You've seen it. I know I've seen it as well. The trend where people wear pajamas like regular clothes. I never really warmed to that bit some years back where people who were not medical professionals wore scrubs, and I've always been underwhelmed by the Pajama Game trend just because it's goofy.
Many years ago (before any of us were even born, come to think of it), as a rock and roller working in the vinyl jungle, I interviewed the Boomtown Rats who boasted not only the self-aggrandizing (and relentlessly brilliant) Bob Geldof (known now as Sir Bob by Her Majesty and Saint Bob by many of the yobes he used to hang out with) but a keyboardist named Johnny Fingers (some of his best known work is here) whose stage attire was pajamas. For reasons that may say more about all of us and the relations we had, or not, with a variety of controlled substances, no one seemed to notice or care.
Today, perhaps because all the world's a stage (whether we like it or not; sorry Will), pajamas show up everywhere. Additionally, but I suspect not so coincidentally, the number of celebartists (whose particular art is being famous for being famous) who wear their underclothes on the outside approaches legion. That injunction our Moms gave us all those years ago about wearing clean underwear is paying off big-time and I, for one, am very grateful since beauty is in the eye of beholder and there are certain things I don't really need to ever behold.
In the United Kingdom, yesterday, there was much ado about underthings--ironically, underthings that were under clothes. So unless you're Clark Kent, we all look pretty much the same, when viewed from space. A retail chain, Next, had a complaint about a cartoon print on men's underpants (no part of that sentence fragment makes any sense to me at all) by a customer and decided to literally, eat their own shorts and withdraw from sale all 5,200 pairs of underpants that may, or may not, have had a likeness of Hitler on them.
The chain is quoted in the story as having gone back to the designer who insists the image is actually that of V. I. Lenin. That explains everything, right? There are about forty questions left unanswered by the story, to include the 'why did you think putting a cartoon likeness of anyone on underpants was integral to the process in the first place?' but in addition to that tip about wearing clean ones, my mom once suggested to me 'don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer.' She was going to suggest 'don't sleep in the subway' but she had to go scrubs shopping with Lenin's Mom.
-bill kenny
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