A Wearable Autobiography

I  was cleaning out my clothes closet the other day, frankly, so that when I die, someone else won’t have to do it, and I counted 127 T-shirts, some going back to the 1950s. As I looked through them, I thought to myself, “Geez,” this is the story of my life; it’s all here: ships I was on, colleges I attended, places I’ve been, sights I’ve seen, causes I supported, concerts I attended, automobiles I coveted, friends who deserted me, women who dumped me – my whole existence reduced to three-color screen printing, recorded on cotton, guaranteed not to shrink.

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Here’s the big and small moments of my life as recorded by T-shirt, a “bildungsroman” novel (dealing with a person’s formative years) on cloth; a moveable montage of events in several sizes; a wearable history of a life ill-spent.

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Remember that old TV series, “The Naked City?” 

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Almost every literati knows it was a take-off on the works of Damon Runyan, the newspaperman and short-story writer who wrote about the world of Broadway in New York City during Prohibition. Each episode ended with the narrator speaking the iconic line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

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Well, there are 127 stories in my clothes closet, and here’s just a few.  My life in T-shirts. By anyone’s calculus, not much to show for three score and ten.

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For example, here’s my Jerry Lee Lewis concert T-shirt, but it makes me mad. I had anted up my last few discretionary dollars to attend his concert at the Jackson, Mississippi, coliseum, and he didn’t show up.

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No bus, No pumping piano. No great balls of fire. No Jerry Lee.