“
What do blokes do to prepare for weddings? I rack my brain, thinking about grooms in commercials. Tuxedos are out. I could get her a garter...
Wait. Rings! Brilliant. And, where will we go afterward? We'll need a honeymoon suite somewhere. Look at me, already a pro at this husband business.
”
”
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Temptation (Sweet, #4))
“
If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
A monkey in a tuxedo suit, is still a monkey.
”
”
Charlie Green
“
I once saw you in a tuxedo and all I wanted to do is eat.
”
”
Pushpa Rana (Just the Way I Feel)
“
He had been a criminal, but he was also beautiful. I wasn't there to judge, only to make him clean and dressed him in his powder-blue polyester suit with the ruffled tuxedo shirt. Holding up his arm to wash it, I paused: I was comfortable. I wanted other people to know that they could do this too. The washing, the comfort. This confident, stable feeling was available to anyone, if society could overcome the burden of superstition.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
New Money wore dinner suits, which it called tuxedos, and smoked big cigars from which it removed the band before lighting up—an unthinkable solecism, for
”
”
Robertson Davies (Cornish Trilogy Omnibus)
“
Ha! Listen, this guy walks into a bar, with a shopping bag, right? He sits down, puts the bag on the bar. Something in the bag is moving, and the bartender says ‘Hey, buddy, no animals in here’. You with me, Jones?” “Yah.” “The guy is looking real unhappy, totally down in the dumps, he reaches in the bag. He pulls out a brass lantern, then a small piano, a little stool, and finally a little guy in a tuxedo, about a foot tall. The little guy sits on the stool and starts playing the piano. Playing the piano, right?” “Yah. Got, it.” “Bartender says,” Williams’ grasp on a handhold slipped for a heart-stopping moment before the suit gloves restored their sticky grip. He could see the problem was some sort of fluid leaking from the access hatch above had coated the handhold. He moved his hand to the left to avoid the slippery fluid, and continued climbing down. “Bartender says, ‘That’s amazing, where’d you get him?’ Guy points to the lamp. ‘Magic genie granted me a wish, But he don’t hear so well-’ Before the guy can stop him, the bartender grabs the lamp, rubs it and shouts ‘I want a million bucks!’. POOF! The bar is filled with ducks! Ducks everywhere, under the tables, in the street outside, feathers flying all over the place. The bartender says ‘What the hell?’ So the guy says ‘I told you the genie don’t hear so well. You really think I asked for a twelve inch pianist?
”
”
Craig Alanson (Black Ops (Expeditionary Force, #4))
“
Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.
”
”
Julie Orringer (The Invisible Bridge (Vintage Contemporaries))
“
He handed me something done up in paper. 'Your mask,' he said. 'Don't put it on until we get past the city-limits.'
It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a mask but a hood for the entire head, canvas and cardboard, chalk-white to simulate a skull, with deep black hollows for the eyes and grinning teeth for the mouth.
The private highway, as we neared the house, was lined on both sides with parked cars. I counted fifteen of them as we bashed by; and there must have been as many more ahead, in the other direction.
We drew up and he and I got out. I glanced in cautiously over my shoulder at the driver as we went by, to see if I could see his face, but he too had donned one of the death-masks.
'Never do that,' the Messenger warned me in a low voice. 'Never try to penetrate any other member's disguise.'
The house was as silent and lifeless as the last time - on the outside. Within it was a horrid, crawling charnel-house alive with skull-headed figures, their bodies encased in business-suits, tuxedos, and evening dresses. The lights were all dyed a ghastly green or ghostly blue, by means of colored tissue-paper sheathed around them. A group of masked musicians kept playing the Funeral March over and over, with brief pauses in between. A coffin stood in the center of the main living-room.
I was drenched with sweat under my own mask and sick almost to death, even this early in the game.
At last the Book-keeper, unmasked, appeared in their midst.
Behind him came the Messenger. The dead-head guests all applauded enthusiastically and gathered around them in a ring.
Those in other rooms came in. The musicians stopped the Death Match. The Book-keeper bowed, smiled graciously. 'Good evening, fellow corpses,' was his chill greeting. 'We are gathered together to witness the induction of our newest member.' There was an electric tension. 'Brother Bud!' His voice rang out like a clarion in the silence. 'Step forward.' ("Graves For Living")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich
“
Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for.
Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.
”
”
Walter Tevis (The Color of Money (Eddie Felson, #2))
“
Paint me. Put me in a sports coat with a big pattern. In silk or wool or cotton. Padded shoulders. Nipped in at the waist. A wide tie. Silk, of course. Paint me in one of my light ties on a white shirt. Make my clean, heavily starched shirt jump from the canvas. Have my good Johnson and Murphy shoes shined. Make my creases sharp. Creases count all seasons of the year. If you don’t want to paint me in spring or autumn in a sports coat, paint me in winter when I have just come in from the cold wearing a suit, with a cashmere coat in the crook of my arm. Hat still on my head. Pocket square. Tie clip. All the Ziggy details in place. Or paint me in one of my shirts that let me wear a collar bar. Remind us that that is how, once upon a time, we did it. That ours was a world of pocket squares, and tie clips—tie clips were most important, as they held a dancer’s tie in place midflight—and stick pins, and gold cigarette lighters and silver key fobs and money clips of metal or a plain rubber band, and cufflinks, and good hats, and mohair V-neck golf sweaters and fine tuxedos and Murine. Don’t paint me dropping Murine in my eyes. Or me in my boxer shorts and white cotton V-neck shirt sitting at my dressing table in my room at the Gotham, my toes tickled by the wool wall-to-wall carpet. Or maybe paint that. How and where we got ready. And we were ready. Paint our readiness.
”
”
Alice Randall (Black Bottom Saints)
“
I also bought an evening dress suit from a secondhand clothing store in Charing Cross Road. It was double-breasted and in a very heavy, uncomfortable material, and I looked, frankly, stupid in it, but it was the only one I could afford. Miss Leigh announced to us one day that Gone with the Wind was going to be rereleased theatrically, and she requested the pleasure of our entire company at the premiere, which would be my first. And so, also for the first time, I had to wear that tux in public. I had by this time bid farewell to my friends and moved out of the boardinghouse, to slightly nicer digs that were walking distance from the London Coliseum in St. Martin’s Lane. This meant that I would not need to get out of a taxi and walk the red carpet—I knew that I looked idiotic in my tuxedo and wanted to keep a low profile. Inside, there was a champagne reception before the film in the upstairs bar, and my castmates had a field day making fun of me and my shit suit. Evidently, Miss Leigh caught sight of this scene and took pity on me. For all of a sudden, her boyfriend, John Merivale, was at my side, whispering into my ear that he was going to be sitting on one side of Vivien at the screening and that she had requested that I sit on her other side. I was already besotted with her, and this act of kindness only intensified my feelings. The capper was that, once I was seated beside her, I addressed her as “Miss Leigh” and she took my hand in hers. “Patrick,” she said, “you are to call me Vivien.” My erstwhile Irish roommate was right: The memorable experiences were already piling up. One more happened that evening. The film had been running for about an hour when Vivien—I still couldn’t quite believe I got to call her that—turned to me and again took my hand. I could see that she was crying. “I am so sorry, Patrick, but I am going to have to leave,” she said. “So many of these dear people I worked with are now dead, and it is making me so sad. I hope you enjoy the rest of it.” And off she went into the night.
”
”
Patrick Stewart (Making It So: A Memoir)
“
Actually, I think I'm more into sleek-looking suits right now." I ran my fingers over the arm of his tuxedo and gave him an appraising stare. "You know, sort of that James Bond cool look.
”
”
Janette Rallison (My Fair Godmother (My Fair Godmother, #1))
“
Lawson looked great in a suit, he was dangerous in sweatpants, but a tuxedo - I may as well hand him my ovaries now because he had just ruined me for any other man alive. (Abby)
”
”
Ada Frost (Watch Me)
“
Despite all the small hitches, prom night turns out to be even more magical than I imagined it would be. I don’t care that Chris painted the tips of his mohawk blue. I don’t care that he wore a T-shirt and jeans when all the other guys wore their dorky suits and tuxedos. I actually love that he looks so different than all these clones. He’s crazy, sexy, and beautiful. And he’s all mine.
”
”
Cassia Leo (Forever Ours (Shattered Hearts, #1))
“
I asked Carl to go to the event with me, and he agreed. We rented him a tuxedo, and he looked very handsome in it, if a little uncomfortable. The tuxedo was only the beginning of a miserable evening for Carl. Everywhere we went there were crowds of people, including photographers, and everybody made a big fuss over us.
Carl sat through the ceremony and patiently waited afterward while I shook hands and accepted congratulations from a throng of music-industry people. I thought he was really handsome in his tux, but you could tell by the look on his face it suited him like a sock on a rooster. He didn’t say much all evening long, but on the way home, he took off his tuxedo jacket and tie and then even his shirt. I’ll never forget the way he looked sitting there in the car with his suspenders across his bare chest.
Finally, he turned to me and said calmly, “Honey, I love you and I will support you in your career any way that I can. I know it’s a big part of you and you wouldn’t be the same person if you didn’t do it. But the limelight’s just not for me. I’ll be there at home waiting for you, but I am not going to any more of these wingdings.” He has been a wingdingless man of his word ever since.
”
”
Dolly Parton (Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business)
“
Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The cool kids of the 1960s invited the old man who had been cool before they knew cool was cool to join them in a musical romp that nobody took particularly seriously. Crosby enjoys himself. He has nothing at stake, since he’s not the star who has to carry the film. He’s very casual, and appears to be ad-libbing all his lines in the old Road tradition with a touch of W. C. Fields’s colorful vocabulary thrown in: “You gentlemen find my raiment repulsive?” he asks Sinatra and Martin when they object to his character’s lack of chic flash in clothing. Crosby plays a clever con man who disguises himself as square, and his outfits reflect a conservative vibe in the eyes of the cats who are looking him over. The inquiry leads into a number, “Style,” in which Sinatra and Martin put Crosby behind closet doors for a series of humorous outfit changes, to try to spruce him up. Crosby comes out in a plaid suit with knickers and then in yellow pants and an orange-striped shirt. Martin and Sinatra keep on singing—and hoping—while Crosby models a fez. He finally emerges with a straw hat, a cane, and a boutonniere in his tuxedo lapel, looking like a dude. In his own low-key way, taking his spot in the center, right between the other two, Crosby joins in the song and begins to take musical charge. Sinatra is clearly digging Crosby, the older man he always wanted to emulate.*17 Both Sinatra and Martin are perfectly willing to let Crosby be the focus. He’s earned it. He’s the original that the other two wanted to become. He was there when Sinatra and Martin were still kids. He’s Bing Crosby! The three men begin to do a kind of old man’s strut, singing and dancing perfectly together (“…his hat got a little more shiny…”). The audience is looking at the three dominant male singers of the era from 1940 to 1977. They’re having fun, showing everyone exactly not only what makes a pro, not only what makes a star, but what makes a legend. Three great talents, singing and dancing about style, which they’ve all clearly got plenty of: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin in Robin and the 7 Hoods
”
”
Jeanine Basinger (The Movie Musical!)
“
The “big wheels” of Detroit, as a local society writer called them, appeared at the Ford Auditorium’s semicircular front drive in midnight-black limos and emerged in dark tuxedos and dark business suits. It was a warm night, but that did not curtail the number of women wearing mink stoles over short, bright-colored dresses with matching satin shoes.
”
”
David Maraniss (Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story)
“
That confidence only slips marginally when I open the door to my suite and find four handsome men wearing matching frowns and tuxedos. “Are you the four horsemen of the apocalypse sent to carry me to hell, otherwise known as my mother? Because if you are, I can already tell you, I plan to put up a fight.” “Bunny, honey, we’re so sorry.” That’s my second stepdad, Elijah. He’s the vet and the most tender of the bunch.
”
”
J. Saman (Doctor Untouchable (Boston's Billionaire Bachelors, #5))
“
He was class itself, a real movie actor, born to the tuxedo. I’d never seen anyone look better in a formal suit, and he seemed right at home in this hall of mirrors.
”
”
Bohumil Hrabal (I Served the King of England)
“
The man wore a black suit rather than a tuxedo, which made him both stand out from and blend into the crowd, a sore thumb on a broken hand.
”
”
Snowden Wright (American Pop)
“
wet suit—and revealed white tie and tails underneath. Removing a small bottle of Hennessy XO cognac from his pocket, he took a swig and sprinkled a few drops over his elegant evening clothes. Only then did he stroll nonchalantly past a luxury seaside hotel crawling with German officers and hop on a tram—just another tipsy young Dutchman on his way home from a long night of partying. (Tazelaar’s exploit inspired the opening scene in the James Bond film Goldfinger, in which Bond goes ashore wearing a tuxedo under his wet suit.)
”
”
Lynne Olson (Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War)
“
Photographs from Distant Places
(1)
In distant villages,
You always see the same scenes:
Farms
Cattle
Worship spaces
Small local shops.
Just basic the things humans need
To endure life.
(2)
‘Can you stay with me forever?’
She asked him in the airport,
While hugging him tightly in her arms.
‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’
He responded with an artificially caring voice,
As he kissed her on her right cheek.
(3)
I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets,
In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten
by Time,
And severely damaged by development and globalization.
I saw a poor homeless man
Combing his dirty hair
In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car!
(4)
The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter.
What matters is that,
As soon as you gaze into them,
You know that they have seen a lot.
All eyes that dare to bear witness
To what they have seen are beautiful.
(5)
A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life.
I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’
My path has always been like someone forced to sit
In an airplane on a long flight.
Forced to sit with the condition
Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times,
Until the end of the flight.
Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on.
I can neither move
Nor walk.
I can’t even throw myself
out of the plane’s emergency exit
To end this forced flight!
(6)
After years of searching and observing,
I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place
Is under business suits and tuxedos.
Under jewelry and expensive night gowns.
Despair dances at the tables where
Expensive wines of corruption
And delicious dinners of betrayal are served.
(7)
Oh, my poet friend,
Did you know that
The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase
On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity?
The vase is just a reminder
Of a flower massacre that took place recently
In a field
Where these poor flowers happened to be.
It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter,
To wither and wilt in your vase,
While breathing the not-so-fresh air
In your room,
As you sit down at your table
And write your vain words.
(8)
Under authoritarian regimes,
99.9% of the population vote for the dictator.
Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes,
99.9% of people love buying and consuming products
Made and sold by the same few corporations.
Awe to those societies where both regimes meet
to create a united vicious alliance against the people!
To create a ‘nation’
Of customers, not citizens!
(9)
The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters.
They master the art of eating up
The dead bodies and achievements
Of the fools who sacrificed themselves
For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals.
Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions?
(10)
Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them,
And beautiful, if you take a closer look.
(11)
Just as wheat fields can’t thrive
Under the shadow of other trees,
Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow
Of any power or authority.
(12)
We waste so much time trying to change others.
Others waste so much time thinking they are changing.
What a waste!
October 20, 2015
”
”
Louis Yako (أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower])
“
fuckin’ hated suits. Put me in ghillie suit in the goddamn desert and I won’t complain, but when I stuff my ass into a tuxedo I’ll bitch till the cows come home.
”
”
Jasinda Wilder (Badd Motherf*cker (Badd Brothers, #2))
“
Impa and Genison stood back, as Link looked at himself in the mirror. Wearing a white waistcoat tuxedo with gleaming silver trim and polished black riding boots, Link looked like one of those bold, valiant knights in the Disney movies. A Sheikah crest of dark blue enamel on sterling silver had been pinned to his chest, and his hair had been trimmed and styled so as not to appear as scruffy as it normally did. "You clean up nice, man," Genison laughed, and next to him Impa chuckled. Genison himself stood in a similar white tux, but without any extra decoration. "Hey, Hans from Frozen called, he wants his suit back." Link smirked at his best man. "Is all of this really necessary?" Link asked, not truly recognizing himself in the mirror.
”
”
J. Row (The Legend of Zelda: A Sword in the Time of Guns: Vol. 6)