If it weren’t for water, Seve Ballesteros, a foreigner, would have won the Masters golf tournament a few years ago, keeping Jack Nicklaus from his heroic and nostalgic victory.
All I’m trying to say is, we occasionally should consider just how precious water is. Wheeling, West Virginia, now knows.
Nothing like a citywide outbreak of B.O. to drive that point home.
2.
Fashion Tips
Dress Codes that Need Decoding
While actress Whoopi Goldberg was in Atlanta recently for her one-woman show, she stayed at the downtown Ritz Carlton Hotel.
She was refused entrance to the Ritz restaurant, however, because she didn’t look like the Ritz thinks you ought to look when you eat in one of their hotels.
Let’s just say that Whoopi will never make the cover of Mademoiselle.
I often have wondered why restaurants and bars are so picky about how somebody looks or dresses when they come in and offer their business.
Take the sign that says NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE.
Does this mean as long as I have on a shirt and shoes I can take off my pants and still get the bacon cheeseburger?
The least they could do in a restaurant with a sign like that is to say, “You can’t come in without your shirt or shoes, but I’ll take your order if you’ll just wait outside while it’s cooking.”
I’ve never been fond of the sign that says GENTLEMEN ARE REQUIRED TO WEAR JACKET AND TIES.
I’ve always figured restaurants have rules like that to make certain they don’t get any riffraff.
But some very riffraffy people wear ties. Ed Meese. Jimmy Swaggart. Al Capone wore ties, didn’t he?
I don’t know if medical science has looked into it, but I would suppose that wearing a jacket and tie and trying to eat in a place where they won’t allow you to drink your beer from a bottle would not be that good for the digestion.
The jacket restricts movement and the tie probably is some detriment to circulation. This dress code, then, could lead to such maladies as heartburn, indigestion, and even ulcers.
If it turns out such restaurants have a deal going with the Maalox people, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I saw a sign in a hotel bar in Jacksonville, Florida, recently that completely baffled me.
It said CASUAL, STYLISH ATTIRE ONLY.
The first thing I did when I saw that sign was to look and see what I was wearing. I was wearing a golf shirt, khaki slacks, and loafers with no socks.
There was no question that I was casual, but was I stylish as well?
It depended, I suppose, on various personal points of view.
“Something out of a 1956 Sears catalog,” detractors might say. “Definitely not stylish.”
A more mature person might say, however, “Middle-aged preppy, huh? Very stylish, please come in.”
With some trepidation, I walked into the place and took a seat at the bar.
“Before I order,” I said to the bartender, a woman, “do you think my outfit is stylish enough to be in here?”
“You’ll do,” she said. “Now, what ya drankin’?”
Whoopi! I ordered a beer in a bottle.
Pulling the Wool Over My Eyes
I found my old high school letter jacket the other day. I was looking for something else in the back of a closet at my mother’s house and came upon it—blue with off-white leather sleeves and a block N sewn on the front.
I had forgotten it even existed. I suppose that twenty-four years ago when I graduated from high school, I simply cast it aside as I leaped into the more material collegiate world.
“I put it up for you and kept it,” my mother said, “in case you ever wanted it again.”
I played basketball and baseball at Newnan High School. I lettered in both sports, which is how I got the jacket in the first place. My number, 12, is stitched on one of the sleeves. The face of a tiger—our mascot—is on the other.
Enough years have passed now that I probably could lie about my high school athletic career and get away with most of it.
I know guys who barely made the varsity who’ve managed to move up to all-state status with the passing of enough years.
But I’ll be honest. I was an average athlete, if that. I averaged maybe ten points a game in basketball, and shot the thing on every opportunity that came to me.
“Grizzard is the only person who never had a single assist in his entire basketball career,” an ex-teammate was telling someone in my presence. “That’s because he never passed the ball.”
I hit over .300 my senior year in baseball, but they were all bloop singles except for one of those bloopers that rolled in some high weeds in right field. By the time the ball was found, I was around the bases for the winning run.
“Why don’t you take it home with you?” my mother suggested after I had pulled the jacket out of the closet. “Maybe you’ll have some children one day and they might like to see it.”
I reminded my mother I was forty-one and down three marriages, and the future didn’t look that bright for offspring. But I suppose a mother can dream.
I did bring the jacket home with me. Alone, up in my bedroom, in front of a mirror, I pulled it over me for the first time in a long time.
A lot of names came back with the jacket. Clay, John, Buddy, Russell, Richard, Al. And Dudley and the Hound, who’s still looking for his first base hit since he was fifteen.
And then there was Wingo, of course, the best high school shortstop I ever saw until a ground ball hit a pebble one day and bounced up and broke his jaw.
Ever hear that haunting song “Where Are the Men I Used to Sport With?”
They’ve all got kids, I guess, and their mothers are happy.
It’s funny about my jacket. It still fit well on my arms and shoulders, but I couldn’t get it to button anymore.
I guess some shrinkage can be expected after all those years of neglect in the closet.
Your Guide to Men’s Leisure Fashion
My interest and expertise in the area of men’s fashion are well documented. I, for instance, predicted the coming of the leisure suit back in the late sixties.
What led me to such a projection was the sudden falloff in the purchase of Nehru jackets, not to mention the fact a group of geologists digging in the mountains of West Virginia discovered the world’s richest vein of polyester.
I also forecast the fall of the leisure suit. This was after four conventioneers perished in their Las Vegas hotel when one dropped a cigar ash on the pants of his leisure suit.
He was engulfed in flames in a matter of seconds. His three companions succumbed to the dense acrid fumes from their friend’s lime-green leisure suit.
Once, while I was temporarily stationed in sunny Florida covering warm weather for the rest of the country, where it was cold and dismal, I was hanging out at the pool at my hotel, working on my tan, when I noticed other male visitors were suffering from various levels of warm-weather fashion impairment.
Women, of course, have the annual Sports Illustrated swim-suit issue to guide them as to what to wear