One suit to rule them all

Nine days from today, I’ll have played the fathers of recalcitrant teenagers in two films, continuing a recent trend … plus Brabantio in Othello, Polonius in Hamlet, Doc Gibbs in Our Town, Bellomy in The Fantasticks. I sometimes wonder how believable an actor can be in such roles when he has neither offspring nor parental inclinations, but it’s called “acting” for a reason, I suppose.

Shooting on the first film, a Fine Arts Center student production, wrapped last night. It was a one-day shoot (two hours, actually) and a chance to ever so gently break in some of the very nice, very expensive clothes that Rush Wilson Limited contributed to Chris White’s film, which shoots next week.

It’s been ten years or more since I last worked in front of a camera, and considerably longer than that since I last owned a suit. Kinda crazy to think that I’m doing both things again, and doing one of them twice, within the span of just two weeks.
Sadly, the blue suit (with white pocket handkerchief), khaki slacks, black dress shoes, three white cotton dress shirts, purple plaid merino wool pullover sweater, Republican red club tie and black leather belt – total retail value: $1,500 – will spend most of the rest of my time on Earth in closet storage. I almost never go anywhere or do anything that requires dressing up.

But Rush says that the clothes he sells are timeless, so I needn’t worry that they’ll ever go out of style.

I’m imagining the memorial retrospective of the final 20 or 30 years of my life. Photos of me making rare public appearances … at 51, 61, 71 … “My God!” someone will say, “He always wore the same set of clothes! And they never aged at all!”