Thrift Stories

Kelly inspires me, as some wives sometimes do, to give more thought to my attire. I will never dress as funky as she does, but lately I’m stylin’ at work and around the house, a cross between Don Knotts, Charlie Harper and Tiny Tim.

The reason? The abundance of thrift stores in our town.

In one recent weekend, I found three new dress shirts, with tags still on, $1.49 each, a nice belt for $1, so I can wear my brown shoes again, six great ties (great if you like paisley), 79 cents each, a sweater vest for $2, and three, count em’, three very nice wool sports jackets for $3 each. A whole bunch of new clothes for less than $25. Sweet!

We were thrifting with a long list of items for actors, because as costumer for the local community college theater, Kelly needed Laugh-In clothes for Moliere’s Tartuffe, a 1660s play with a 1960s look. So we needed those kinds of pants and those kinds of skirts, a Dick Van Dyke gray suit, a cardigan or two and some skinny ties.

But that’s only one story. The real stories are these clothes.

Everything we bought that weekend has a story. That brown belt? Who made those scratches on the side? Did some man I will never meet have it on when he proposed to his wife? Was he wearing it when he got fired? Has it been to Hawaii? Was it in the flea market because he died?

Did the person who bought that black and gray cardigan 40 some years ago ever imagine that one day a lead actor in a play originally written for Marie Antoinette would prance around on stage with it on? What has that mini skirt been doing since the Summer Of Love? What adventures did the owner have wearing that leisure suit, what triumphs and tragedies?

Did the people who bought and wore these clothes ever conceive that one day we would mention it on a blog about American life in 2012?

So many stories, so many stories. That must be why so many people blog, and why we read so many blogs. We love telling and being part of the stories.

Do you ever wonder what stories your clothes will leave behind?