Gary Soto has a great essay about a coat he got when he was a little boy in Fresno, Calif. He had asked his mother for a cool jacket — the leather kind with studs and all. Instead, she got him a puffy vinyl coat that was “the color of day-old guacamole.” Two sizes too big with a dark mustard-colored lining, the jacket was so ugly that when little Gary went outside, his dog attacked him, tearing a hole in the sleeve that later had to be patched with Scotch tape.
As Soto writes, “The next day I wore it to sixth grade and got a D on a math quiz.” His adolescence, so he recalls, was miserable from that day on — he got into fights, girls completely ignored him and even the teachers snickered. He blamed it all on the jacket.
But that’s not the coat I want to tell you about.
When I was in graduate school, I hung around with some friends at church who loved to throw themed parties. At one of these events, we were supposed to come dressed all in one color and bring a dessert to match. It’s a shame we couldn’t invite Gary Soto to come with his jacket and some guacamole dip. But, alas, I didn’t go to graduate school in Fresno. Anyway, to this day I still smile when I picture Kevin Reed walking in the door in a three-piece, candy-apple-red suit, carrying a bag of Red Hots. If a devilish twin had co-starred with John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever,” he would have been wearing this suit.
Kevin had bought the outfit at a thrift store just for this occasion, and when I said how much I liked it, he ended up giving me the jacket. And a handful of Red Hots. Even though it was too small for me, I wore the neon red coat a couple of times to my English composition class. No one slept through class on those days.
But that’s not the coat I want to tell you about, either.
When I was in high school, my father printed the programs for our school drama department. So even though I had no acting or singing talent, I had an excuse to hang around with the drama kids. One day I was in the costume shop and found a vintage polyester sport coat — in plaid. The colors were orange, brown, green and yellow. It was the kind of jacket your uncle would wear if he sold used Ford Mustangs in the ’70s and moonlighted as a stand-up comic in the Catskills. And if he owned white shoes.
This is the coat I want to talk about. Because I need to confess something — I stole that jacket. Needless to say, I had my own sense of style in high school. And ethics. Not only that, I had the nerve to wear the purloined coat to several plays put on by the drama department. In those days, I lived on the edge more than I can really tell you about. But over the next two decades, that jacket made appearances at many a costume party.
In 2010 — after 20 years of flaunting this stolen property — my conscience got the better of me, and I donated the jacket to the Harding Drama Department. It has since been put back into service — most recently in a delightful Searcy Summer Dinner Theater production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” This comic musical involves audience participation, and on the night I went, I ended up onstage. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, and at one point I even got roped into a dance number. While I guess it could have gone worse, I noticed that I was not roped into a second dance number. In fact, there is now a restraining order against me dancing in White County.
But that doesn’t matter. It was just good to see my coat of many colors back in show business. While it pales in comparison to the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat you will see in this year’s Homecoming musical, the jacket is there in the wardrobe department for the next time Harding puts on “Forever Plaid.” That is, unless some groovy hipster swipes it again.
