Heaneyland!

The Tie Project, days 174 to 179

Ties marches on.

Day 174. I've had this tie since college. I bought it around the time I was acting in a production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart at the Santa Fe Community Theatre. I worked part-time in a tiny little mall in the Plaza (which is simultaneously Santa Fe's downtown and its main tourist area) selling Oaxacan animal figurines at a little cart.

Because of my role in the play (a queeny young man from the south), I had an incredibly gay haircut. Short, very 80s, ducktail in the back, swoopy to one side in a way that was good for dramatic head tosses...I'm sorry I don't have a picture to do the explaining for me. I will sidetrack to point out that I also had to pretend to smoke a cigarette in this play, which anyone who knows me and is aware of my extreme antipathy toward cigarettes will find a pretty risible concept. But I did my best; I swished and I puffed (and nearly choked onstage the time I accidentally inhaled) and was pretty pleased with my performance. And the gay men in the show (of which there were quite a few) would get together with their gay friends who had come to see the show and play the game of having them try to guess which of the other actors in the show were gay. And it never failed: everybody thought I was gay.

But absolutely nobody thought I was a smoker.

Anyway, so I was working at this cart in the mall, and the cart that I was next to was run by two lesbians who I was slightly crushed out on and who I made friends with. Well, work friends, anyway; we didn't stay in touch or anything. And our friendship may have been aided by the haircut, because there's certainly a chance they thought I was gay. Anyway, they sold, among other things, aprons (featuring two cowgirls or two cowboys) and ties made with marbled fabric. I loved the ties, but they were (I think) $35, which was pricy compared to what I usually spent on clothes, especially for the amount of money I used to live on in my college days. But I did buy one, and this was it:

Day 175. At this point in the Tie Project, I spend a fair amount of time looking in my closet and trying to figure out what I haven't worn yet. And I had been skipping over this shirt for a while, completely convinced that I had photographed it already. But I couldn't quite remember. So I went through all my photos, and it turned out I had not, in fact, worn it yet. So I wore it with this tie...and then I uploaded the photos from my camera to the computer, and it turned out I had, in fact, worn it three weeks or so previously (with the same tie), but the photo of it wasn't on the computer yet. D'oh. And here is that earlier photo.

Day 176. Not sure where this tie is from. Garment district? Gift from Rose? Can't recall. Tricky to match, though. I decided the green and yellow, combined with the similarity between the green shapes on the tie and and the flower shapes on the shirt, were enough to call this an outfit.

Day 177. This shirt is vexing to photograph. The pattern is just a leeeetle too wide to get in the frame comfortably. I sort of managed on day 87, but there was a lot of bunching from stretching my arms out so far. Ah well.

Day 178. This is the other shirt I got from the street vendor mentioned in day 163. Worn with a shiny tie to go with the silky, drapy fabric; the periodic gray squiggles echo the green and black ornamentation on the pink rectangles. [Lapses into art curator-speak] The gray rectangles' interaction with the silver tie comments humorously on American post-Industrial Revolution life, and we see the drive toward Manifest Destiny evident in the waterfall-like aspect of the tie, with the froth it kicks up representative of... [Comes to, shakes head disorientedly] I'm sorry. Let's move on.

Day 179. I'm not sure I've ever actually worn this shirt (even though I've owned it for a while), because there's a little hole in the shoulder, so I put it in a pile of "things needing repair". But I never got around to buying a patch for it, and frankly the hole isn't all that big, so given my need for more, more, ever more shirts, I pulled it out. And I found the perfect tie for it almost immediately. Maybe now that I've been reminded the shirt exists, I'll actually patch the hole.

Next time: socks.

Posted by Francis at 02:54 AM in Ties