What to wear.....what to wear....

If you've been skating any amount of time, you'll have noted the wide variety of skating clothes. There's black slacks, and black tights, and black skirts....oh you know.  Yeah, the teenagers who look like grasshoppers, and the rare adult woman who looks like that too, can wear tights with exotic trim. The rest of us, those of us who are 'people of size', 'shapely',  or 'Rubenesque', or 'curvy', well, for me at least (at the shorter end of the human spectrum), anything on a 'skating clothes' website is too long or too skinny.

Below stairs
So far, I've stayed with L.L.Bean slacks since they have a nice distribution of petites in stretchy slacks. Unfortunately, they change the line every season, so there's nothing consistent. Every year I have to start over. The only thing I prefer are slacks with no pockets. Just one less thing to catch your hand on.  The L.L. Bean slacks wear like iron though. I have a pair from when I first started skating that I still occasionally wear. This is a pair with a small hole in one thigh, from the time I fell on the tail of the blade when I was doing a Jenkins spiral (you don't see those anymore).  They're still wearable, but I'm afraid after these many years the seam up the back will split at some point. And then it's 'oppsie daisy get off the ice'.

Upstairs
I'm a two layer shirt person. I wear a sleeveless shirt on the bottom and a long sleeved shirt on the top. This allows me to put on my elbow protection under the long sleeved shirt, without having to hide in the bathroom for modesty. And I find this keeps me warm, without bulking up under the jacket sleeves.

I didn't know that adult skaters were as snooty about skating clothes as teenagers. I skated at a rink for a while, and one day decided to retire my white denim skating jacket after I bought a new fancy-shmancy athletic jacket over lunch (hard to find those that fit someone 5'2"). As I was throwing the old jacket in the trash in the ladies dressing room, a cheer went up. I put on the new jacket and someone yelled, "You're a real skater now!"

Ephemera
I find I sometimes need to bring something on the ice with me: a camera, or an iPod. Since I'm small, the pockets in my jacket are too small to hold these things (plus the wallet, the car key, and the headphones). When I have to bring more than I can hold in my jacket pockets, I hand it over to Dance Coach. He has the big man's long jacket, with four zippered pockets in it. He denies he has any pockets (!), but I just point them out. In effect, I treat my coach like he's a purse---my very own Coach bag.

I'll be here all night folks. Don't forget to tip the waiters.