Excuse me, your ass is showing

A couple of months back, a friend of mine was sharing her indignation over the overt flakiness of a friend/neighbor of hers. The two women had gone shopping and my friend, we’ll call her Stacy, was buying a shirt to wear to a work-related event. In the dim and distorting light of the dressing room, she did what any normal person would: she turned to her friend and asked if the shirt looked okay for work.

The friend said the shirt looked great.

So the next week, Stacy dresses in a flash, runs out the house and slips into a day-long seminar wearing her lucky new shirt. The first break of the morning rolls around and she heads to the bathroom where she freezes with a shriek.

The shirt isn’t lucky, but she could certainly get lucky wearing it. She looks like a total hoochie mama -- at a work event – and she doesn’t have a jacket or a sweater to cover the faux pas. Needless to say she spends the rest of the seminar moving from embarrassment to mortification to downright seething what-the-fudgism.

No sooner than her butt hits the seat, she’s calling her “friend” to ask why on earth she didn’t tell her the shirt looked this way. And to Stacy’s surprise, the friend unapologetically said something like, “I thought you knew. I thought you wanted to look like that.”

Oh, uh uh.

If I’d been there, I would have told my friend the shirt looked hoochie. After all, there is a time and place for hoochie. The deal is that you say so, that’s the chick code, or so I thought. If this is a shirt for work, I’m telling you to either (1) not buy it or (2) buy it for some other occasion.

Anything less and you aren’t a real friend. You get tucked away, safe and sound, in the trifling heifer category.

You see I pride myself on my genuineness. My tactful, respectful honesty. I’d tell a person if their slip or bra or clothing tag was showing. I would. I’ll tuck the offending article in for you (after asking permission of course) and I’ll do it without so much as a second thought. I’d even tell a guy if his fly was open although I would stop short of, um, helping him out. After all, what kind of person lets someone walk around with their unmentionables on display without saying a word?

Of course, the same obligation applies when someone is clearly showing his/her ass. I mean, here the person is, revealing the unmentionable side of their character and looking unseemly in public. The right thing to do would be to speak up.

What’s that you say? Careful on that high horse I’m riding? Sorry, I can barely hear you from way up here. Wait a second, I'm on my way down.

Recently, I was faced with a situation that knocked me down a peg or two on the self-righteousness ladder while in spin class. There I was, huffing and puffing after a two-month summer absence when a song came on – I can’t remember what it was, but the base line was heavy and it would have made me shout, “That’s my song!” if I’d been in a club. But of course, I wasn’t at a club. I was in spin class grunting and groaning like a wild boar caught in a trap.

If you are not into spin, the deal is this: you need to keep your cadence (or pedal speed) consistent with the down beat of the music. Up-tempo songs like the one that started playing that day are simultaneously a blessing and a curse. A blessing because they make you want to grove and move and sing along (which is often okay because it’s so loud that no one can hear you if you sing softly). A curse because they often come when you are on the verge of collapse and long to lay down on the floor whispering sweet nothings to your quads and glutes.

Instead, what I was saying to my legs sounded less like a coo and more like a desperate pep squad: “This is it! It’s go time. Time to show and prove. Time to bring it, baby!”

Unfortunately, my legs were shouting in reply, “Go screw yourself, Kim.”

I was literally thigh and ass deep in this internal conversation when I heard another voice – an outside voice -- shouting above the music from the row behind me.

“Come on, Kim. You know you’ve got to bring it. You can’t let white girls show you up.”

Huh? I didn't want to believe that I heard what I thought I heard. Except that I had. This woman is a long-time gym mate and someone I like very much. This was someone who comes to my gym every morning and someone whose workout buddy was both white and seated on the bike between us. I should also mention that the class was full of women – mostly white – and we were the only two brown faces in the crowd. Not that it should matter, but it kind of did.

If exhaustion hadn’t blown my focus, her comment surely did.

It’s been nearly two weeks and I am still stuck on WTF mode. I’m fairly certain that the comment was inappropriate and I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that I should say something, but I’m not sure what. In the time since, there has been an awkward silence, a funky ick between us that I feel guilty for. Isn’t that nice? She showed her ass and somehow I’m the one who feels guilty. But it’s true, I do.

I feel like I should have said something, like I’ve dropped a ball, and now so much time has passed that the opportunity is gone.

Alas, the chicken shit thing got the better of me again.

So now I sit here asking myself, which of us has been placed in the trifling heifer category: Her, for the off color (excuse the pun) remark or me, for my silence?