I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille…or maybe for some extra starch…

   A pleasant day to one and all, and our most heartfelt apologies for being so tardy with our latest posting. The residents of Chez Cousins have played host to a touring artiste (Kurt Fitzpatrick, an award-winner at the just-completed Piggyback Fringe Festival) for the past week, so all of us have been well and truly occupied with revelry, merrymaking, and their inevitable effects on free time and sleep patterns. To ease our creative burden, another guest blogger has agreed to step into the breach—or breeches, as the case may be. What on earth does THAT mean? Read on…

Uncle Fun

P.S. Please excuse the intrusion of a trio of footnotes. They’re for the benefit of the 99.5% of the world’s population that doesn’t live in Canada, and won’t get the references.

   I may have done my last day of work on television. This is a cruel business. You get a little old, a little wrinkled, start to sag in places, and they start losing interest in you. Lose a button, and you’re through.

   You thought I was talking about actors, didn’t you? Don’t kid yourself. Except for the lucky few who have lines of dialogue, they’re interchangeable. The vast majority of faces that you see on screen aren’t faces, they’re indistinguishable blurs deep in the background, mere delivery systems for their wardrobe. We’re what’s important to the camera, not the people who wear us.

   Not that I should complain. I’ve gotten a lot more work than most shirts as old as I am, or as frayed around the cuffs and collar. I get brought along to film and TV shoots as a comfortable last resort, when other shirts don’t strike the proper balance between ‘casual’, ‘corporate’, and ‘corporate casual’ that the wardrobe department’s looking for. I’m a compromise candidate, the Michael Dukakis of shirts, and have enjoyed every bit as much success and lasting fame as that comparison implies. Even so, it’s good to still feel useful. Considering that I’m older than my owner, a hand-me-down from an older brother, I guess that means I have a sort of timeless quality that only improves with age, like a George C. Scott with seams. It sure beats being used to wax somebody’s car.

   Today’s shoot was for a CBC¹ series, which made the whole affair Old Home Week, in a sense. I first appeared on the CBC in Reach For The Top², never mind how many years ago. Not that you likely would have seen me. My owner was so short during his high school years that only his eyebrows appeared above the podium. It was like a cross between Jeopardy and “Kilroy Was Here”. With the passage of time, both shirt and owner have acquired a rumpled, lived-in look, which keeps us both in demand for work as what is known as ‘background’, in this city’s semi-regular schedule of low-and-medium-budget productions. It’s probably because both of us have the good fortune to be unobtrusively bland. This makes it easy to obey a director’s instructions to background extras, which can be summed up in the simple phrase “stand there, and don’t stand out”.

   Once again today, we both performed flawlessly just by being ourselves—neutral-coloured and without a recognizable pattern. There was a moment, though, which told me that the end may soon be near. Just before the cameras rolled, the wardrobe mistress made a final check and discovered that a couple of my buttons were undone. Not to worry: the product of hasty dressing in a washroom stall standing in for the dressing room that no-one has; easily remedied.

   Good thing no-one noticed the hole behind one of the buttons.

   Wear and tear has worn and torn a hole where the button has clung steadfastly, stubbornly, to the spot on the shirt where it was originally sewn, lo these many decades ago. You don’t get workmanship like that anymore. Like a centuries-old sequoia hit by a windstorm, the button has held fast, rooted in the only place it has ever called home, as an abyss forms around its refusal to give way to time and circumstance. The hole, witness to yet another respect in which shirt and owner resemble one another, was camouflaged by a tie, and can be mended, but probably signals the effective end of my show business career.

   Then again, maybe it doesn’t. If I know my owner, he’ll probably drag me to many a film shoot after this, unmended, in the hopes of subversively creating a compelling back-story for some nameless figure who appears, then disappears from view in half a blink. Some day in the near future, I may adorn the torso of Slouchy Loser in the Fourth Cubicle from Where the Dialogue Is Happening, Who Hasn’t Done His Laundry in Six Weeks, or Disillusioned, Unambitious Partner of the Lead Detective on the Elite Sleep-Deprived Slob Squad. It’s these little touches that make an actor’s craft a thing of wonder, and liven up many an otherwise routine cinematic effort.

   So maybe I do have a future after all, and can look forward to many more years of brief cameos, as my owner dodders from middle-aged obscurity into obscure senescence. Perhaps I’ll even manage to survive long enough to ease into the mature, weighty roles that culminate a long and distinguished career, such as Former Dress Shirt Worn by Old Man While Gardening, or Shirt Some Poor Stiff Gets Buried In. Until then, as long as I can avoid the rag-bag or a trip to Value Village³, I’ll be happy.

NOTES

1. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a publicly-funded radio and television service whose principal function is to remind Canadians when hockey season is.

2. A competition which pits teams of too-clever-by-half adolescents against one another to test their ability to recall reams of arcane and pointless trivia. Roughly equivalent to Top of the Form in the U.K., College Bowl in the U.S., or the General Assembly of the United Nations.

3. A chain of second-hand stores whose inventory consists of charitable donations from the general public. Just slightly more upscale than a Salvation Army Thrift Shop, and just slightly less upscale than a K-Mart.