December 14, 2011
Check this out.
There’s more to the article but you get the point. Of all the places to be told you can’t wear a pot shirt, at a Willie Nelson concert? That’s like being told you can’t wear a Derek Jeter jersey at Yankee Stadium.
But I can relate to an inappropriate t-shirt.
About a decade ago my brother and I took a trip to England. We were there for about two weeks and, it being the middle of the summer, our wardrobe was on the casual side, meaning a lot of t-shirts. I recently had a chance to look back at out trip photos and, ten years later, nothing we wore back then looks silly or out of date. For the most part, knowing we were taking a ton of pictures since odds were we’d never be back, we were dressed quite neatly and nicely. And even our printed tee shirts had nothing out of line on them. Sure, I am standing next to the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum wearing a Thunder Cats t-shirt, but it is a cool Thunder Cats t-shirt. However, when I get to the pictures we took at Greenwich Observatory it really is glaring that my brother has his arms crossed in each and every photo. He is hiding something. Something across his chest.
It is because he is wearing The Scandal Shirt.
T-shirts in Europe, as I soon found out, are taken a bit more seriously than they are here. T-shirts are scrutinized, they are read, they are taken as a serious reflection of the wearer’s beliefs or interests. For example, if the pot smoker in the article above were to have worn that shirt in England, that person would be assumed to be bragging about and endorsing the pot-smoking lifestyle and not just some silly boob in a pot shirt. Now it may very well be that the person in the article really is endorsing and bragging about it, but here in America, who cares? It is just another silly shirt in a nation of silly shirts.
We are, after all, the nation that invented the Hawaiian shirt.
But as I said, they take t-shirts seriously over seas. (You would not believe how many hot blonde women wore shirts that said Bond Girl.)
Back then my brother and I were huge wrestling fans and we were both total marks for Mick Foley. The guy was fearless. He was a nut. He lost an ear in a match, had been tossed off a steel cage and through a table, did more stupid stuff with barbed wire than you can imagine, and he wore a sock on his hand. Yeah, he was a character. But he was a brave character and one of his catchphrases was that he had a ton of “testicular fortitude.” The catch phrase was so popular that the WWF put it on a t-shirt.
And that is the shirt my brother chose to wear one fateful day in England, a black t-shirt with the phrase “Testicular Fortitude” scrawled across the front. Start to see the issue?
At this point, I would like you to read a short passage from Mick Foley’s book, Foley is Good:
Mick Foley is a man who got hit over the head with steel chairs for a living and even he felt silly wearing that shirt.
So one particular day we set off from our hotel to walk to the Thames, where we were catching a short boat ride up river to the famous Greenwich Observatory. Among other things, it is the home of the International Date Line and you can stand astride it with one foot in Thursday and one foot in Friday- assuming you are there at the end of the week.
On our way to the boat we noticed that my brother’s t-shirt was getting a bit of attention. People seemed to be reading it, and they seemed to be interested in him. He got a few long stares. Some people pointed him out to their friends. At first neither of us had a clue. We didn’t put two and two together, at least not yet.
Our walk to the boat took us past the aquarium. Out in front was a man dressed as a Beefeater, one of those historic reenactors in a suit that must have had some British relevance but we, being American (and products of the NYC school system) were totally unaware of. He saw us and like the rest of London thus far, took careful note of my brother’s shirt.
And then the Beefeater called out to him “you’ve got big balls, eh?”
This was a guy wearing red tights, a velvet dress and frills, and he had something to say about how my brother was dressed? Seriously, the guy wearing his great-grandmother’s dressing gown had a comment? Now we knew we had a problem.
We kept walking.
We got on the boat and by now my brother was feeling embarrassed. He’d worn that shirt in the States and gotten nothing but the occasional grin from another Foley fan, but in England he was causing a scandal. I’m not certain but I bet that, somewhere in the back of his head, he was wondering where the American embassy was, just in case.
The boat arrived at Greenwich and we had to walk up a large hill to get to the observatory. I was lagging a bit behind my brother so I had a great view. As he walked up the hill, I saw the people coming down read his shirt, stare at him, and, when they passed him, turn and point him out to others. I saw girls giggling and women frowning. I saw men shake their heads in disgust. I heard a lot of comments. It seemed that every single person passing him just had to note that shirt.
I caught up to him at the top of the hill and he shot me a look that was one part “what is wrong with these people?” one part “just shoot me,” and one part “I want to burn this shirt.” He spent the better part of the day walking around with his arms folded across his chest, at least until he went to the gift shop and bought a new t-shirt.
From then on we were a bit more careful about what shirt we wore.
I can only imagine what would have happened had he worn a pot shirt there.
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