Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 15th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on July 15, 2017.

---

Going Commando

I admit that I’m cheating. Linda’s prompt for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday challenge is to write a post about the title of a book you’re currently reading or one that is closest to you as you write this post.

Sorry Linda, but I’m not doing that today. Not exactly, anyway.

Yesterday’s WordPress one-word prompt was the word “tailor.” I wrote a post that referenced spy novels, including one by John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I am neither currently reading that book nor is it close to me at the moment.

But after I’d published my post for the “tailor” prompt yesterday, I recalled a long-suppressed memory of the last time I’d gone to a tailor, something I don’t do very often. I’m an off-the-rack kind of a guy.

Anyway, I remembered one very mortifying experience visiting a tailor. It was many years ago. I mean MANY years ago. Here’s the story of that experience.

My sister was getting married in a far away city and I was an usher. Her fiancé made an appointment with a local tailor for his ushers (and his father) to get fitted for our wedding party tuxes. Five of us piled into a car and headed to the tailor.

Upon our arrival, the tailor herded all of us into a large, communal fitting room so that he could get our measurements for the tuxes. He then instructed us all to remove our shirts and trousers.

So what’s the big deal you ask? Well, back then I was a bit of a hippie. Long hair, beard, tie-dyed t-shirts, and bell-bottomed jeans.

I also went commando. Just in case you don’t know what that means, going commando involves not wearing underpants beneath your pants. For men, it’s sometimes referred to as “free-balling.”

The day we had the appointment with the tailor, I had on my bell-bottomed jeans and I was, as usual, not wearing underpants. I guess I wasn’t thinking about where we were going or what we would be doing.

So there I was with four other guys in the open fitting room and I wasn’t wearing underpants. I dropped trou, just like the other four. Fortunately, my tie-dyed t-shirt was extra long and I pulled it down as far as I could in order to better conceal my goodies.

I thought I was going to get away with being without underpants until the tailor knelt down in front of me in order to measure my inseam. Holding his cloth measuring tape in one hand, he pulled up my t-shirt with the other.

Uh oh!

Kneeling, my junk directly in front of his face at eye-level, the tailor seemed totally unfazed. He looked up at me with a blank expression on his face, as if this was a common occurrence, and politely asked, “Will you be wearing underpants at the wedding?”

That was the day I stopped going commando.