My son Barrett is getting married this Saturday in Charleston, SC. A beautiful couple, a great moment. I planned to wear my old blue pinstripe suit. But style-wise companions and associates convinced me that my suit is outdated and that it would make ME look outdated. So I bought a new up-to-date blue suit and had a nice seamstress at the mall take up the too-long pants. Trying the suit on later, I discovered that the pants still broke well over my shoes. Ugly! The old-guy-at-the racetrack look. I took them back to the seamstress She smiled and insisted they were fine, that if taken up any more, they’d be too short when I sat down. I did plan to sit down once in a while, so that made sense to me. But thereafter, it made no sense to all those style-conscious sartorial advisors of mine who, when consulted, told me my seamstress, God bless her, seemed oblivious to fashion advances in the pages of GQ and Esquire. The style, they said, is to be sleek and not too capacious (i.e., baggy) in the pants with the cuffs barely touching the tops of the shoes. All I can say is, they haven’t seen my shoes — black, bulbous things worthy only of Mickey Mouse. Perhaps it’s best if they get draped over like dead bodies. What this all comes down to is – I’m sadly out of date for such a cool guy. I must work on that. Meanwhile, my up-to-date, fashion-savvy handsome son – who was just a mere boy when I bought my antiquated formal wear – is having the biggest day of his still-young life and everybody will be looking at him and his lovely bride, not at the father of the groom. I’ll ask the photographer to crop me at the knees. And I’ll probably spend most of the wedding sitting down anyway. Apparently I have the right pants for that. And for the occasional dance number, I admit I’ll be a little self-conscious. So I’ll be dancing in the dark, while the new couple dances out into the light.
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