The Naked Time

I am a big fan of clothes.

That’s not to say that I enjoy shopping for them or have any inkling of fashion sense, but rather that I staunchly advocate wearing clothing as frequently as possible.

That old stage fright technique of picturing the audience naked has always struck me as horrifyingly bad advice. If you already have a large crowd of potentially intimidating strangers, how could a dose of nudity possibly make anyone involved more comfortable?

The most unsettling thing about the underclothed is the way they tend to crop up unexpectedly, just when I’m feeling safe. One reason I’m fond of winter, along with the increase in available baked goods, is the drastically reduced chance of sudden exposure to Speedos.

Admittedly, I knowingly set myself up for an above-average risk of surprise naked people by belonging to a gym with locker rooms. Then again, this is not the YMCA. The showers all have individual stalls, and there’s a row of little curtained cubbies for changing clothes.

That’s why I was so startled to walk into the room one day and discover a woman lounging against the wall, carrying on a phone conversation while very, very naked.

I suppose conversations like this are the reason that video phones still aren’t very popular. I couldn’t help wondering if the other party knew where this woman was, and I felt a strong urge to help clarify the situation.




What struck me was the mundane nature of her conversation. I’m pretty sure it could have waited, at least for underwear. In the hierarchy of phone call importance, some admittedly rank above clothing, but not the majority. However, perhaps this poor woman does not have an internal gauge for nudity-appropriate conversations. If that’s true, she can use this helpful chart:

For any of you in the UK please substitute “trousers” where appropriate—or don’t, since that kind of pants are also pretty vital to success in the wider world.

Extra Credit: Variations on a theme, old, medium, and new.

Is There a Continuing Ed Class for That?

Somewhere in middle school I missed the class on how to dress in clothes that look good. This omission left me incapable of distinguishing between outfits appropriate for not getting teased in 7th grade and those appropriate for repainting a doublewide outside Wal-Mart in 1987.

Conveniently, I also missed the lessons on how to be self-conscious, thus preserving my love of brightly-colored stretch leggings and extra-large t-shirts from the science fair. That’s how I reached the decision to adjust for cold weather by wearing red stirrup pants with my new lavender dress.

This was the day my balloon of blissful ignorance began to leak and I begged my mom to buy me a pair of jeans. This was also the same classmate who, a few weeks later, took advantage of our napping substitute teacher to wrap masking tape around my eyes and drag me across the floor by my braided hair, so I got those lessons in self-consciousness after all.

Anyway, my continuing lack of fashion standards makes clothes shopping an ordeal that I only attempt when all of my existing garments develop enough holes to be used for draining pasta. Paralyzing anxiety about the term “business casual” couples with my ingrained unwillingness to spend more than $20 on anything short of a life-saving appendectomy.

On top of that, I primarily shop at discount superstores that require you to navigate around the 87% of the options that proclaim either “Hootchie Mama” or “Thanks for coming to my retirement party.”

I am also not big on shopping when it comes to gifts for non-relatives approximately my own age. I have no ability to determine maturity-level-appropriate presents. I also can’t use the “buy something you would like to receive” metric anymore because I would just get everyone Play-Doh, and anyone who has invited me to a previous birthday party already has some.

(Two-hour intermission while I browse the Play-Doh website. Did you know there’s one with confetti in it? You can also buy it by the pound, or teach children to inject it into dogs.)

Ultimately, the only shopping I really enjoy is at the grocery store. While I’m there I can imagine myself as the kind of person who prepares mouthwatering delicacies instead of just smearing things with peanut butter.

That’s how I end up with a pantry full of orphaned crab meat and saffron and a kitchen spattered in Cement of Béchamel Sauce.

The resulting failure-related reversion to a ramen-based diet is also why I keep having to go shopping for pants.

How I Did Not Save Christmas

I didn’t draw anything this past week because of Christmas. I did get to climb in a dumpster at work today, though. If this sounds like fun, you need a more stimulating job.

See, a couple of weeks ago I borrowed my roommate’s plastic Christmas platter to take a bunch of cookies to work. The cookies lasted about three hours, and the platter got repurposed for a swanky executive event in another part of the building. I figured it would turn up eventually. A single fried chicken thigh can spend six months in our office fridge unmolested, so nothing terrible could happen to a heavy plastic tray in the ten days before Christmas.

As it turns out, that is not the correct answer.

This morning at work I remembered that I should retrieve that platter before my roommate gets back from her Christmas vacation, so after a cursory but fruitless search, I sent out an inquiry to the staff.

Ten minutes later, a coworker came over to inquire how much the platter cost and where it was purchased.

Apparently, in a pre-holiday cleaning frenzy, the tray was mistaken for a disposable one and purged. And then the trash went out.

Luckily for me, the garbage truck doesn’t hit our neighborhood until Tuesday. All I had to do was fish around a little in the dumpster we share with a few nearby buildings. I was even a little bit excited, since my job does not include a lot of field trips.

The good news is that now I know what the neighbors got for Christmas. The whole top layer of the dumpster was Barbie playset boxes and sacks of wrapping paper, all of which I could reach from the outside. Last week’s office trash was farther down, though, so I glanced at my open-backed shoes and jumped in.

I knew that one of our neighboring businesses dealt with large, feces-rich birds (it seems they board parrots). I did not know that Monday is cage-cleaning day. The shoulder-high mound of discolored, dribbling newspapers convinced me to get out of the dumpster and call my roommate to confess.

She says the tray is not emotionally irreplaceable, so I will not be returning in the wee hours of the morning with hip waders. And my pants should be okay after a couple more washings.

Ultimately, I have emerged with further validation for my policy of never throwing anything away without watertight evidence that I will never need it again. Also, I’m pretty sure I don’t want a parrot.

And Now in Superfast Mode, Sans Pants

I took drama classes in high school. Every year we put on four shows, and one of them was usually a one-act festival in which we’d present eight to ten short plays, chosen or written by student directors, over three days.

With this many plays rehearsing and running at once, pretty much everyone who wanted to act got to be in a show. Male actors were in especially short supply, since a lot of high school boys feel that theater is incompatible with their developing machismo and three carefully cultivated beard hairs.


That is how Wesley* ended up in the tutu.

One of the student directors had picked a show called “15-Minute Hamlet,” which is exactly what it sounds like—Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece, edited to 15 minutes by Tom Stoppard. Since its source material was written in an era when all women on stage were played by men anyway, this show had two female parts and about ten male ones. On account of the beard scarcity problem, however, our director decided to switch the roles. Voila! The play was a perfect fit for high school, requiring only two guys (Ophelia and Queen Gertrude) and a whole bunch of girls (Hamlet, King Claudius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Fortinbras, etc.).

The director thought this gender arrangement might be confusing for the audience, though, so all the actors wore large, reflective versions of the “male” and “female” symbols around their necks on stage.

That is how I, Hamlet, ended up sitting in a park wrapping aluminum foil around a circle-and-arrow “male” icon two feet across.

After a couple weeks of rehearsals, the show was shaping up well. We definitely had the best props that would be appearing on stage that spring, including a fully operational SuperSoaker, a Styrofoam head, and a plastic sword that made battle noises. All the girls wore simple, all-black costumes to facilitate changing between characters, while Ophelia sported a floor-length purple gown and Gertrude complimented his goatee with a delicate pink leotard and tutu.

Finally our director, Brandon, brought the last portion of our costumes: brand-new sparkly boxer shorts. These were for the last two minutes of the play—a superfast remix of the whole story, presented with the actors’ pants around our ankles.

That is how my high school career ended up containing this moment:


Surprisingly, we did not suffer any wardrobe malfunctions during the performance—which is to say that all the clothes intended to come off came off, and mercifully the ones intended to stay on stayed on.

However, Brandon had purchased our decorative drawers with his own money, and he wanted them back after the show. We had all been strictly admonished to wear at least five pair of under-underwear with, preferably, a generous layer of Scotchgard, and to finish off a gallon of Tide on the garments before returning them.

Once the show finished, though, I didn’t really have a chance to see the director to give my costume back. We didn’t have any classes together, since I was a sophomore and he was a senior. We didn’t hang out, since I spent my discretionary time in the chemistry classroom playing with the model carbon atoms. We didn’t have any mutual friends, again because of the carbon atoms thing. My only choice was to return Brandon’s boxer shorts via the drama teacher.


An approximate script of this conversation:

Me: Hi Mrs. Schmidt. You know how I was in a show last week? With costumes? Well, Brandon was directing it, and he bought the costumes. And he wanted them back. So here’s my costume. It’s these boxers that were a costume for a play. Can you give these costume boxers back to Brandon? ‘Cause they’re his. No! Well, yes. But only because of the play, since they were a costume. In a play. Did I mention these boxers of Brandon’s that I have were a costume in a play, which is why I have his boxers, because of the play and the costume? Please?

Mrs. Schmidt: …

And that is how I ended up never looking my drama teacher in the eye again.

*Names have been changed in case anyone’s online banking security question was “What abbreviated play required you to take off your pants in high school?”