The Slice: First batch of swimsuit memories comes in 2 pieces

The Slice asked readers how old they were when they looked their best in a swimsuit.

“At age 15, I looked pretty spiffy in my classic yellow polka-dot bikini, until I started my very first job that summer at a bakery,” wrote Moses Lake’s Carol Bending, who grew up in Redmond, Ore.

Spokane’s Joyce Cameron, who grew up in Lewiston, thinks she might have looked her best in a swimsuit when she was 17, the summer she worked as a nanny for a wealthy New York family. “A baby blue bikini,” she wrote.

Then there was this from a friend in Idaho, Carol Nelson. “I challenge you to find an adult female who thinks she looks good in a bathing suit. I think I looked the best when I was 10 years old and walking to the pool with my sister in our two-piece matching suits. My mom sewed the suits and when they got wet they grew two sizes. We had to walk home holding up the bottoms and wrapped in our towels.”

Maybe those girls should have gone to work at a bakery and perhaps by the end of summer their suits would have fit.

Re: drinking untreated wilderness water: The Slice heard from a number of folks who have done that on occasion. Some did fine. Others got sick.

But Ralph Wilfong offered what seems like a good rule. “In an emergency, drink the water,” he said. “It’s better than dying from dehydration. Doctors can fix sick, they can’t fix dead.”

One more of these: “If you hear giggling it’s a tree house,” wrote Pamela Pierson. “If you hear armpit farts it’s a fort.”

For the record: The item about heckling bike riders who might be imagining that they are in the Tour de France was intended to be humorous.

Not everyone understood that. So let me be clear. Only a cretin would shout anything other than encouragement at a cyclist or anyone else out getting some exercise. And, no, I didn’t think I was encouraging cretins as I don’t picture many of them buying the newspaper.

Today’s Slice question: When was the last time you played catch?