Sticky Dew and Bounty Too
By Michael Antonoff
I once made a fake commercial about a super-absorbent bath towel that professed to suck up ten times its own weight in moisture. I framed the towel in a partially-filled bathtub, then used a time-lapse movie camera to speed up the water disappearing down an unseen drain. Accompanied by a dubbed sucking sound, the illusion conveyed the claim that the super-absorbent towel did all the work of emptying the tub.
During these days of high humidity, I wish such a towel existed and could be worn to soak up body sweat or placed inside the wrapper of refrigerated bread to act as a desiccant and preserve the loaf from going moldy prematurely. Well, guess what? The next best thing to a magic towel is a roll of perforated paper towels, an item so ordinary and so disposable, that during these summer months I go through at least one jumbo roll a week — wiping up spills being the least of its uses. Strategically placed, a paper towel simply works wonders on both body and bread. Not to mention armpits.
Anyone who ventures into a subway or takes a walk in the mugginess of summer would be well-advised to first line their chests and backs with paper towels. You don’t have to be a tailor to get the fit right, but a little planning goes a long way to fashioning towels as sweat guards.
First, calculate the number of sheets needed for coverage. In my case, three contiguous sheets (6- by 11-inches each) are sufficient for shielding my torso from belly to neck, nipple to nipple. For back armor, I use four sheets. Using one fewer sheet chest-side counters paper creep in which the edge of a towel peeks over my tee, obscuring my neck and eliciting inquiries from small children who point. The longer covering on the back can dip lower than the front with the added advantage of acting as a desiccating presence against your upper derriere.
Before touching those measured sheets to your skin though, make sure your body is completely wet-less. There’s no point mounting a paper armor if you’re already sweating like a steam pipe fitter in a turtleneck. Plan on a wipe down and/or standing under a high-speed fan until dry.
Have a T-shirt ready to pull over your head, front first, to hold the paper in position. Ideally, a partner can hold the second set of paper towels in place on your back and help you pull the T-shirt over it. If you don’t have someone to dress you, a workaround is a piece of masking tape for temporarily hanging the paper from the back of your neck. You can reach around and remove the tape once fully dressed.
If a mere T-shirt isn’t dressy enough, put a dress shirt over it. But if you’re wearing only a T-shirt, make sure it’s dark or thick enough so that the outline of the paper towels won’t shine through. Paper towels are meant to be worn but not seen. You don’t want to look tacky.
Where once perforations appeared every 12-inches on a roll, the innovation of Select-A-Size allowed for easy tearing every 6-inches. The latest innovation adds perforations vertically in the middle of the towel, enabling a pair of near-perfect armpit protectors. They can be pushed up your sleeves even after you dress, assuming you’re wearing short sleeves.
There’s a good chance that once you get to your destination, such as a job, the paper towels will have soaked up buckets and you’re ready to change into something less wet. That means more towels and perhaps a clean T-shirt. Hopefully, there are plenty of paper hand towels available in your office bathroom. You may want to pack backup shirts on days in which humidity approaches 100 percent.
What works for the human body also works for bread. That’s because placed in a refrigerator, bread sweats. A neighbor in a stone house with a kitchen barely above the water table taught my wife and me a trick for preserving bread, rolls and bagels. Make sure to wrap them in a paper towel or two before returning them to their plastic wrapper and placing them in the fridge. That way, moisture is absorbed by the paper, short circuiting the growth of mold. Edible bread life can be extended from days to weeks.
I prefer to arrive at work the same way I like my buns — fresh, not soggy. It’s not easy to remain calm and collected during the dog days of summer. Yet, with a little help from a well-situated paper towel, sponge-like on your chest or crimped around a loaf, your mastery of super-absorbent towels will make you the envy of all. Living dry isn’t just an aspiration. It’s a lifestyle.
As we shelter in place, the routine of leaving home for a remote workplace has been disrupted. One silver lining to the pandemic is that commuting to your home office is achieved without breaking a sweat. Thus, the skills you’ve learned here are best put in a drawer for now and pulled out once you reenter the rat race and all the sweat it entails.
