Invited to a beach wedding, I'm told that male guests are requested to wear Hawaiian shirts, apparently a surfer dude's idea of black-tie. Personally, I'd prefer to attend both the ceremony and reception in a rubber wet suit with snorkel and flippers, but I don't want to ruin the happy couple's special day by looking like a police diver searching for the drowned body of Uncle Jim who will probably fall into the sea after one too many Mai Tais. So I guess Hawaiian shirt it will be, albeit the cheapest and plainest design available for purchase.
There is a reasonably acceptable specimen at my local department store, mostly solid blue with a single pineapple embroidered over the right chest. It's not exactly Hawaiian but it's Kon Tiki enough for me. Alas, no S sizes can be found on the rack, just M, L, XL, XXL, 2XXL, and one so huge it presumably doubles as an emergency canopy to shade your entire family from the tropical sun. This means sending the stooping, apathetic sales associate on a stockroom search for the size small I need.
But it turns out there's no need for such an expedition. The store doesn't sell small sizes in anything, the sales associate tells me with a smirk. Most men refuse to consider themselves as small or short, he explains, so they usually size up to at least size medium. It's as if they believe buying larger clothing will magically make them bigger men, no matter how ill-fitting and inelegant their actual reflection in the changing room mirror. Apparently, the tiny size tag sewn into a seam can transform you from Pipsqueak Pete into Superman. Welcome to the irrational gymnasium of the inadequate male mind. Apparently, everything Gloria Steinem says is true.
No wonder there is so much macho rage in the world if men can't even accept they're just a few inches shy of average height. I would describe them as knuckle draggers but since their hands have disappeared inside too-long shirt sleeves it's their oversized cuffs that are scraping the floor. The sales assistant wasn't at all apologetic about his inability to help me. In fact, he clearly thought me weird for not caring I was diminutive, miniature, pintsized, or whatever his favorite disparaging term for short people happened to be.
In the end, I ordered a similar shirt in my size from the Internet with zero human contact besides waiting for the mailman to deliver the package. Of course, I looked conspicuous at the wedding, neat and trim in my size small, discretely pineappled attire. My fellow guests billowed around the beach in voluminous and extravagantly patterned Hawaiian shirts almost hanging down to their knees. Any casual observer might assume they'd wandered into the annual pageant of some Polynesian appreciation society. Pacific burlesque staged on an Atlantic shore for puzzling reasons.
I was certainly puzzled by the Hawaiian motif: the aforementioned de rigueur shirts for men; the fruity rum signature cocktails; the enormous plastic palm tree that threatened to topple over at any moment and crush the flower girls; and, God forbid, the bridesmaids' fluorescent Hula girl costumes. Neither the bride nor groom had ever been west of Pennsylvania as far as I was aware. It was like a destination wedding in the wrong location. At least the happy couple seemed happy. That's what counts on these occasions, after all.
