Skirt good, fit good, VPL bad

Last night, as we always do at minute-70 on our post-work 90-minute jaunt, Monte and I exchanged daily pleasantries with the Mayflower attendants and made our familiar right turn down DeSales Street.

Before we even passed the last of Filene's three display windows - and the prince could make his three-drip mark on the adjacent shrub - I could already hear the high-pitched, five-cocktail chorus of sorority-sister babbling pouring out of Panache.

I knew from previous attempts that unless I picked Monte up kicking and squealing, retreating back to ConnAve wasn't an option, so I took a deep breath, stood as tall as my 5'7" frame would stand, shot the dollop an you're-the-only-one-I'd-do-this-for look and forged on into the single-sided skintern gauntlet.

Predictably, the mix of Corona Light, pre-Summer weather, hell's-yeah-it's-Friday! excitement and the cutest puppy that ever was meant the two of us couldn't slip by unnoticed.

"Oh my GOD, that is like, the most ADORABLE little...hey Jen, look at...JEN, this is the dog you need to get!"

Out of nowhere, a dark-rooted blonde stumbled over the velvet rope partition in a pair of 5-inch pointy-toed pumps and headed straight for us.

"Oh my god, hi, I'm Jen -- what is this little girl's name?" the clearly on-at-least-her-fourth woman asked Monte, not me.

"His name is Montesquieu."

"Montescrew? What an odd name for just the sweetest wittle guurlll...," Jen purred, simultaneously digging her French tips into his scruff and unsuccessfully trying to balance her Vodka tonic atop the metal sphere on the pole to which the velvet rope was attached.

I thought about correcting her, but that would only lead to glassy-eyed confusion and a feeling of pretentious shame for being the sober girl walking her dog past a bar on a Friday night trying to explain to a girl well on her way to drunkdom why I named my dog after a French political theorist.

Needless to say, I let it go.

After about three minutes of basic "yes, it's expensive to have a dog" and "no, I've never left him alone to spend the night at a guy's house" conversation, she stood up, smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt and picked her tumbler up off the edge of the (occupied) table on which she'd placed it.

It was only then that I realized Jen was wearing a pretty fantastic high-waisted black pencil skirt.

"That's a great skirt."

"Thanks, it's new - my boyfriend (using her head to "point" in the direction of a babyfaced boy boisterously filling the bar with talk of how A-Rod's recent marital problems better not affect his performance against the Red Sox this weekend) hates it. He thinks I look like a grandma."

"Well you don't, it's really quite stunning. Good fit, too."

"Thank you so much," Jen said with Vodka-enhanced sincerity, "that really made my day."

"You just spilled your drink."

"Oh fuck...well, I better get back," she said, more motivated by the need to get a replacement, than to tend to the enlarging wet spot on her white silk button-up.

"And we better get on our way. But seriously, the skirt -- keep wearing it."

"I will! And goodbye to you, teeny little...what was it again? Montescrew?"

"Yeah, Montescrew."

And as she turned away to reclaim her perch at the bar, the little bit of wind her Catherine Malandrino skirt (identified by its distinct cummerbund waistband) had blown into my sails vanished.

VPL, or "visible pantyline," is nothing new, especially not in a town where women seem to think thongs, g-strings and my fitted-skirt default - commando - are tantamount to a hooker's first layer of defense. But this woman, Jen, was in her mid-20s, seemingly very appearance-aware and was unafraid to casually drop the f-bomb in front of a stranger -- in short, not the kind of woman I'd expect to be sporting a very VPL. A full-coverage brief VPL, no less.

In the short five-second window I had to do so, I certainly bandied with the idea of bringing this very elementary fashion don't to her attention, but in the end, she wasn't my friend, she wasn't even an acquaintance -- it would've seemed petty.

So instead...

"Hey Jen!"

(swiveling around) "Yeah?"

"It's Monte-skew, not screw."