Dear George,
We had tickets for the opera
at Music Hall last Saturday night.
We were running late, and I asked Katja if she could pick out some
clothes for me. I always ask her that
because she has a much better sense of these things. This time she chose a pair of tan slacks, a dark blue
short-sleeved linen shirt, and a cream-colored sports jacket. It looked fine to me. I started putting the shirt on, but I
had a lot of trouble. The buttons and
the buttonholes were small, it took a lot of effort to get each button
fastened, and, besides that, the buttons were on the wrong side of the
shirt. All in all, it felt very
awkward. Suddenly it dawned on me
that this might not even be a man’s shirt. I asked Katja, but she said that was silly. She said she’d bought the shirt in the
men’s department, and it had been in my closet for a long time. I continued struggling with the
buttons. After several minutes I
finally finished the last button.
But then I discovered that it wasn’t even a short-sleeved shirt. The sleeves extended all the way down
to the middle of my forearms, ending halfway between the wrist and the elbow,
and each sleeve had a large slit in it.
“This isn’t a man’s shirt.”
I protested. “It’s a
woman’s blouse.” “No it’s
not,” Katja said, “this is the new style that men are wearing.” Just to prove it to me, she had
me bend over so she could check the label. Much to her surprise, the label was for a women’s clothing
manufacturer. Katja was
amazed. She wondered if Macy’s had
mistakenly stocked a woman’s blouse among its men’s shirts. By then we were ten minutes past our
planned departure time, and I was getting nervous about whether we would make
it to the opera at all. Since my
sport jacket would cover up the blouse’s sleeves, I decided to go with what I
was wearing rather than having to unbutton it and start all over.
We got to Music Hall in the
nick of time. The auditorium was
packed, and the temperature was on the warm side. By the middle of the first act I was feeling unpleasantly
hot, and I decided I’d have to take my jacket off. If my nearby seatmates thought that I looked strange in my
wife’s blouse, that’s just how it would be. At the intermission I put my sports jacket back on, and we
went out to the lobby for a glass of wine. I noticed a large poster that I hadn’t seen when we came
in. It announced that tonight was
gay pride night at the opera. That
was a funny coincidence. Actually,
if I had to wear some of Katja’s clothes to the opera, this was probably a good
night to do it. At least I was in
the midst of a crowd that would be receptive to gender diversity.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Jennifer M
(7-21): Great story. :-)
-Donna D (7-17): BRAVO, david. well done :) donna
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