Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [48]
I’m relatively unaware of how I look in clothes. I usually look once in the mirror when I dress in the morning but that only shows me myself from the chest up.
I don’t know where I go wrong. I buy pretty good clothes but one of us is usually the wrong shape.
Maintaining clothes in good condition is as hard as keeping a house painted and in working order. For example, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get a spot on a necktie or the lapel of a coat once in a while. I keep all kinds of spot remover at home and in the office and I’ve never had any success with any of them. That spray can, with the powder in it, just plain doesn’t work for me. I’ve used it a dozen times on grease spots and the same thing always happens. The grease spot is gone and I’m left with a big, plainly visible splotch of white chalk imbedded in the fabric. Nothing takes that out, ever.
Most brands of spot cleaner use carbon tetrachloride. I’ve tried to remove a thousand spots from a thousand neckties with carbon tet. All I get is a ring bigger and more obvious than the original spot.
I’ve seen women remove spots successfully. They say you just have to keep rubbing in circles. I’ve rubbed spots in circles with carbon tet until I was blue in the face from the fumes and I still get nothing but a big ring and a smelly tie.
In the morning I often take a pair of pants, a shirt or a coat into the back room where we have an iron set up. My intentions are good. I don’t want to burden my wife with my problems and I want to look neat. I don’t want to embarrass my friends or my family.
I have yet to iron a pair of pants that end up with fewer than two creases down the front of each leg. I’d like to have one of those machines the dry cleaners have. They just lay a pair of pants on there any which way, they pull down that handle, there’s a big whoosh of steam and presto! the pants are perfect.
Shirts? Who can iron a shirt? I’ve never ironed a shirt yet that didn’t look worse when I finished with it than it did when I started.
Neckties are smaller but they’re at least as hard to iron as a shirt. You’d think they’d be easy but if you press down on a tie, you get the imprint of the lumpy lining on the front of the tie. As a result, many of my ties look like my pants.
During the summer I often carry a tie in my pocket instead of wearing it. Many of them never recover during the winter.
It’s a good thing socks don’t show much because if my kids think my pants and jackets look bad, they should see my socks. I’ve given up trying to put them on right side out because at least half the time I don’t even have a pair. I just look for two socks in the drawer that are somewhere near the same color. I haven’t had pairs of socks in years.
The funny thing is that I have a clear idea in my mind what someone well dressed looks like. I know what I want to look like and sometimes I realize I’m unconsciously thinking that’s what I do look like. Obviously I’m dreaming.
I had several friends in school who were always well dressed, and I can go around for days thinking I look more or less the way they looked. Marshall always looked just right. Then someone will casually tell me I look like an unmade bed and I’m brought back down to earth.
The only thing for me to do is take the position that clothes don’t make the man.
A World-Class Saver
There is a pair of crutches leaning against the wall opposite the oil burner in our basement. I’m not sure who ever used them. They’ve been there as long as I can remember. I suppose one of the kids broke something once or maybe we bought them for my mother the year she broke her hip.
No one ever used the crutches much, I know that. I was looking at the rubber tips last weekend and they’re almost new. I suppose I’ve kept them because, in the