This afternoon, Dan and I ventured into the horror that is J.C. Penney on a Sunday afternoon in search of dress pants, shirts and ties for him. My brother, Aaron, is getting married on November 20. As I have been telling Dan, it is our responsibility to try to look presentable given that photos are taken at weddings that will be hauled out and shown to posterity long after we are dead and gone. When those photos are brought out, we don't want our children's children to say "Why is that one couple wearing sweatpants?"
Since this will be an evening wedding held in First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi, I have been trying to ease Dan into the idea that he is, in all likelihood, going to be required to wear his suit. This he seemed to accept, but convincing him that the onoe dress shirt and one tie he owns might not be up to the weekend's repertoire of wedding and pre-wedding events we will be attending was another matter. Men, I have learned, basically don't understand why they can't just wear the same clothes to everything. Pants? Check! Shirt? Check! Shoes? Check! Everything else is secondary.
So today, when we went to J.C. Penney (Am I the only person who cringes at the mere mention of J.C. Penney?) it was not without some tension. The first task was finding pants, and this brought our first interpersonal derailment of the afternoon. It turns out that Dan, as a man of a manly sort, does not understand that just because a pair of pants is black, it doesn't mean they are dress pants. Khaki can be dyed black. It doesn't make it dressy. So it was like he was playing a game where he didn't know the rules. He would hold up a pair of pants and say "How about these?" and I would sort of look at him like you would look at a person who was proposing that he wear black jeans to a formal rehearsal dinner, and he would get all discouraged. It was sad, but he got better at it as we went along.
The shirt thing was going slightly better until I realized that Dan has never found out what his official shirt size is. I will cut him some slack on this, because the menswear system of clothes sizing is WAY more complicated than it is for women. There are like three numbers involved in buying a real shirt for guys. Women pretty much only need to know a couple of numbers for their entire wardrobe. So we got Dan measured and found out that at a shirt size of 18 inches in the neck and 36 in the arm, Dan fits into a category known as "Virtually Non-Existent in Normal Men's Clothing Stores" and "Too Small to Qualify for the Big and Tall Department."
After much digging through the endless pile of shirts, came up with three nice dress shirts, a gray, a dark blue, and a red, and three ties, plus one pair of pants, for a price that we could live with. We came home and Dan tried on his new duds with his charcoal gray suit to make sure they matched like we thought they would. And here comes the point of this post.
Have I ever mentioned how great-looking my husband is in a suit? Probably not, because he never WEARS ONE. But let me tell you, he is a handsome man. I am almost afraid to take him to this wedding .. someone will steal him from me! I didn't think to take pictures because I was so busy looking, but I'll take some at the wedding. Wow. Men should wear suits more often.