green jeans

I was catching up on all my Lucky magazines last night—talk about addictive. That rag is like bootleg hooch. You know it'll kill you but you just keep swigging out of that jelly jar like a sad ole rummy.

One thing I kept seeing amidst all the shameless pimping of Gwynnie's must-have macrobiotic pimple cream and Posh's favored $10,000 handbags was something those fashionistas call "green jeans." As far as I can tell, this term refers loosely to a variety of products, from jeans made of American-made organic cotton to jeans made of regular old cotton processed in ecologically responsible mills; jeans made by folks who donate profits to orphanages in India to jeans made by decent people who turn out the lights when they leave the room.

I don't know. Jeans are really hard to get right on a good day. I mean, how many times have you been tricked by those sneaky dressing room mirrors into buying a pair of jeans that seem to promise youth and passion and the open road, only to catch a glimpse of yourself later in a sidewalk window and realize that they make you look like an angry piece of chorizo sausage. A whole lotta times, right?

So how does adding the green to the lifelong search for the perfect jeans make it better for me? It doesn't. In fact, the green requirement pointedly decreases my chances of ever seeing myself in the Jeans That Will Change My Life. So as much as I'd like to play along, doing my part to shop this economy back into fighting shape and save the earth, I'm not going green on this one.

Besides, by my account, Greenjeans was that nice fella who mixed Captain Kangaroo's martinis and provided the home-grown delivery system that fed Bun-Bun's own nasty little Vitamin A dependency. I just don't think you should mess with that brand.