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The Newsletter >
The Mother of All Shirts
July 14, 2009
A Vintage Zern: This essay was first posted October 2005 (Back when shopping was still possible and socially acceptable)
Boils are painful. Skull fractures can make you dizzy. Shopping with my husband is painful and can make you dizzy. Therefore, shopping with Sherwood can be like having a boil on a skull fracture.
When my husband shops, he does a trotting quick-step past every store in the mall, dreaming that clothes will fly off their hangers and relocate themselves from the hangers onto his body. He makes no attempt to browse, look, or make comparisons. He makes not attempt to enter a store. He makes no attempt to make eye contact with a sales person.
He believes that if you make eye contact with a sales person they will steal your soul. The best that it ever gets is that he will stop at the metal carpet stripping, lean into the store—but not enter—turn his head from side to side and say, “Nope.” Nothing in there that I want.”
He then trots on—ever on.
My husband doesn’t have a lot of clothes.
I tried to change his clothes-less status recently at Macy’s Department Store in New York City. We worked our way down the escalators from the petites on the fifth floor (where I managed to find several complete outfits and a promise from a sales clerk to call me when the new fall line comes in) to the men’s department on the second floor. Now if you haven’t been to Macy’s Department Store in New York City you need to understand that the selection is more than extensive. It is gargantuan.
In the men’s department there isn’t a selection of shirts to choose from, there are canyons of shirts to choose from. Surely here, I thought, there is potential for a shopping breakthrough. Surely here, I dreamed, in this bastion of retail sales and evil American marketing—surely here.
He bought—a shirt.
I’m not sure there was a breakthrough.
Sherwood began shirt shopping by starring at the canyons of America’s finest textiles and saying, “These are butt ugly.”
I asked, “What exactly were you hoping to find in the way of a shirt.”
He moped, and said, “You know.”
I didn’t.
“You know. With long sleeves. Dressy but casual.” I must have frowned because he added, “You know.”
I still didn’t.
“You know, a good shirt.”
“And that would be different than a bad shirt.” I may have had a tone.
“You know.”
He kept saying that, but in all honesty, after twenty-six years of marriage I did not know. You could stand me against a dirty brick wall in a banana republic, with a firing squad trained on me, and say, “Tell us what your husband’s taste in clothes is, or we execute you at dawn.”
I would have to ask for a blindfold. The only things I’ve seen him wear for the last decade are company shirts with the company BEA logo. I think the logo stands for Bernie, Ernie, and Aladdin.
Finally, he said, “A shirt that goes with brown.” When he mentioned a color I felt a glimmer of hope. Here was something we could work with. He wanted a shirt that went with brown things—like footballs, tree trunks, and dirt.
“Okay then!” I shouted.
But he kept going. “You know. A shirt that goes with brown and also other colors.”
“Okay, let me get this straight; you want a long-sleeved, dressy but casual, good not bad shirt that goes with brown and other colors.”
I patted his hand and said, “Sherwood, honey, you don’t want shirt. You want chameleon skin.”
“No, I just want the mother of all shirts.”
He picked out a shirt, finally, and then asked the cashier if she liked it. She said, “No.” I asked for a manager.
This is why I shop on the Internet.
May this week bring you sales and service galore, and may every dress, shirt, coat, or girdle fit you like a glove and may the gloves fit too—all for seventy-five percent off.
Linda (Bargain Basement) Zern
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