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[10/18/99]

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Urge
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[10/14/99]

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Many panties were flung without premeditation that night -- but few were aimed at the stage. Ivy and Lux weren't themselves the objects of desire, but instead sprayed the crowd with sexual possibility like a bomber plane sending briefs exploding skyward, launching a geyser of airborne briefs. These chicks just wanted out of their underwear, and so they cast their scent wherever it landed. I never doubted that those flung panties were wet, so I assumed that wetness was at least implied in any panty-toss.

But would this be true at a $50 Tom Jones concert at a staid Washington theater?

I didn't expect spontaneity, but I thought some original meaning of a tossed panty would survive. Rituals are meant to both stand in for and re-ignite whatever expression originally inspired them. So even if the Tom Jones fans brought laundered panties in their handbags, once airborne they would signify the same thing as the pioneering pair thrown 35 years ago by some British schoolgirl pushed past her boiling point by the Welsh pelvis. I assumed that every tossed panty still says: You and your show, Mr. Jones, get me very excited, and here are the body fluids to prove it.

But at Jones' concert, the panties appeared while the roadies were still setting up the stage. A woman about 30 rows back started it off, standing up at her seat and twirling white bikini briefs to growing cheers. Others picked it up, and the air above the seats filled with the tiny waving flags and bawdy whoops and cheers. The sound swelled to a war cry: An army of ladies who'd left their husbands at home were preparing to storm the stage and bomb it with their underwear.

I sat between two demographically representative groups. On my left three 60ish women in bifocals and beauty-shop hairdos cooed and giggled over the coming attraction; on my right three women in their 30s played it cooler, making it clear that the panties they'd brought would be tossed ironically. When asked if Jones was married, my 60ish neighbor answered a little prissily, "Well if he is, he has a very liberal wife." My 35-year-old neighbor was the first of many who told me her mother loved Tom Jones and that ogling him on TV had been a family affair.

Next page | Tom Jones hits the stage and the panties hit him