Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual SEND IN THE CLOWNS Every Saturday morning, from early June until late October, I go to the farmer's market in our town and feel as if I have stepped into a Koren cartoon. People look a bit...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Not that I am dying to go there—I exceeded this year's tofu budget by January 2—but nothing on the shirt reveals where Tofutown might be...
...Has it to do with that central casting director within each of us, who instructs us on how to present ourselves to the world...
...Maybe the time is ripe for a T-shirt that reads, "'Let's Kill All the Designers'—Nietzsche...
...and "Space for Rent, Owner Has Forgone All Attempts at Original Wit...
...All these people in their comic T-shirts have clearly answered the call to send in the clowns...
...You don't suppose anyone will check the quotation, do you...
...I sometimes wear my Central Intelligence Agency T-shirt to épater les liberals at the university gym where I exercise, though, near as I can make out, I don't seem to have épated too many...
...As a kid, I owned a jacket that had KoolVent Awnings written on its back...
...A quick inventory of my own shirt drawer reveals a sweatshirt with Dartmouth on it, another with Illinois written in Hebrew, and yet a third with "Run-yon's Travelling All-Stars"—Runy-on's being a bar in Minneapolis owned by a friend—which advises, in small print, on its back: "There is no free lunch...
...My T-shirts tend to carry straightforward messages: "Evanston Public Library," "98.7 WMFT Chicago's Classical Music Station," "Chicago Joe's" (a restaurant and sports bar), and (this sent to me by a friend who was in the OSS during World War II) "Central Intelligence Agency...
...Bet You Don't Know Me," with "Federal Witness Protection Program" on the back...
...I am Tired...
...Nearly everyone at this market seems in a state of dishabille...
...CCCP—The Party's Over...
...On the yellow shirt of a pudgy, smiling woman is written the question: "Does Anal Compulsive Need a Hyphen...
...Today a large portion of the middle class is a walking ad for Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and the rest of the designer mafia...
...Why the hell do you want to be a walking advertisement for someone else's company...
...What is the meaning of people walking around in these T-shirts...
...Across the back of the T-shirt of a young man I note eyeing the porto-bello mushrooms is written "Tofu-town...
...KoolVent in those days sponsored one of the best softball teams in Chicago—I came into the jacket through a friend, whose father ran the local franchise—and I thought that, wearing it, I might be taken, by the less than fully cognizant cognoscenti, for a better athlete than I was...
...Something there is about fresh produce amassed in vast quantities that brings out the goofi-ness in people...
...he would say...
...I Survived The Joyce Carol Oates Literary Oeuvre...
...Only when it's an adjective, Toots, I want to tell her, now go home and change that silly shirt...
...Boulder, Colorado, it turns out...
...While there, I myself sometimes feel a bit arugulish (funny, I don't look arugul-ish...
...Lots of feet in sandals, women without makeup, men unshaved, hair flying...
...Having a playful yet, I like to think, quietly malicious mind, I cannot help inventing a few T-shirt messages of my own...
...I don't see any surefire big sellers here, but you never know...
...And T-shirts everywhere, T-shirts asking that we save this or that animal, or testifying that one has been in this or that bicycle or marathon race, or commemorating one's trip to Paris, Key West, Vegas, or Martha's Vineyard...
...An older dude wears a T-shirt bearing the legend "Whatever . . ." A man with a substantial alderman (as they used to call pot bellies in Chicago) wears a black T-shirt with white cursive lettering that reads, "Bad Spellers of the World— Untie...
...There ought—to devise a less than fresh transition—to be clowns, but I'm not sure they ought to appear in T-shirts with other people's jokey lines written on them...
...Decades ago I wore Lacoste tennis shirts with the company's small alligator over the breast, but I have long since forsworn wearing any garb with a designer logo, and, in agreement with my father, have come to feel it's stupid to offer oneself as a human billboard for another person's goods...
...Here is a sampler: "Hard Rock Cafe—Purgatorio...
...Or: "Why don't you just walk around in sandwich boards instead...
...Baseball hats are ubiquitous...
...A woman of a certain age wears a T-shirt that reads, from top to bottom, "I am Woman, I am Invincible...
...Ka-boom...
...People look a bit shaggy, strange, rather as if they were themselves animated fruits and vegetables...
...It is one thing to wear one's heart on one's sleeve, quite another to wear someone else's humor on one's chest...
...This jacket was the only item of clothing I wore to which my father ever objected...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 4
