The title of this blog post is only cute if you are familiar with a children’s book by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) titled The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. I always thought it was some ancient folk tale that he put into words and illustrated- but in fact, the story is entirely Geisel’s own and was apparently inspired by a moment while he was taking public transportation and saw a rather dour-looking man sitting in front of him with some sort of hat on his head. Geisel, always an off-beat thinker, began wondering what would happen if he just reached out and knocked this hat off of the man’s head- and almost immediately he conceived this fanciful tale that has enchanted readers the world over.
The story is about a young man, Bartholomew Cubbins (who, come to think of it, looks more like a boy than a man in Geisel’s illustrations) who needs to remove his hat in the presence of the king …. but for some mysterious reason, a new hat takes the place of the one he removed- and this happens again and again and again. The young man is arrested for his insolent behavior and faces execution if he can’t bare his head once and for all. He continues to frantically remove hat after hat after hat from his head even as he is being led to the guillotine. And as if all that wasn’t weird enough, each of the last 50 hats are more and more elaborate – and the 500th hat is the most spectacular hat ever seen! Completely enraptured by it, the King demands it for himself- and when he removes it from Bartholomew’s head, a new hat does not appear. The strange ordeal is over at last! This was one of the very few works by Geisel that was written as prose rather than poetry – and it remains one of my very favorites.
I thought of this odd and enchanting story not long ago when I posted on Facebook a photo of me wearing my 500th tie. It’s the most recent in a long series of photos of selfies in which I’m wearing “Today’s Tie” – a series that stretches all of the way back to April 9, 2015 – when I posted a photo of myself wearing this odd tie commemorating my favorite Wallace & Grommit film, The Wrong Trousers.
Just what possessed me to post such a photo is beyond me, but the next day I did the same thing – and the day after that – and more than three years later, I am still posting photos of “Today’s Tie.” I don’t do it every single day; I only post a photo when I am wearing a tie that I have never worn before (or more accurately have never posted a photo of before.) No reruns allowed. And if one goes to my Photo Page and clicks on Albums, you will very quickly come upon the Today’s Tie gallery in which all of these photos are gathered in one place. One gets a very clear sense of the extent of my obsession when you see all of these photos in one overwhelming conglomeration, looking a little bit like something out of a strange yearbook from a school with only one student …. one very weird, tie-obsessed student.
So when and why did my fascination/fixation with neckties begin for me? Certainly not back in my childhood- although there was a period of time when I was really taken with the neck scarves for guys that were fashionable for about fifteen minutes. I owned several of them, and when I wanted to look my sharpest, this was what I turned to. But unlike a lot of young guys who would wear these with the knot off to the side (sort of like a cowboy might wear) I liked to wear them hanging straight down the front, as though it were taking the place of a normal necktie- and I wore them threaded through a ring rather than tying them in a knot.
I certainly wore regular ties from time to time- and somewhere there is a photo of me looking awkwardly nerdy on the occasion of Marshall’s confirmation (by that point we had moved from Decorah to Atlantic, but I came back for his confirmation) in which I am wearing navy slacks, a navy shirt, a navy sleeveless sweater, and a bright multi-colored bow tie … and the outfit is topped out with white dress shoes. Even then, my fashion sense could be pretty sketchy, to put it mildly. Speaking of sketchy fashion sense, people who were at Luther with me might remember a pair of crazy-looking red, white & blue plaid overalls that I loved to wear. They actually belonged to my dad, and they were given to him as a gift by Fletcher and Avonelle Nichols, who were dairy farmers right outside of Atlantic and pillars of the church and community in every way- who each owned a pair for themselves! (One memory that is forever burned in my brain is of a church roller skating outing in Atlantic and watching my dad and Mrs. Nichols smoothly roller-skating around the rink wearing those wild matching overalls. Clearly, fun-loving craziness is not limited to wild-living beatniks in the big cities; even Lutheran pastors and dairy farmer wives in the midwest are known to shake things up with bold fashion choices.)
The period in which I began to go crazy with neckties is P.K.- Pre-Kathy- when I first moved to Kenosha in 1986 to begin work at WGTD. At that time, there was a big outlet mall at the corner of I-94 and highway 50, and I quickly fell in love with a small store there that was devoted to the ties of Ralph Marlin, a designer who almost single-handedly created the Novelty Tie industry. At the time I was a young adult with almost no responsibilities beyond the necessities of life, so I usually had extra money burning a hole in my pocket- and I blew most of it on neckties. I remember the bewilderment of my WGTD coworker Bill Guy whenever I would walk into the radio station wearing yet another tie emblazoned with super heroes or Bugs Bunny or rubber ducks or some other odd design. (Bill was no fan of ties to begin with- he only wore one when he had a special guest coming to the station- and it was always the same very conservative tie that he kept at the station in his top desk drawer. When Bill died in 1998, his widow Lynda gave me that tie as a remembrance of my friend and colleague- and I cherish it to this very day.)
I think these offbeat ties were (and remain to this very day) a safe way for me to convey to the world that I’m more of a fun-loving free spirit than in fact I am. Think about it- there is probably no single item of clothing that suggests formality like a necktie – and even when you’re wearing the craziest-looking necktie, it’s still a necktie. So it allows me to keep one foot anchored in normalcy while planting the other foot in the world of wild and crazy.
Of course, when you take tie-collecting to this extreme, there’s not too much that’s normal about it. Case in point: every May 4th, I have not one- not two- not three- but four Star Wars ties to choose from to celebrate “May the Fourth” (“may the force”) Day.
And when we attended a Dr. Seuss-themed baby shower for our friends Mike and Rebecca Kishline, I had multiple Dr. Seuss ties to wear for the occasion, including this one that perfectly matched their One Fish Two Fish cake.
The photo at the top of this blog shows the 30+ Disney ties that I own. But I think the clearest indication that this fixation/obsession has gotten a bit out of hand was when I decided to lay out all of my Christmas/winter-themed ties. I was shocked to discover that I own 53 of them (and actually 54 if you count the black 12 Days of Christmas tie that seems to have gone missing- temporarily, I hope.) So even if I wore two different ties every day between December 1st and December 25th I still couldn’t wear them all.
I was especially chagrined when I discovered that I owned three different ties depicting a reindeer with antlers festooned with Christmas lights. For most normal people, one would be more than enough. Three? That sounds like some kind of disorder requiring psychological intervention.
Some of the ties I own were gifts- including one that was given to me by a voice student of mine, Neil Scharnick, who is now a faculty colleague of mine. At some point during his senior year, Neil walked into a voice lesson or a chamber singers rehearsal one day sporting a Shakespeare tie that I absolutely loved … and told him so. Just before graduation, Neil surprised me by presenting me with that very same tie as a thank you gift – and all these years later (at least 15 years after the fact) I still think of that lovely gesture every time I take out that tie and wear it on Shakespeare’s birthday.
In a couple of cases, someone has actually had a necktie made for me, and it’s just about the sweetest thing that someone can do for me. I was touched when a private voice student of mine, Noah Chartrand, presented me with such a tie – emblazoned with a photo of the two of us.
In another instance, I was given a tie as a lovely gift from the members of the Tremper High School Chorale, for whom I have served as pianist for quite a few years now. (My sister-in-law, Polly Amborn, is their director.) I made a point of wearing it when I accompanied the group for their performance at that year’s graduation exercises.
There was also the instance in 2016 when the Carthage library celebrated my 30th anniversary with WGTD (and all of the author interviews I have done over the years) by organizing a reception that culminated in the presentation of a very special gift- a tie honoring my work both at WGTD and at Carthage. I was tremendously touched by the gesture. (Thank you, Todd Kelley and Carol Sabbar.)
And in an extraordinary series of kind gestures, the brilliantly-talented Bob Benson, one of the mainstays of the Racine Theater Guild in recent years, has hand-crafted a number of ties to thank me for my work on various musical productions there in which Bob was part of the cast.
And in a gesture that touched me more than I can say, Bob fashioned for me a special tie with the rings of the Olympics to celebrate the first performance of my opera Black September.
I’ve done a bit of tie-crafting myself, although nothing nearly as spectacular as these hand-crafted creations from Bob. I have used a company called Zazzle in which one can personalize all kinds of different items: caps, cups, computer cases, and just about anything else you could think of. I’ve made a few ties through Zazzle, including one with photos of various voice students over the years and another to honor my nieces and nephews. Here are the ties I made in honor of three of our dogs: (left to right: Bobbi, Ellie and Mabel.)
My first such effort was actually something a bit more abstract- utilizing a colorful photo taken in a quilt shop up on Washington Island. (In case you hadn’t noticed, I have a thing for bright colors.)
Speaking of bright colors, a tie I bought from Zazzle (someone else’s design) actually elicited a very enthusiastic compliment from the wonderful comedienne Paula Poundstone when Kathy and I met her after her performance in Milwaukee last spring. Because she always wears a necktie for her standup performances, this was an especially sweet compliment. (And by the way, I happen to own the red 101 dalmatians tie that she was wearing that night.)
So what did I wear for tie #500? It was actually a tie I whipped up with Zazzle … utilizing several photos of some of my ties that are now housed in drawers. It seemed like a fun and colorful way to tip my hat to this crazy fixation of mine.
Am I still buying ties? Yes, but …. I almost never buy ties in the stores anymore, in part because the vast majority of ties I see for sale are bland and boring (at least by my slightly unhinged standards) … and because it’s impossible for me to justify paying full price for a new tie when I have literally more than 500 of them at home. Occasionally, one will catch my eye – especially if there is a spectacular splash of color – but the vast majority of the time I am able to walk on by… although this tie at Kohl’s Department Store calls to me every time I see it.
And then there’s the case of the hand-stitched ties imported from Norway that I saw in a store in Decorah not long ago. The clerk described how the gradation of shade (for instance between the lighter and darker shades of rose) is achieved not by dyeing but rather by the twisting of individual strands of thread into varying degrees of thickness. It’s incredibly exacting and time-consuming work, which helps explain why each of these ties costs $399. Even if I won the lottery tomorrow, I’m not sure I could bring myself to spend that kind of money on one tie- especially given my propensity for spillage. (I think the only way I would feel safe walking around with a tie this valuable around my neck is if I was wearing a protective suit of armor.)
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So almost without exception, the “new” ties that come into my possession are not new at all- but rather ties I find at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other such shops. And in an effort to keep myself from becoming hopelessly inundated, for every tie I now acquire a tie is given away. (Although to be perfectly honest, I’m about 20 ties behind.) And during our most recent Secret Santa exchange amongst the voice teachers at Carthage, my Secret Santa – Jeremy Mossman – gave me four or five ties. He and I actually engaged in some necktie fun this past fall when he proposed that we do a 5-day exchange … where he would wear 5 of my ties while I wore 5 of his. So the fun continues. There is a small sliver of me that fears that this represents an orgy of excess somewhat akin to the hundreds of designer shoes owned by the infamous Imelda Marcos. But I hope it’s less about that and more like someone who collects stamps or baseball cards or beanie babies … for no particular reason or purpose, but just to add some harmless fun to life. And I appreciate not only Kathy’s willingness to tolerate this crazy quirk of mine, but also her ability to actually enjoy it – as though I’m her own Bartholomew Cubbins, removing one necktie only to see a new necktie magically appear in its place. Will wonders never cease?
