Fashion-numbed by warm weather

The following is to be sung with fervour and all the emotion that falling off a bunk on your tour bus when it crashes on a slippery highway, through no fault of the driver leaving you with a metal rod in your back can muster:

“Coming out of the dark! I fiiiiiin’lly see that light!”

That’s right, my friends. No, it’s not a Glo Estefan moment. It’s not stepping out of the Carlton after a matinee that you only got to see ’cause you played hooky or are mercifully unemployed. It’s springtime!

Let the March Of The Lily-White Legs begin. Let the Too Early For Short Shorts Parade on Church St dazzle us all. While I sit out on a patio too early in the season, you put on cutoffs and promenade down the avenue, each for the other’s fantastic entertainment.

Let’s gaze upon each other, surprised that some people just can’t wait for it to actually be warm, and say, “Look at that fool!” meanwhile secretly wishing we had the cage-thrown-open unrestrained Id to be so free ourselves.

Me: “How can I wear short shorts? I make Snow White look like Leslie Uggams.” Or you: “How can I sit on a patio before May? The sun may catch the top of my head and all will see that I haven’t touched up my highlights since November.”

And this perhaps is the real reason April is the cruellest month. (It is, isn’t it? Did I just misquote? Thank God no one reads anymore. And Indigo is just a library with coffee and biscotti.). If April is indeed the cruellest month, it’s because we have finally emerged from the purgatory of winter’s isolation and found that, frankly, many of us need to shave our legs. Ladies, too.

The gay village is currently just a cut-though path of so many of us scuttling past one another, head down, getting it together. Like a fat bride with her impending nuptials, we’ve got work to do. Bring on the medicine ball and the reducing suit, Kathy’s gotta fit into the dress.

We’re off to the tanning salon for the first tan of the season, which incidentally seems to start out as an attractive striped candy cane look that they tell you will fade. Oh, that’s good news. So you can go from looking like a barbershop pole to a pink and white Valentine’s Day candy.

When I was living in LA a couple of years ago, I had a hairdresser tell me in February, that since it was always warm in Los Angeles, there was no coasting there for the winter. Maintenance was a year-round job. How exhausting. No wonder Anne Heche had a mental breakdown. Really, anyone would.

Here in the fabulous great white north, we have 10 months, it seems, of fucking winter and with it a unique and necessary set of coping skills. And I think they’re brilliant. It all starts with a sudden fondness for root vegetables in late October and proceeds from there.

And so we let it go, even if just a little bit. I swear, even the biggest gym goers can’t escape putting on a few pounds and acquiring a strange bond with butter tarts. But then in a fit of determination, will power and hard work, we put Humpty Dumpty back together in a four-week intensive that results in a shined-up presentable version of us, ready for our coming out week.

‘Cause that’s where everyone is, aren’t they? I find it suspiciously quiet in the village.

We’re off to the gym, unable to stop and say hello to that acquaintance on the street because that winterfat fat roll pushing into the waistband seems to spill a little further over with every step, suddenly more acute (and less cute) now that it is spring. And soon (egads) summer.

Or maybe you started jogging and actually heard your body make a blip-blop sound like hitting a water bottle with a ruler. That’s not good.

I myself knew it was nearly spring when, while walking, I heard the sound of corduroy rubbing as my legs scraped together – and I wasn’t wearing corduroy.

But we made it through. Winter is like addiction to the show The OC. You can ask yourself why, but it won’t help. (So I hear.) It’s just the way things are.

You know what? I say fuck it. Let’s not hide for the next month getting ready to be seen properly. Let’s fling the door wide, step out into the sunlight and say, “World, here I am!”

And with that, there we are in all our end of winter glory; He with his skin whiter than Edgar Winter in a snowstorm. She with her hairstyle that was so cute in the fall now looking like a two- tone brown washcloth. And everybody in need of a waxing.

Oh, who am I kidding? I have a 4:15pm with Malibu Tan, a haircut with Bill and a crabby date with a Lifecycle.

But it would be nice wouldn’t it? Maybe next year.