Listening To Lingerie

By Morgan O’Neill

So Ellen, Lingerie Briefs executive editor, has been on my case because I haven’t published much lately.  I have many great excuses I am prepared to defend myself with, notwithstanding the key one being my utter inability to intelligently connect what I am reading or reading about to lingerie.  Essentially, that is the theme behind the blog.   So, without that connectivity I remain speechless.  Or, blogless as it may be. That combined with the ever-present end-of-year array of things both important and trivial that must be attended to, writing has taken a back seat.  How is that for a rationalization?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am still reading though in a less conventional way.  I am listening to audiobooks!   And I must say that I have fallen in love with the genre. Yes, they have been around for decades.  Clumsy cassette players. Tapes (some unlabeled), batteries, dead and alive, evoke memories.  But today, with easy downloads, headphones and mobility and a vast library of choices, audiobooks have come of age.

Remember the hissing background of a dirty cassette player.  Or the narration slightly out of sync because a tape was too loose or too tight or worse, bent in some way.  Audiobooks (there weren’t even books) were tapes, not books; an interesting idea but in a nascent stage.  But today with the enhanced production values and stellar talent narrating the stories, audiobooks are a great way to pass time, particularly if you need both hands free.

When you are driving.  When you are doing the yard.  When you are housecleaning.  When you are cooking or feeding the dogs or grocery shopping or doing any one of the daily chores that take up your time, audiobooks are a terrific diversion from the menial, but necessary chores of the day.  I listened to Steig Larsson’s trilogy about Lisbeth Salander beginning with The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo and never stopped.  It is the perfect material for the trek by car through the Adirondack State Park in the dead of winter especially when cell service is suspect.  I have also become a serial character addict.  I never knew who Mitch Rapp was before I picked up a Vince Flynn spy story.  Now I have listened to all of his stories. I feel like I could easily be deluded into the righteous but apparently necessary covert operations of the CIA.   I never knew that I would like spy stories or detective stories.  Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender character is frumpish and certainly more dour than most, but he fascinates me and I don’t know why.  I have now read all of the stories.  So I am a fan.

Now that I have written this excuse for not writing, it is odd how it makes me think about lingerie.  Lingerie styles that have been around forever just like the audiobook. They have been updated and improved many times over especially as technologies advance.  When I think of the evolution of the girdle and corset it is remarkable to see the changes and the innovations today that make what could have been a painful experience before a pleasure today.  Just look at Rago shapewear, then and now.  When I think about the weaving technology and the diversity of choices manufacturers have today versus years ago I know that wool can feel comfortable against the skin just like silk always has.  I know that some of the components of today’s well fitted bra just didn’t exist not too long ago. Check out the Flashback / Flashforward blogs by Layla L’Obatti and see just how beautifully lingerie has evolved.

Listening to a description of lingerie in an audiobook will never surpass looking at a beautiful women adorned in something enticing, but when there is no opportunity to look I can let my imagination go and listen instead.