I chose to wear a silky Ascot o’ the Day this afternoon. I have a few ascots and cravats in my collection, and they do matter. I can appreciate them for what they are, but they don’t resonate with my soul like bow ties or neckties. I can see the beauty in an ascot, but I can also see I’m not really an ascot kind of girl. But there’s room enough for different types of neckwear in the world. I let my little gaggle of ascots be whoever they were born to be, and we all do a pretty good job of getting along in the Tie Room. We share more in common than we get in each other’s way. It’s like that with human beings, too, if we shut out the rumors and simply get to know the people around us who might seem so different from ourselves. Now, I’m going to take some time to get to know my bow-tied cotton candy.
Taco-seekin’ shark Tie o’ the Day is a fresh catch for me. I wasn’t shopping for ties, and I certainly don’t need any more of the artifacts for my already gargantuan neckwearian-collection. But my laptop was open and I was online—and you know how one good click on a link leads to another. So when my eyeballs came across this odd necktie specimen for sale, you know I had to adopt it into the fold I have created upstairs in the Tie Room. We’re all made a tad jollier by this singular tie’s very existence, I’m sure.😁BTW I want to avoid any confusion on this point: my shirt does not call for the suppression of HAT. Instead, it suggests we should suppress HATE. That makes much more sense.😉
Bow Tie o’ the Day has one question this morning: Why are human beings so often oblivious to the most obvious philosophical truths? Do they think “oblivious” and “obvious” mean the same thing? Why should we need a t-shirt message to state what we already know? Yeah, that was more than one question, but they were each variations on a theme. 😎👒
Leather Bow Tie o’ the Day is proud to accompany T-shirt o’ the Day’s timeless guidance. Carry this bit o’ wisdom with you over the approaching weekend—and always. You won’t regret the idea, especially if you’re the one being judged by someone else.
We had tickets to last night’s production of LES MISERABLES at the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City. Suzanne had even reserved a table for us to eat a pre-show dinner at Tin Angel. I put on my new pink-and-white striped shirt, which I think looks snazzy—even though it has no paisley. Miss Tiffany had mowed my hair earlier in the day so my coiffure was spiffy. I couldn’t decide what piece of neckwear would feel right for the show, so I did what I always do in that situation: I stood in front of one of the tie racks in the Tie Room, closed my eyes, and grabbed a random tie. Black sheep Tie o’ the Day was my blind choice and I was pleased with it. But. Suzanne has had a cold for the past few days and it was getting worse. She canceled the dinner reservations and took a nap she hoped would cure her, so we could make it to the performance. The nap did not make her feel any better. She felt too miserable to go to the theater, which meant I was not going to see LES MISERABLES while wearing my swell black sheep tie. So I call this selfie my this-is-me-not-going-out-to-see-LES-MIZ-while-wearing-my-black-sheep-Tie-o-the-Day-necktie snapshot.
FYI Our tickets did not go to waste. One of Suzanne’s nieces was able to use them.
Bow Tie o’ the Day is one of my recent DIY neckwear creations made of generic LEGOS. It’s all about creative play and having a laugh. So is drag. One of the first films I remember watching with my parents on television was SOME LIKE IT HOT, wherein Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis try to pass as female musicians in a band, in order to not be killed. It is a brilliant comedy, and Mom and Dad and I laughed from the minute it started. It was about fun. Dustin Hoffman in TOOTSIE and Julie Andrews in VICTOR/VICTORIA were fabulous cross-dressing, gender-playing roles I will forever treasure. Robin Williams’ cross-dressing character in MRS. DOUBTFIRE will always be breathtakingly hilarious. If you are too young to have seen Flip Wilson’s “Geraldine” character or any of Milton Berle’s female characters, please check them out on YouTube, so you can catch up on amazing comedic—sometimes serious—drag work. And those are but a few examples of the craft of drag. I would probably have to say my all-time fave pop-culture drag character is Jamie Farr as Max Klinger in M*A*S*H*. We have all enjoyed drag performances throughout our lives, and each one of us has turned out to be exactly who we were meant to be. Drag is about playing with gender roles, and watching it from m childhood on never confused a one of us about who we are. It is simply fun performance.
We have been eating strawberries by the boatload recently, and I can’t explain why. All I know is that every time I make a grocery run lately, I have been hauling home a couple of containers of strawberries for us to devour. We can’t get enough of the bite-sized red fruit. I wanted to make myself a heapin’ helpin’ of strawberry shortcake for breakfast this morning, but as you can plainly see, I wasn’t able to create that exact dish because somebody who wasn’t I had already eaten the last of the strawberries—without alerting me to that fact. So I ate strawberry-less strawberry shortcake for breakfast instead. Suffice it to say that the dessert was very shortcake-y and Reddi-Whip-y to the tongue. Strawberry-y? Not so much. The whole situation was a shock to my strawberry-wantin’ digestive system. In fact, it discombobulated me to the core. I submit the following as evidence of my utter discombobulation-by-lack-of-strawberries: my Bow tie-less Bow Tie o’ the Day selfie. I completely forgot to attach a bow tie to my t-shirt for a post photo. A lack of available strawberries in the house was responsible for this tie travesty. It will not happen again, I assure you.🍓
Bow Tie o’ the Day and Suzanne and I spent part of our long Juneteenth weekend at a baby shower, which was held at her sister Janita’s house. I feel welcome in any of Suzanne’s sibling’s homes, but for reasons you can easily behold in these selfies, I feel most at home at Janita’s. It’s the taxidermied-animals-on-the-walls decor there that makes it feel so much like my parents’ house: my kidhood home. After years of Mom wanting Dad to build her a family room, he finally built it for her after he returned from his triumphant Alaska hunting adventure—when he needed a high-ceilinged room to show off his taxidermied Alaskan beasts.🐻🦌🐾
Oh, it’s just a regular afternoon here around the house—with me wearing my new potato Tie o’ the Day and my polka dot clown shoes as I do some housekeeping chores.🤡🥔🏠
This dear deer Bow Tie o’ the Day is also a nod to Rob, who in his younger years managed to grow some of the scraggliest Deer Hunt Beards I have ever seen. He could down a trophy buck, but he could not grow a trophy beard.The early morning Rob passed away, it was my niece, Steph who called to give me the news. She asked if I’d inform my three other siblings that Rob was gone. We all have cellphones, so even though it was quite early, I was confident I’d easily get through to the people I most needed to talk to at that tragic moment. I’m the baby of the family and one of my siblings was now gone—and I felt like I needed to talk to my remaining brother and sisters with an urgency I hadn’t felt before. I needed the connection to them RIGHT NOW. I called Anne first, because—living in Delta—she was literally the closest of us to Mary and the entire situation. I got no answer. I called Ron. I got no answer. I called BT/Mercedes. Again, I got no answer. I left messages for each of them to call me ASAP. Three calls, three strikes. I had struck out. I texted them. I kept calling them over and over until I got them. I really did feel like an orphan and it was lonely. I do recall ranting loudly around the house at all three of my siblings about how it it was ridiculous that we all have mobile phones and I still couldn’t get in touch with even one of them in an emergency! For the next hour or so until they had each finally returned my calls, I chewed them and their smartphones out bigly—in my head and out loud. I could focus my sad anger on phone technology and my remaining siblings not getting back to me. It’s not like I could chew out Rob at that very moment. I have, however, read him the riot act in many moments since that day. Grief is a fickle thing. It sneaks up on you and makes you feel all the feelings you least want to feel. Working through those difficult and complex feelings is what you have to do, though, in order to get up every morning and create the rest of your meaningful life—for yourself and those folks who love you.
