Buttoning the waist band of the pants had been a challenge. Red faced and panting, thumbs blistered, belly sore from five minutes of trying to squeeze a 40 inch waist into size 34 slacks far enough to persuade the button and the button hole to make friends, I finally relented and stretched out upside down on the bed, like a teenage girl inserting herself into jeans so tight you could see the bump of a petite pimple growing on her butt, and wrestled myself, writhing and twisting, engulfed in flying clouds of cat fur, into my only pair of fancy pants, got them closed up and buckled shut.
Clean, fresh pressed long sleeve shirt holding in a slightly bulbous torso, tucked tightly into blue khaki slacks with pocket openings puckered out like conch shells escaping from both hips, I looked pretty dapper, if not a little stiff and pained.
I think my elegance, complete with my finest slip on tennis shoes that hardly showed the water stains from an unexpected dunk in the lake a couple days before, went unnoticed by the people in the room who seemed - every one - to be distracted, as we spoke, by the plastic lens of my glasses that hung like a Picasso painting from my left eyebrow, created that very afternoon by a slightly misdirected four inch flame from the butane torch I was using to light a cigar.
It was a wonderful evening out, but I'm glad we don't have to get all prettied up very often.