Musings on raincoats (True)(Non-explicit :-) )

[vp39]

I was lying in bed the other night waiting to fall asleep, and thoughts about raincoats passed through my mind. I remembered the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when plastic raincoats and jackets came into vogue. I remembered that in the Bon Marche store at the Tacoma Mall there was a circular rack ten feet across with probably more than a hundred plastic rain jackets and coats of numerous sizes and styles, nearly all of them translucent. I think that the employee who set that up must have been a fan, and I visited that rack quite a few times over a couple of years.

Someone had a line of shiny satiny-looking translucent jelly jackets in at least six colors with various graphics on the backs; many of which I bought and wore out. I remembered the long, rather crackly purple raincoat that lived in my old Chrysler, and that was left behind when some lowlife stole all the 8-track tapes out of the car.

I thought of the main failure mode of raincoats for me, tearing out the armpit of the right sleeve, and how I still have three or four nice raincoats that have that problem but that I still wear in the house when I want to be just a little warmer; one of those being the light green opaque raincoat that I got on ebay from Patty of Patty’s Parlour…decades ago obviously…and how it wasn’t until just last year that I managed to tear its armpit. I think I got more wearings of that raincoat than any other I’ve had. The same problem occurs with long-sleeved plastic tops too.

I thought of the few jelly jackets I’ve managed to keep undamaged over the decades, a shiny emerald green one, one that’s a deep plum color in the house but that takes on a more saturated violet hue outside, and a clear one. Later I’ve gotten a couple of orange ones, one that I think came from the Philippines, and the other a very nice one that I bought used from a UK site.

I’ll sum up by saying that even though raincoats are now a relatively small part of my plastic garments I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of them over the years. Just lying in bed thinking about them definitely helped me to get to sleep last night.

[annabell-cagoule]

Love those Jelly Jackets, on my paper round as a youngster, a house had one hanging in the porch when I delivered their paper. It was blue and i fell in love with it, then one day it was gone. I had thought many times about borrowing it but never did.