comfort are, to the mind of the Manolo, equal to the Big Tobacco in the damage they are doing to the tender and gullible soul of this nation.

If you wish to see the shoe that is stylish and comfortable, but emphatically not the “comfort shoes” then the Manolo would present to you the Physical by the Stuart Weitzman; simple, atrtractive, classical, and designed to be worn on almost any occasion.

Perhaps it's my irrepressible optimism that keeps me putting band-aids on flesh wounds. While I'm hemmorhaging style, I gamely smack very expensive band-aids everywhere. Perhaps, I must just acknowledge who and what I am:

I'm a Midwesterner. I'm a former Michigander. I know that it's unfathomable in Texas or Long Island or Southern California, but we Michigan girls did not give a rootin' toot about these high maintenance ways. Hair cuts, maybe. Manicures, pedicures and big hair, big boobs and tight skin? Why bother?

Really, it's true. Right ladies? You know who you are out there. My beloved Michigan friends and relatives: Chris, Sharon, Roxanne, Rita..... Was it just the compnay I kept? (Athletic, active, smart ladies, all.) Or is the trend I remember still true?

'Cause deep in this Texan's heart, I just don't have then energy or inclination to care all that much. Dang! Existential crisis resolved. I'm a Texas girl with Michigan roots. And man, are they ever dark.