Say Farewell to Half the Closet
Hamlet may be called a tragedy, but it’s full of hilarious scenes because the poorest members of Shakespeare’s audience had to stand for three hours in the sun or rain and wanted something to laugh at.
Early in the play Laertes is trying get back to college to do some serious drinking but he’s cornered by his dad Polonius, who leaves him with a “few” pieces of sage – and boring – advice. Things like, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and “To thine own self be true.”
At one point of this intentionally tedious speech Polonius tells his son to spend good money on good clothing, “rich, not gaudy,” for, “…the apparel oft proclaims the man.”
But clothes can unmake us as well, something I realized when I looked up and down the length of my closet and realized a lot of these clothes don’t fit anymore. And wearing them made me look like a clown, the kind that wears clothes that don’t fit anymore.
The other day I found a picture of me from forty years ago. I was a young pastor in Los Angeles, wearing a White Sox jersey I’d brought with me from Chicago. During my seminary I used to skip classes all the time to attend games at the old Comiskey Park. Me and my buddy Chuck were famous for tempting fate by skipping classes you were never supposed to miss in order to see the Sox play on the South Side.
Anyway, I brought a lot of Sox gear with me when I moved to LA, and I was startled to look at that picture. At the time I thought I was overweight and needed to get back in shape but I could not believe how thin I looked back then. And how much hair I had on top of my head. And how black it was. And how thick a mustache I wore.
How come we all used to think of ourselves as fat, but now that we’re old and chubby we realize just how skinny we used to be.
I think it was the Pandemic that really packed on the pounds. Or at least I’ll blame it on Covid. My thinking was, “If I’m going to die anyway I won’t regret eating ice cream on my deathbed.”
I didn’t die. So now I have regrets after all.
Anyway, my wife Jennie recently bought me some new dress shirts. Now they don’t label these shirts “Bigger Because You’re Fatter” but they should. Instead they’re described as “loose-fit” or “comfortable wear.”
The new shirts fit pretty nice, but that makes it all the more obvious that most of my older clothes are just a little too tight. It’s especially hard to button the collar. I guess my neck is thicker. As for the other buttons up and down my gut – they bulge out.
Who’s kidding who? I grabbed a large paper shopping bag with handles and began to try on all the old shirts one by one. It was a struggle.
It wasn’t long before a dozen dress shirts and four pairs of dress pants were neatly folded into that bag. We dropped it all off the next day at a thrift store. It’s in pretty good shape. Someone should get some use out of it.
If it’s true that “Clothes make the man,” at least in my case the clothes don’t make me look as stupid. I may have averted disaster. What’s left fits nice and loose.
For now.