There was a big article in the newspaper recently about Velcro and Velcro copycats, and how wonderful the stuff is. I don’t know for sure which of them is part owner of every brand of pantyhose I buy, but I’m convinced there’s a connection, and it’s not wonderful.

Let me explain for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of owning a pair.

I’m not a big pantyhose fan in the first place; they don’t keep me warm in the winter, and they’re hot in the summer. They’re either so tight I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, or sagging around my ankles. A male probably invented them, but we wear them because someone convinced us we look sexy when we wear them.

Anyway, I begrudgingly bought a really pretty, name-brand pair of pantyhose. I was really quite unsuspecting that anything was different about them. (They want you to think that.) Everything was fine until I washed them three times.

Then they transformed into . . . VELCROHOSE.  The manufacturer must have added that little something extra that made wearing them even more miserable.

I’m not talking about static cling, even though that’s bad enough. No, this is the day you will swear you bought “silken mist” but got “brillo pad” instead.

It doesn’t matter what you wear; it will crawl up your legs in no time flat and just stick there. Typically, this happens on a day when you don’t have another pair to fall back on. I’ve been known to cut the one bad leg out of two different pairs and wear the two good ones, but then I can hardly breathe with the double-control top. But anything’s better than Velcrohose.

If you have on slacks, they will stick all around your ankles and crawl just high enough where your teenager will die a thousand deaths if he/she is seen with you. If you have on a skirt, well, you could be flashing somebody and not even know it.

I was wearing a skirt recently that is nearly transparent without a slip. So I tried on three slips and got just the right one, did the stand-in-front-of-the-window-and-spread-the-legs thing to make sure you couldn’t see anything, and was sort of struttin’ because I was thinking how good I looked.

During the program I was attending, I went to the restroom and discovered Velcrohose had struck again! My slip had crawled completely up around my waist, I looked like I had an innertube around my hips, and I had just strutted in front of about 200 people with a transparent skirt on.

Vanity is so much fun.