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 shaggy, strange, rather as if they were themselves animated fruits and vegetables. While there, I myself sometimes feel a bit arugulish (funny, I don’t look arugulish. Ka-boom). Something there is about fresh produce amassed in vast quantities that brings out the goofiness in people.
Nearly everyone at this market seems in a state of dishabille. Lots of feet in sandals, women without makeup, men unshaved, hair flying. Baseball hats are ubiquitous. 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.
Across the back of the T-shirt of a young man I note eyeing the portobello mushrooms is written “Tofutown.” 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. (Boulder, Colorado, it turns out.) A woman of a certain age wears a T-shirt that reads, from top to bottom, “I am Woman, I am Invincible . . . I am Tired.” 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.” On the yellow shirt of a pudgy, smiling woman is written the question: “Does Anal Compulsive Need a Hyphen?” Only when it’s an adjective, Toots, I want to tell her, now go home and change that silly shirt.
Having a playful yet, I like to think, quietly malicious mind, I cannot help inventing a few T-shirt messages of my own. Here is a sampler: “Hard Rock Cafe — Purgatorio”; “Bet You Don’t Know Me,” with “Federal Witness Protection Program” on the back; “CCCP — The Party’s Over”; “I Survived The Joyce Carol Oates Literary Oeuvre”; and “Space for Rent, Owner Has Forgone All Attempts at Original Wit.” I don’t see any surefire big sellers here, but you never know.
What is the meaning of people walking around in these T-shirts? 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. Has it to do with that central casting director within each of us, who instructs us on how to present ourselves to the world? All these people in their comic T-shirts have clearly answered the call to send in the clowns.
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. 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 “Runyon’s Travelling All-Stars” — Runyon’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 straight-forward 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.” I sometimes wear my Central Intelligence Agency T-shirt to epater les liberals at the university gym where I exercise, though, near as I can make out, I don’t seem to have epated too many.
As a kid, I owned a jacket that had KoolVent Awnings written on its back. 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. This jacket was the only item of clothing I wore to which my father ever objected. “Why the hell do you want to be a walking advertisement for someone else’s company?” he would say. Or: “Why don’t you just walk around in sandwich boards instead?”
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. 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. Maybe the time is ripe for a T-shirt that reads, “‘Let’s Kill All the Designers’ — Nietzsche.” You don’t suppose anyone will check the quotation, do you?
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
