Ok, here’s what really happened to the bellows pocket cavalry twill masterpiece. Hopefully this will quell the curiosity and preclude additions to the three thousand emails I received asking about the singed sartorial masterpiece.
Nothing good happens after midnight. Butcept the night in question with the Tone. After constant consumption of see-throughs I develop unique capabilities. Four of the above and at the stroke of midnight my crooning capabilities trump Sinatra. And an additional bonus is that I suddenly posses cunning linguistic skills. On this night I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Shut up.
Had my emerging skills and charm remained limited to Sinatraesque Mandarin, the coat would be intact today. The usual drink thrown in my face wouldn’t have done anything but further patinated my twillessence. But then I glanced over at the jazz club stage and there she was. I kid you not, it was Josephine Baker.
Paris in the twenties be damned, Ms. Baker was in great form and her rhythmic Bakerosities manifested in me, my inner Dance Fever skills. Then the trouble soon began.
It was the Fire Dance sequence that really spoke to me. “I can do that” I said to myself in Mandarin. And then I said “Do what daddy?” and then I said it again in Southern English to which I responded“Well of course you can”.
I seem to remember that they offered me, upon witnessing my moves, a scanty outfit similar to Ms. Baker’s and the other performers but I was on a roll with the fire-sticks—literally. Someone said “don this” but I looked at it and it seemed too Don Ho and I felt that the Polynesian theme was already well represented. Plus, I’ve never thought my nipples look right. So in my best Mandarin I said “naaahhhh” and they said “what?” and then I said it again in Southern English and they said “ok den”.
Fire dancing wasn’t a problem—I was a natural. My martini breath was a problem but fire breathing seemed to go hand in hand with my act so I kept hacking and coughing pyrotechnically between back flips.
The mid-week crowd of seven roared with approval and gasped with the thrill that only a Mandarinsinatrafiredancefromsouthcarolina can evoke. The trouble began when the Southern Fratty Chinese Disco gator move flung itself upon me in an undeniable way. This is a jazz club and I figured that improvisational riffs, centric to an individual performers’ niche skills, gifts and motivations would be accepted and frankly...expected. I did overhear Tone say one time to someone at the bar… "I don’t know the impish little man. I’ve never seen the effer in my life".
I hit the floor, fire-sticks now flailing, no longer turning with ADG precision. Flames were askew and I was too. My Mandarin Sinatra turned immediately into high pitched Andy Kaufman Caspiarian yelps for help. The next thing I remember was the crowd yelling “stop, drop and roll” but I thought amidst odiferous singed-hair weft wafts that they were yelling “rock and roll” ...you know, kinda like how drunk Southern rednecks yell "Freebird" at outdoor rock concerts in the summer. So I retortilated in what by then was surely a mongrelized sinatramandarinkaufman pidgin… "rock and roll?This is a jazz club and rock and roll ain’t what we do here." And then half the crowd left. Yes, three point five patrons fled.
I woke up when the chilly Center City Philly air filled my lungs and I was levitating. Not really. Tone had me by the collar of my singed Flusser contrivance and he was cussing at me and saying something, in English, about how he’d never agree to meet up with a fellow blogger again. He then threw me in the trunk of his car and drove me over to my hotel.
So here’s to one of my most unique sartorial undertakings—now ready for the undertaker.
And here’s to my promise to never have more than three see-throughs in one evening.
And to resist the siren call of fire-dancing and Mandarin crooning. No matter how seductive the hallucinatory beckoning from the crowd may seem. Shut up.
It’s a flimsy but not totally inefficacious consolation that I still have my cavalry twill covertilated keepers-tweed Advent Calendar coat that I snagged at Bobby From Boston.
And no, I won’t be replacing the coat. The original run of cloth from which the suit was made has now been exhausted. The costs involved in remaking only the coat aren’t worth the risk of even the slightest fabric mismatch. Plus, I’ve got to save money for LFG’s surgery. Yes, my baby is gonna require corrective-interventional orthopedic surgery. It’s for the best and you’d do it for your child too. If we don’t do this for our little precious, the consequences both social and tactile will be tragic.
“Why?” you ask. See for yourself. LFG has…Man hands.
Onward. ADG…Fire Dancer Emeritus.
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