Welcome to 1961, and to being a handsome male actor! Thank you for your interest in being a handsome male actor in 1961, where the rule for you is tight, taut, male swaddling! Thank you for coming to us with your fourteen-pushup body and severe close-cropped hairline, your critical neck-tan, lightly-furred wrists and your most jutting chin. We’re going to put the smallest, most-tense things all over your body. Your body! Your swimming-pool novelist body. We’ll ensnug you, egg-drinking fit man, with your celery-stick tie and your Bloody Mary skin. Money-hard shoes, hard and tight and glossy-thick like cockroach wings! Trim-and-terse dress socks, hauled up over your fifty-year-old calves, snapped into knee garters as tight as your own blood vessels. Snap them closed, snap them shut, wear a bear-trap on your apple-pie male feet!
Don't you DARE put on airs, Well-Dressed Man. I've seen you with your coat off. You've got stripey suspenders hiking your trousers WELL past your navel, and your sock garters are clearly repurposed gear from a WWI polio clinic. Yes, yes, you've got your whole thing working for you. But we both know you live in fear of someone touching your hair and/or buttons.
"It’s 1961 and we’re binding up our best and tautest men!"
I laughed, picturing several Sixties men all wearing binders under their suave attire.
Warning: do not show unaccountably slim birdlike wrist out of the tight cuffs, bc then you're just John Mulaney.
be as like the stonework of the Peruvians, betwixt whose blocks not a knifeblade could pass
Don't you DARE put on airs, Well-Dressed Man. I've seen you with your coat off. You've got stripey suspenders hiking your trousers WELL past your navel, and your sock garters are clearly repurposed gear from a WWI polio clinic. Yes, yes, you've got your whole thing working for you. But we both know you live in fear of someone touching your hair and/or buttons.