This title is an allusion to a very satirical song by Tom Lehrer, and while I don't intend to be satirical here, I can't help but think of the autumn of my senior year in college--around October 1968--and the suit I bought then.
In our theatre department the tradition was that the stage manager of a show came to the performances dressed nicely in case he or she had to step onto the stage and make a public announcement, such as a casting change or a delay in the show's curtain going up. The stage crew wore black so they could move unseen during scene changes in the dark, but the stage manager had to be presentable to the audience. For the first production of our year, I was the stage manager, and I needed a suit.
So I bought one. It was a three-piece light green (or more accurately, a very grayish-green) corduroy suit. The vest was reversible: that light green on one side, and on the other, a burnished gold cloth with a black paisley pattern that matched the coat's lining. It didn't look bad.
For some reason that I can't explain, I still have that suit hanging in my closet, and several years ago I set as a goal the idea that some day I would wear that suit again. The problem, of course, was that I was much larger than I was when I had bought the suit, and getting down to the weight I would need to weigh in order to wear it was a task of--well, let's be honest and say a task of huge proportions.
When I came to weigh what I did when I was married the following summer, I tried on the suit. The surprise came when I was able to wear the trousers, even able to fasten the hook at the waist, but far from being able to wear the vest or the coat. Why the pants fit when no other part did remains unclear to me. Obviously our bodies change shape as we age, but I wasn't prepared for the discrepancy that this vest and suit jacket represented. So in spite of my best intentions, the future utility of this suit looked bleak.
Telling my friends and especially my children (and most especially my daughter) that I was going to wear that suit some day brought on comments of incredulity and threats from the fashion police. The suit is, obviously, not of a contemporary style, and the mod look it represents is not exactly in fashion these days. No matter to me. The suit represented a goal that had nothing to do with looking trendy, and I was still trying to get to where it fit me. And I decided that if the suit wasn't going to fit me, I was going to have to fit the suit.
Well, now I weigh considerably less than I did when I was married, and probably a good deal less than I weighed when I was a college senior and first wore that suit. In preparing to attend a dinner dance Friday night, where the customary dress for men is a tuxedo or a suit, I tried on my tuxedo and the suits I have in my closet. They hung like tents on me. The suit pants' waists are eight inches bigger than the waist size of jeans I bought the other day. I had room in one of my suits for both me and a guest. Wearing my tuxedo or one of those suits to the dinner dance would have been like dressing as a clown. So I tried on the green suit, and it fit. The pants, to be honest, are a little loose by now, but at last I could button the vest and the coat. I showed up in my new-but-really-old retro look, and received not one word of criticism for it, not even from one friend in particular who had said to me several months ago that if I wore that suit to one of this dance club's functions, she hoped I'd bring a change of clothing because she wasn't going to let me look like that (a superannuated mod rocker?) all night long. Even she said the suit looked pretty good.
And I think it did. It made me feel good too, so I'm glad I had the chance to make that particular goal a reality. I have a long list of important things to do, but I got to check off an item that I've been carrying on these lists for years and years, and how often can we do that?
sf
