Formality Is a Little Less Formal These Days

Uh-oh... I can feel it coming on.

Far more telling than a few gray hairs, or a few burgeoning nostril-hairs, or a few more crow's feet, or that twinge in my back or that crick in my neck-- I can feel aging approaching in a far more palpable, far less tangible manner.

I'm pining for days of yore.

I'm becoming one of those fuckers who says, "Well, in the old days..."

Pray for me, kids: this is the beginning of the end. I can practically feel the prickly scrape of Grape Nuts against my deteriorating gullet.

I've been thinking, though, as I warm my pre-arthritic knuckles and my pre-diabetic feet in the flickering, halcyon glow of days of yore, that formality is becoming a little less formal these days.

And I'm not talking about firm handshakes or calling your boss "Sir" (or *gasp* "Ma'am") or about standing when a woman enters the room-- that shit is long dead and decaying. I'm talking about what passes as "formal" these days in the sense of tarting oneself up for a night on the town in the lap of luxury.

Tastes change, no doubt, and I realize and I accept that. But, what happens when changes in taste become a complete lack of understanding of taste? Even people who possess taste now are simply unable to locate goods and services that charm their discerning palates. Unsure of where I'm going with this?

Maybe some subcategories and pictures will help illustrate my point.

THE FORMAL AUTOMOBILE

When it's time to tool around 5th Avenue on an uber-special occasion, what kind of car do you think of? You think of a limousine, of course. Long, luxurious, and swathed from carpet to headliner in sumptuous burled wood and leather-wrapped yumminess.

Well, "in the old days" this is what a limousine looked like:

This, children, is a 1933 Rolls Royce Silver Phantom II. It's probably somewhat unlike the limousine in which you got drunkenly fingerbanged on the way to the beach after your prom. That choice vehicle probably looked something like this:

Familiar? That this lousy hunk of shit passes for a limousine is a shocking and depressing statement about modern culture, and I don't care if that makes me sound like a man named Morton who wears his pants with the elastic waistband hiked up over his nipples.

I just don't care.

If you're still not convinced that limousines aren't what they once were from these two startingly disparate exterior photographs, let's open up those rear doors and take a look inside, shall we?

Here's the interior of an antique Rolls limousine:

I mean-- for real? Those are seats a Queen would feel proud to fart on. And she probably has. And, do you see those beautifully hand-crafted wooden things on the backs of the front seats? Those are picnic tables, friends.

Now, my wife likes to complain about the fact that she's never been inside a "real limo." Well, honey, if you're talking about a modern limo, you ain't missing much:


I mean, seriously-- this looks like a nightclub. And not a nice nightclub either. One in which people get high on coke and then get anally violated in the bathroom by the bouncer. And forget about the Queen farting on these seats. No way. Crackhead hoochies sit on these things without underwear on, for Christ's sake.

THE FORMAL MALE

Once upon a time, men cared about what they looked like in public. Getting gussied up in formalwear was a way to show your impeccable taste, to show off your elegantly-engraved man-jewelry (an 18-K gold pocketwatch, handed down from your great-grandfather on down perhaps-- draped lovingly from your waistcoat pocket). If you can believe it, there was a time when men concerned themselves with looking presentable to go out to dinner or the theatre.

Don't believe me?

We heart Sir Arthur Sullivan here at My Masonic Apron. Even though he was a corpulent little cuss, Sir Arthur could get hisself tarted up with the best of the Victorians. Check out the gold-capped walking stick, leather gloves, and silk top-hat with grosgrain ribbon, clutched deftly in his big-boned left hand. Christ-- check out the fucking monocle! I mean, seriously-- that's a class act. The rest of the ensemble speaks for itself. Elegant, refined, dignified and expertly hand-tailored.

Doesn't look like anybody you ever went to the opera with, does it? When I think of modern formalwear, I definitely start to break out into hives, and my ass starts to sweat prodigiously. Wanna know why? Of course you do:

See what I mean? This is not formalwear. This... this is a fashion tragedy. Congrats on the wedding, though, fellas.


THE FORMAL FEMALE


You feminists can say whatever you want about male oppression and the inhumanity and physically grotesque torture inflicted on a woman's bone-structure, lungs and stomach by the corset, but I don't think women ever looked hotter or better than they did in the Victorian and pre-Victorian era. Trim waists, billowing puffery and neverending trains, breasts on display as if we were at the open-air market, graceful, swanlike necks protruding gallantly from mounds of lace and frill and mountains of curls bedecking freshly-puffed faces.

Yum.


Apron likey.

Well, these days are long gone. But we'll always have Merchant-Ivory films and "Amadeus." These days, women who want to look their best for a special occasion are, well, left to the devices of Jessica McClintock and, well, whoever the fuck designed this all this shit:

Wait a minute-- did I just write a fashion blog?

Jesus....

Well, at least there were cars, too.

Identity

My mother had her identity stolen a couple weeks ago. Why anyone would want to be my mother, I have no idea. I guess solely for the money and not for the amusement value of pretending to be married to my father-- which might seem fun at first, but I'm sure gets old pretty quickly. Just ask my mom.

A few weeks ago, she was at the bank depositing her paycheck, as old ladies do. The teller asked my mother if she had a debit card.

"No," my mother replied.

"Well, do you want one?" the teller inquired.

"No."

"Well, you should really get one-- debit cards are going to be the bank's primary source of identification in the very near future."

"But I don't want one."

"Well, I'm telling you, it's really best that you get one."

Feeling pressured, because she was, my mother hastily agreed and the bank said that they'd "send her something in the mail." What they ended up sending her wasn't "something," it was a debit card with a temporary PIN number, only, it never got to her house. Or, it did, and somebody got it before she did, and was happily racking up charges on it at stores around the area to the tune of several thousand dollars.

Of course, since all my mother buys is parrot food (they don't own a parrot) and the occasional sweater at Kohls, the bank immediately recognized something was amiss and notified my parents. An investigation was begun and the money was refunded to their account, but the damage to my mother's fragile psyche had been done. She was never one to stand up tall under pressure.

"When I was a girl and my parents would leave me at home to babysit my younger brother, I would just sit on the step and cry all night until they came home," she told me last night.

"Why? What the hell was wrong with you?" I asked, somewhat bewildered. Somewhat not.

"I don't know," she said. "I guess I just didn't like being home alone."

My mother is a true enigma. Married and pregnant at seventeen, she moved far away from home to start a life on her own. Unfortunately, it was with the wrong guy and, very soon after, she was right back at her parents home, to deal with her emotionally cold father and her dying mother. She held a job as a very young woman, stringing tennis rackets at the local pro shop, while my sister, then a baby, played happily under the store counter. They eventually got rid of her because having the baby around probably turned off some of the tennis jackasses who came in looking for more than some green, fuzzy balls. This was the 70's, after all. When I was eight years old, she went back to work at the local library. She cut off most of her hair at right around that time, too, and that was roughly the moment we could all pinpoint that "Mommy became a bitch." Really, she was just becoming independent again, but, to kids who wanted their mommy home all the time, independence and bitchiness are the same thing. To us, that yellowed piece of paper with elegant, cursive handwriting all over it might just as well have been called "The Declaration of Bitchiness."

But for all of her bit-- sorry, independence, my mother is still very much a backwards, time-trapped individual. For instance, she didn't learn to drive until she was in her late twenties. She didn't go to college. And, at 58, she doesn't have a debit card. Last night at our semi-traditional Sunday dinner, she asked me if I had one.

"Yes, since I was seventeen. You and Daddy insisted that I get one before going to college so I could buy beer and condoms."

"Can I see it?" she asked.

"Can you see what?"

"Your debit card. I've never seen one before, I want to see what one looks like."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious. I want to see it. Show it to me."

I dug into my wallet and I pulled out my much-exercised debit card. My mother thinned her lips as she peered at the front, and then the back. She turned it over a couple times, actually. Remember, in "Airplane!" where Ted and Elaine are missionaries visiting "the Molombos," a fictional African tribe? Well, remember the scene where Elaine tries to introduce the Molombos women to Tupperware, and they're all sitting around in the dirt cautiously examining the Tupperware containers? That's kind of how my mom was behaving while looking at my debit card. I don't know what she was looking for, or what she thought she might find on it. Some sort of hidden secret, maybe. Her link to the future. I didn't know.

"Looks an awful lot like a credit card, doesn't it?" I asked her.

"Mmm-hmm," she replied absently, squinting her eyes at my signature on the back before handing it over to me.

We didn't get touch-tone phones in my parents house until the mid-nineties. I can still remember those rotary relics-- a white wall-mounted phone in the kitchen with a cord that could stretch to Brazil, and a forest green wall phone in the basement-- a telephone that would have looked quite at home in Bea Arthur's hand on the set of "Maude." My mother still refuses to buy a microwave, because she's afraid-- of everything really, and mircowaves are included. You can't imagine what we went through to convince her to get a fucking DVD player. But it's just who she is.

I suppose, in a way, my mother not having a debit card is very much the same as me resisting getting cable television until three weeks ago-- it's part of our identity. And, for better or for worse, that identity never really gets stolen until we capitulate, until we call Comcast or Wachovia and give in.