Big ‘ol Glasses Frames

What ever happened to those big ol’ eyeglasses frames of the 70s and 80s? You know the kind – they went from the top of your eyebrow to halfway down your cheek and from side to side. When glasses were still made of real glass and mounted in those babies, you almost fell forward from the weight. The plastic ones were only a tiny bit lighter, but came in fake tortoise shell and cool colors like royal blue and pink.

If you needed bifocals, the bifocally part was large enough to scan an entire page of the newspaper without bobbing your head. I always thought the “aviator” styles were quite handsome on men. My girl friends and I favored a more girly style and complimented each other on how cute we were.

For the last several years when I picked out frames, I had limited choices: teeny oval, teeny oval-ish and teeny oblong-ish. The biggest frame in the store was under an inch-and-a-half high, barely covering my eye socket. Look a teeny bit up, see frame; look straight ahead, see “out,” look a teeny bit down, oops, there’s the teeny bifocal. Without the frames, I think the lenses could be called “contacts.”

I asked if they had any frames that weren’t so “squinchy” and the glasses lady nearly fainted from horror. “Why, my dear, these are the latest styles.” Yikes. The latest styles do look cute on folks under twenty-five, but when the wrinkles start to creep in, we want as much camouflage as possible. If we’re just a teensy bit overweight by, oh, say, maybe ten or fifty pounds or so, we also want a pair of glasses in proportion to our face and figure. There’s nothing more silly looking than one of us … er, of generous proportions in a pair of those little squinchy glasses with frame arms so tight that they almost disappear into the generosity on the sides of our face.

So you frame manufacturers out there, supersize some of those frames, give us some color (I vote for red and leave off the rhinestones), and make us stylish again. Damn the squinch, full vision ahead! And don’t plan on charging more for the larger size. There’s plenty of us with a drawer full of obsolete prescriptions in huge frames and we can set up at the flea market faster than you can say “squinchy!”

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