One Last Thing About Sunday's Show
It's Generic Sitcom Plot Device #28, bookended by #27, (simultaneous dates with two different women) and #29, (losing something valuable of your parents and trying to cover it up only to learn that objects aren't important, but telling the truth is.) Of course, i refer to the situation where a woman "can't go in there" ('there' equals the ball, reunion, party, etc) because somebody is wearing her exact same dress. Being firmly grounded in the real world, this has never struck me as being a big deal. It's entirely possible that I might not even notice were this situation to actually occur in real life. Which made what I did notice at the Casbah at last night's show by The Hold Steay all the more shocking to me.
During a song introduction, singer Craig Finn told an anecdote about the martyrdom of Saint Barbara, which evidently occurred after she converted to Christianity in the third century. Finn, in an effort to illustrate in a modern context how shocking this was at the time, compared it to getting a facial tattoo. I thought this was a good example. A deliberate attempt to distort your most noticable and unmissable feature is certainly a shocking act. That's why so few people do it. It's unnecessary, shocking and rebellious, (in a conformist sort of way.)
So I wonder what was going through the heads of the nine or ten people in the crowd at the show last night that were all wearing the same style glasses. The thick, black framed Buddy Holly/Rivers Cuomo style glasses. It was unmissable to me, and I wasn't even the one wearing them. If you spun in a circle, it would have been difficult to find an O'Clock where someone wasn't sporting them. Even two members of the band were!
The Hold Steady See Eye To Eye on Facial Fashion
So just piecing this together from how I see it...There can't be any reason to get extra thick, ostentatious glasses, other than the look. They can't be lighter, or be more comfortable. The look can be the only reason. And if you want that particular look, you have to have some sort of inkling about what image that look conveys to the rest of the world: indie rock, ironic-nerdy, non-conformist hipster. You care so little about fashion that you're willing to deliberately look uncool as possible! But that makes you cool! UNTIL, you walk into a room and a ten other people are doing the same thing!
Unbelievable. You might think I am exaggerating, but I couldn't be the only one who noticed this last night. The thick framed glasses are still rare enough that I notice when I see someone wearing them. There were so many people last night that it was similar to what it would be like if you went to a concert and there were 10 different people there, of different genders and widely different ages who didn't know each other, all wearing these wigs:
or these fake muscle shirts:
Very bizarre.
