11/07/02’s illustrious band:

Panty Hose Onions

Brought to you by Ms. Wild Rice and an anonymous member of a certain creative home arts club.

Ms. Wild Rice serves as the editorial assistant of the CHAC’s official publication. As such, she is the lucky recipient of mail from the club’s members. Sometimes they send pictures of their home arts/crafts projects, and while many of those projects are quite attractive (ask her about the rhinestone wreath!), some of them are . . . not exactly Martha Stewart.

One such project is known to us only through the Polaroid photo that was mailed to the magazine office. It shows a man standing among the legs of several pairs of pantyhose that are suspended from the ceiling, into which have been stuffed about 8 white onions per leg. No note, no label, no letter of explanation. The white strip at the bottom of the photo simply bears the legend “Panty Hose Onions” and a date written in black marker.

My questions are these:

• Who thought of this? The guy in the photo? The photographer? Some fiendish third party?
  
• What’s this guy doing with several pairs of unattended stockings?
  
• What’s this guy doing with so many onions?
  
• Did he wash everything first?
  
• Do healthy people really hang used pantyhose from the ceilings of their homes?
  
• What is the photo really trying to show us? This is a home arts magazine, after all; maybe the guy is demonstrating some new form of performance art.
  
• If so, what is the message of the performance art? That the roundness of the onions, contrasted with the linear shape of flaccid hose, represents the dichotomy of the yin and yang within all of us? That woman, as symbolized by the hose, is empty and transparent unless filled with earthy substance, as symbolized by the organic onions, which in turn clearly signify pregnancies/children? That the man is lost in the forest of female limbs? That the artist is a feminist who has chosen to subvert pantyhose, long recognized as a tool of female oppression, to bewilder and imprison the hapless white male trapped within and caused him to reexamine his hegemonic patriarchal notions of what should fill the pantyhose? That --
  

Ooh, sorry. Grad school deconstruction-speak got the better of me there for a minute. I’ve been out of that environment for nearly 9.5 years, but the old impulse still flares up again every once in a while. [Deep breath.] Sometimes an onion storage device is just an onion storage device.