On getting in touch with your inner hoochie-mamma
“All women should get in touch with their inner hoochie-mamma every once in a while,” said my friend, Pam, as we pushed our shopping cart through the Walmart in Ripley.
“Now that’s an opening line for a column if ever I heard one,” I said, pausing to examine a lacy black camisole that was cut down to there.
“You should write it,” she said. “It would be a public service.”
“I’m not even sure I know what a hoochie mamma actually is.”
“It’s a confident woman who knows how to work it,” Pam said. “One who attracts attention with little or no effort. And they don’t necessarily dress slutty, but provocatively.”
I did a quick assessment of what we were wearing. Capris and sneakers. Shirts with collars. It was more homeroom mamma than hoochie mamma.
I’ve never been style savvy. As far as fashion, I’m way over there on the conservative side. The same holds true for Pam, a married journalism professor and mother of two. But once a year, when the two of us get together at the WV Writers Conference, we attempt to lure out our inner hoochie mammas. And in what has come to be a tradition, we do this by sneaking away from the conference for a field trip to Walmart, where we try on nothing but inappropriate clothes.
“So you’re saying I’d be doing a public service by encouraging other women to strive for hoochie-mamma wanna-be status, like us?”
“Hey–we’re way past the wanna-be stage,” Pam said. Her side of the cart was growing faster than mine, so I grabbed a few of the closest tank tops that met our credentials. (Those credentials being that it couldn’t be something either of us would normally wear, especially in public. Except according to our own self-imposed rules, we’d each be wearing one of those things later that night.)
“Look at the size of the neck holes on these,” I said. “Is this whole line of shirts made for women with freakishly oversized heads?”
At the dressing room, we encountered Tina, perhaps the most pleasant WalMart employee I’ve ever met. She directed Pam and I to dressing rooms across from each other, then entertained us with enough funny anecdotes about dressing room escapades to fill a whole ‘nother column.
“Hubba hubba,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows lecherously as Pam modeled a severely scooped turquoise number.
“You can see almost to my kneecaps in this neckline,” Pam said.
“But you have cute kneecaps,” I said. Ignoring my most sincere compliment, she resigned the top to the reject pile. Soon, I noticed her arms wiggling strangely in the air over the top of her dressing room door, then heard a snap of elastic, followed by a low, muttered curse, then a giggle. “You ok?”
“I can’t get this thing on,” she whined. “It has one of those built-in shelf bras and it’s all twisted or something. I can’t contort myself into it.” She paused. “Or out of it.”
Finally, she emerged. The shirt was a winner. And I’d found one of my own. (That lacy black number that was cut down to there.) We dressed again in our boring old clothes, bid farewell to Tina, then headed back out into the store, where for some strange reason, we began to attract the attention of men.
“What’s going on?” I asked Pam after a beefy construction worker type had stopped me, insisting he and I had once been “very good (wink-wink) friends.”
“I think it’s our confidence,” she said. “June Cleaver has become Peg Bundy, at least for a while.”
As Peg 1 and Peg 2 swaggered out to the car, I realized she was right. We both seemed changed. Our excursion had transformed the way we viewed ourselves. No longer were we drudgy, middle-aged, working moms. In the course of just one fun and magical hour, we had become hoochie moms instead.
