Looking Your Best When Attending a Wedding

IMPORTANT NOTE: You will be driving halfway across the country to attend the wedding, staying at a quaint hotel the night before. It is imperative that, while packing, when your lovely wife asks if you’ve remembered your dress shoes and shirt, that you reply with a confident, bordering on dismissive, “Of course I have!”

Let’s assume that you need to leave your hotel for the wedding venue at 12:00 noon. Let’s also assume you will wake up that morning at 5:00am (of course). At this point, initiate your Four Step Morning Routine:

1. Wait impatiently until it is 7:00am, which is when the hotel restaurant opens. 
2. Proceed to eat an excessive amount of “complimentary breakfast” food. This allows you to become very sleepy at about 11:00am. 
3. Because of your sleepy condition, inform the love of your life that you are just gonna shut your eyes for a few minutes. 
4. Set an alarm on your phone for 11:45am. You are a grown man and have acquired enough life experience to know that you only need ten minutes to get ready, tops.

If you have strictly followed these guidelines so far, at 11:15 your head will pop off your pillow with this fully-formed thought in your head: HOLY SHIT I FORGOT TO BRING A DRESS SHIRT. 

Repeat that sentence out loud with a strained panicked urgency to your beloved companion. (She had the foresight to start getting ready more than an hour ago.) 

VITALLY IMPORTANT NOTE: If you interpret the expression on the face of your love-of-a-lifetime as: “You told me you packed your dress shirt,” do not, I repeat, DO NOT say, “Don’t make that face at me! Can’t you see that all I packed is a bunch of old t-shirts‽”

A better phrase to use is: “I’m a doofus.”

Please remain calm. This is where my set of guidelines for looking your best at a wedding starts to pay off, big time. Get your phone and type “Dress shirts near me” into Google Maps. Since this is America, there is a Kohl’s nearby. Oh, look! There’s one that’s only nine minutes away at the Bay Park Mall in Green Bay. (Your location may differ. I am, for some reason, in Wisconsin.) Grab your keys and wordlessly run out of your hotel room and to the car at top speed. 

ALERT: As you enter your car, crank the air conditioner HARD. You’ve probably already begun to sweat, since it is July and the temperature is 97 degrees.

Your drive to Kohl’s will be a frantic blur, on unfamiliar roads filled with traffic circles. You’ve never been all that great at navigating traffic circles, so you may take several extra revolutions around one or two of them. Your journey to the mall will end at the side entrance of the Bay Park Kohl’s. As you walk in, you will be greeted by a perky voice with a midwestern lilt saying, “Welcome to Kohl’s!” 

It is strongly advised that you shout out “MENSWEAR!” with the fervor of a father who’s lost his child. Your impassioned plea will get you directed to the portion of the store farthest away from where you are currently standing. It is now that you will notice that this Kohl’s is at least five times larger than the one in your home town. 

Walking swiftly is out of the question. Move that old body of yours (I’m just assuming) into a solid, old-man trot. As you reach the Menswear department, you are not looking at pricetags. (You’ll be paying TOP DOLLAR today, my friend.) Your mind should be a steel trap, repeating three simple words over and over again: White. Dress. Shirt.

Do not let the thought, “Where’s a goddamned salesperson when you need them?” distract you from your mission. Your bespectacled eyes will soon find a stack of white dress shirts, and you’ll pounce on them like a lion ripping apart a wildebeest on the Serengeti. 

This is when you will realize you don’t remember what size dress shirt you wear. You may be tempted to call your sweetheart back at the hotel. Do not. Man up. It is better to guess than to ask for help. Besides, you have these guidelines to lead you.

Grab a shirt and look feverishly for a dressing room. You will see nothing. You may begin to sweat again. But then … Ooh, look … A woman with a Kohl’s badge. You catch her eye and shout out “DRESSING ROOM!” remembering to push from the diaphram to maximize the volume of your voice. 

She will direct you to a dressing room that appears to be in the next county. DON’T PANIC. Initiate your old-man trot and wipe the sweat from your brow as you enter the dressing room after your long hike. As you remove at least forty pins from the shirt packaging, it is not advised to think about the shirt not fitting. This is not an option. If the shirt doesn’t fit you are going to be late. Also they’re going to have to wash this thing because you are sweating all over it. 

Be careful handling the shirt, since you’ve drawn blood by puncturing your thumb with a pin. It is bad form to go to a wedding with a bloody white shirt.

It is with great pleasure that I now inform you that your shirt will fit. (You may think this is the first thing in this set of guidelines that’s gone right, but now’s not the time to get bogged down in semantics.)

At this time you should be frenetically running around the giant-sized Kohl’s, looking for cash registers, thinking “F*** me! We’re going to be late and it’ll be my fault,” which is typical at this stage. You will arrive at the set of doors where you first entered the store and goddammit there will be no registers there. That’s at the Kohl’s at home. Ha! You doofus, you’re not at home. 

Of course the lovely sales associate that you accosted when you first arrived with shouts of “MENSWEAR!” is no longer at her post (probably she’s gone to inform security), so you should now continue, in a frantic yet aimless fashion, to run all over the store looking for the checkout area. And holy smokes Bullwinkle there it is at the main entrance. 

The shirt will cost $55. Both you and I thought Kohl’s would be cheaper. Oh well. The sales person will say, “Sir, if you put this on your Kohl’s account I can add this coupon and it’ll save you 50 percent. Do you—” 

Urgently interrupt her and say, “I DON’T HAVE AN ACCOUNT!” but try not to do it with all the capital letters. Just swipe that credit card of yours and run out the door with your brand new white dress shirt. 

Once outside, three things will cross your mind:

1. Holy crap it’s a million degrees out here.
2. You dope, you DO have a Kohl’s credit card.
3. Where the hell is the car?

You will be 100% sure that you parked in the second row by the store entrance. But your car is nowhere to be found. Settle down, fella. This is not the time to panic. However, ironically, you will need to repeatedly press the panic button on your key fob and listen for the nonstop honking of your car horn. But there’s nothing. Silence. Don’t fret. Thinking the car has been stolen and sweating like a pig are all part of these extensive guidelines.

At this juncture, please ramble all over the parking lot like a nutjob. Your thumb should be firmly pushing the key fob panic button hard enough to crack the plastic. Look around to get your bearings. This will be useless. Now look back at the entrance. Jesus Christ you doofus, that’s the wrong entrance. You parked at the doors on the other side of the building.

You have two choices: Go back inside and cut through the air conditioned store to the other entrance, or walk in the Sahara-like outdoor conditions to the far side of the building. Since your body may not be able to take the extreme shifts in temperature once again, choose to stay outside so as to thoroughly drench your t-shirt in sweat.

And there it is. Your car is right where you parked it. See, everything has worked out perfectly! Your drive back to the hotel will be a breeze. You’ll handle the traffic circles with aplomb. You’ll even have the confidence to call your one-and-only and inform her of the success of your grand adventure: “Get out the hotel room ironing board and iron, Honey, ‘cause I’ve got a wrinkled white dress shirt with a thousand pin-holes that I’m gonna need you to iron!” 

Be happy to know that you will arrive at the wedding with five minutes to spare. Well done, champ, and don’t sweat the fact that you also forgot your belt and you’ll be hiking up your suit pants all night.

Please keep these important guidelines in a safe location. Besides weddings, these handy tips are also appropriate for fancy dinner parties, job interviews, and meetings with your divorce attorney when your spouse has had just about enough of your shenanigans.