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Dressing Up

Last year when I was flying home from Christmas vacation, I did something I don't ordinarily do on a plane: I dressed for success instead of dressing down in jeans and a T-shirt. I did so mainly because I'd gotten a new wool suit, including new dress shoes and a new silk tie, for Christmas, and I decided to wear it instead of packing it in my duffel bag, where it would get wrinkled. I wore the suit on the plane because I had a job interview the next day, and my schedule was such that it would have taken more time to get the suit and tie pressed than it would to hang it up overnight after I got home and then wear it to the interview.

Now you don't often see travelers of my age wearing a new suit to the airport. The flight turned out to be an amazing experience, mainly because of the clothes.

Usually I'm pretty easygoing and like to kid around a lot. And I always dress casually when flying. But suddenly here I was at the airport, and I found myself really trying to protect my suit from getting soiled. I let people cut in front of me in line. I found myself saying "Please" and "Thank you" in a kind of low voice. I also found myself watching other people who looked like college students and who were dressed casually, speaking too loudly, dominating the space around them. I felt ten years older than they were, watching other people my age having fun without participating in it.

Oddly, the airline people treated me differently than I'd ever been treated before, both before and during the flight. My first clue was when the lady at the gate took the ticket stubs of a sports group from Iowa that had been to El Paso for the Sun Bowl and was on its way home. The group was kind of hectic and held the line up, because not all the people in the group were at the door with the person holding everybody's boarding pass. A few of them came up from the direction of the gift shop while the gatekeeper tried to figure out who in the group was and ...

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Dressing Up. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:41, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1694141.html