A Very Special Winter PSA

thelaurenbell crawls from her deep, dank hibernation space to tell you this: please, dear people, cut those stitches that hold the tails of your coats together. Your coat tails are not an extra sleeve, or a wee little headhole for small-headed people who enjoy wearing their coats upside down. They are not a special breathing apparatus hole for when you do that thing where one person sits on another’s shoulders wearing a long coat and they pretend to be one, unusually tall, unusually lumpy person.

No, no, no.

They are tails. They are meant to waggle free in the breeze, like the flowing tail of a fine stallion. They cannot be restrained! To restrain your tail is to restrain your SOUL.

Also, it makes you look dumb.

New Yorkers like to think that they look extra-super-wicked-cool at all times. New York, I tell you this once, and I tell you now: you cannot look extra-super-wicked-cool when your bottoms are unnaturally constrained by stitched-together jacket hems. You look like The Penguin, and he is not even plain old unhyphenated cool.

This nonsense has so distressed me lately, I've started entertaining elaborate fantasies of carrying around tiny (non-threatening!) scissors and just...snipsnip - solving everyone's little rear-binding issues. I would be like a superhero - a modern-day Batman solving this most modern, most pressing of problems, de-Peguinizing people withe the tiniest flick of my leather-gloved wrist. People would greet me with "hurrahs" and tears of joy. This is what goes on in my mind.

But NO! Let us not go there. You must not let the figments of thelaurenbell's overactive imagination come to life and run ramshackle over your fabled streets. New York, you are better than this. You should not NEED a vigilante of tail freedoms. You should be able to handle this yourself. Do not make me be that person with the nail scissors, stalking people's bottoms on the subway (see exhibit a - and please note that I painstakingly wrote those true-to-life sound effects backwards for your benefit, dear readers).

This concludes your very special winter PSA.