Here’s a little something I bet you didn’t know about me. I hate folding laundry. Like really hate it. I find that moving it around works just as well. I usually maintain a nice chair-to-bed-to-chair-to-bed pattern, although sometimes that gets difficult when TWD comes to visit or I find myself needing my chair for other things (textbooks, tap shoes, laptops, etc.)
When that happens, I go chair-to-bed-to-floor but never the bare floor, mind you. I’m way too civilized for that. In college I used to carefully position everything on my area rug. Now that I no longer have an area rug, I just line up my various pocketbooks, dance bags and laptop cases to make a nice little shelf. Then the piling begins.
TWD, on the other hand, loves folding laundry. At least I’m pretty sure he does. He seems to fold laundry all the time. And he’s very fastidious about it.
One time, a while back, we were hanging out in the living room at his house; I was working on choreography for my students and he was folding laundry. He’s very methodical but having spent my early twenties studying LMA (that’s Laban Movement Analysis for those of you not cool enough to know that on your own…) I’m very into looking at the way people move and saying, “There’s a better way to do that, you know.”
He had one pile on the couch and one on the ironing board. Except he couldn’t reach both piles from where he was sitting so he’d stand up, reach for a new shirt to fold, sit back down on the couch and repeat the process.
I watched him do this several times, saying nothing (after all, I’m not exactly winning any awards for the state of my bedroom) but after a while, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Sweetie…”
(“Sweetie” is such a good word, isn’t it?)
“Sweetie, you know if you put the basket on the other side of you, you wouldn’t have to get up every time you finish folding a shirt?”
He paused, surveyed the situation, and agreed that my suggestion was a good one.
But that’s not what I set out to write about today. What I set out to write about was what happened on Saturday night.
I was kneeling on the floor of my room packing costumes for Sunday’s shindig with my tap company, The Lady Hoofers. If there’s anything I hate more than folding laundry, it’s unpacking, so the costumes we’d worn for our performance two weekends ago were right where we’d left them. I pulled them all out to make sure that nothing had gone missing or needed repair. That’s when I noticed that one pair of bright pink skinny jeans were wrinkled.
Horribly wrinkled.
In fact, they were still cuffed at the ankle from two weeks ago!
“Who the hell did this?” I hissed. “I love my dancers but, like, is it that difficult to un-cuff a pair of pants and FOLD them? Do I have time to sit around ironing people’s costumes between performances???”
A few weeks ago, TWD took a look at my master spreadsheet (which contains everything from our annual budget to master class registrations to costume inventories), shook his head and spent the next three hours reformatting my ill-fated attempts at number crunching so that they actually crunch the way they were intended to crunch while I sat on my bed numbering costumes.
The pants in question were Pants #5.
I grabbed my copy of the spreadsheet. “WHO wears Pants #5??? Who did this???”
Well folks…
Surprise, surprise.
It turns out that I wear Pants #5.
I can tell people how to fold their clothes; I just can’t actually fold them.
I wonder if I could hire TWD to do it for me?
