by Mimi Williams
AllAboutMimi
As a teenager I watched the Mad Max movies, and I remember thinking “Those people are nuts! Who would act like that? And more importantly, who would dress like that?” Would all the designers get together at the beginning of an apocalypse and say “Ok, I’m thinking a desperate, cannibalistic vibe, maybe something in fur and plastic? Think chains and spikes, darling!” It was so out there! I mean, how do you ever get to that point? That’s ridiculous! It would never happen! And then we rang in 2020…
When it all started, I felt like I was in the beginning of a disaster movie. Store shelves were empty, supermarket customers were duking it out for the last box of popsicles, and people were hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Everyone was wearing a mask and looking crazy. I half expected people to start gathering in Boulder and Vegas and set off a nuke, like Stephen King’s novel “The Stand”.
You couldn’t buy face masks or latex gloves anywhere, so the first time I went grocery shopping during the pandemic I wore my fur sleep mask over my mouth and nose and a pair of black leather winter driving gloves. I looked like a demented diva doing the walk of shame after a tempestuous night, ready to assassinate a Giant Eagle manager with my pocketbook over a peanut butter shortage. Remember Mad Max? Yeah… this is how we get there!
I was so scared my family would get sick, especially my husband who is a Type 1 diabetic. So I decided to make him a mask. I have no sewing abilities whatsoever, but I have pretty good crafting ideas, and am very resourceful, so how hard could it be?
Let me just say, it was definitely not medical grade, nor do I have plans to launch an Etsy mask store. Don’t look for me on Shopify any time soon. I ended up with a huge rectangle of fabric sewn around 2 hair ties to loop over the ears, and even managed to put a pouch in it for a filter. I didn’t want to use a coffee filter like other ingenious home mask makers, because, you know, water and coffee can get through that. Unless covid germs are bigger than the size of coffee grounds, that didn’t inspire my confidence.
Then I got one of my more brilliant ideas…I decided to use a maxi pad! My man was going to have super protection! Nothing was getting past that sucker! Not germs! Not a virus! Not oxygen! Not dignity! He wore it once, to take a picture that he posted on Facebook, with both of us doubled up in laughter. Then he probably put it in a time capsule and buried it in the backyard so that future generations could learn about what we wore during the pandemic and guffaw over it. And so he would never have to wear it in public.
After that, I spent the next two years convinced I had been in a car accident, hit my head, and was actually in a coma at a hospital somewhere and this was all a bad dream. Unfortunately, the way things are still going in the world today, it seems I haven’t come out of it yet!
