Here Comes Treble: Do Clothes Make The Friend?
...“You obviously don’t recognize me with my clothes on!” The man grinning across my reception desk was smartly dressed in collar and tie and a smart grey suit...
Isabel Bradley, chuckling as she writes, gives examples of our failure to always instantly recognize people when we see them out of their usual context.
“You obviously don’t recognize me with my clothes on!” The man grinning across my reception desk was smartly dressed in collar and tie and a smart grey suit.
Behind me, my colleague roared with unseemly mirth. It took a moment or two for me to “place” our visitor, while I blushed and stammered. Then, the penny dropped. “Koen!” I exclaimed, joining in the laughter. Normally, Koen visited the school office where I worked in his Karate ghee. Seeing him in a business suit confused me utterly.
When we see people out of their usual context, so to speak, we don’t always instantly recognize them.
At an orchestral rehearsal, I’ll know everyone’s name, and easily slot newcomers into their particular spot under the names of instruments they play: “trumpeter”, “second violin, back desk”, or perhaps even “piccolo”. However, bumping into the new piccolo player in the supermarket next to the baked beans proves problematic. I’ll wonder for a moment or two just WHO this high-pitched voice belongs to! It may take a few moments for my mind to recall last Tuesday night, finally identifying the stranger who’s greeting me as a long-lost friend.
As a school secretary, I seemed to know each inhabitant of the entire suburb where I lived and worked. Meeting one of them in the local shop isn’t a problem – but bumping into them in Oranjemund, sixteen hundred kilometres from home, came as quite a shock.
Identifying friends dressed in the gladdest of glad-rags, meandering through the foyer of the concert hall is tricky, when one is accustomed to meeting them in the pub at the Running Club, drenched in sweat and dressed in shorts and T-shirt.
A few years ago, Leon and I spent some time as house-guests of a delightful octogenarian in Amsterdam. She had us laughing in sympathy. “I bumped into someone the other day in the street,” she told us. “It took a while to sort out which part of my life she fitted into! My husband was a neurosurgeon. I was his receptionist for many years, and got to know all his patients – was she one of them? No… that wasn’t right, she wasn’t old enough. Was she a new member of my art group? No… I couldn’t picture her with paint-splodged hands. My husband and I were very involved with his musical group at one time… But, no, somehow I couldn’t picture her with an instrument in her hands… Eventually, I realised – she had CLOTHES on! Of course, I didn’t recognise her when she was dressed; she’s a member of our NUDIST GROUP!”
It was good to know that I’m not alone in identifying people by their dress!
How do YOU identify your friends and acquaintances?
Until next week – “here comes Treble!”
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