100 Days, 100 Ties

Good story with this tie, and with this day…

My little big girl turned 9 today, and I had the day off to help her celebrate a full day of being spoiled. She and Diane are leaving in a few hours for Costa Rica (a little mommy-daughter spring break trip), which will be the topper of the birthday celebrations.

We went to dinner at N9ne Steakhouse, which fits in with the 9 theme of the day, but it’s a bit fancier than Chuck E. Cheese or American Girl Place. Quite a bit. Our tradition is that the birthday celebratee gets to pick the site of the family dinner. Steven picked N9ne for his 19th birthday, and family legend recalls that he ordered all of the items on the dessert menu by calling out, “One of each!” and twirling his finger in the air, a la John Candy’s Orange Whip order in Blues Brothers.

The food was superb, the desserts imaginative and Kelly, our server, was infinitely patient with our eclectic table of 10. And, yes, Julia ordered the entire dessert menu…”One of each!” And they all came with a candle, and the restaurant serenaded her.

Oak Hall, for Ladies & Gentlemen...

So, yes, this is a fashion blog (that may be a stretch), not a culinary one; so before dinner, I let Julia pick my tie and she selected this black tie, with olive, red and yellow adornment, from Gitman Bros. Kind of interesting, in that I don’t wear it much anymore, but there’s a story with it. I’m actually surprised I still know where I got this…even know who sold it to me.

When I was about to graduate from college, I needed some interview suits, and hopefully those suits would turn into they-actually-hired-you-so-now-you-need-to-go-to-work-not-looking-like-a-schlub suits. So, I went to see one of my brother’s best friends, Anthony Dionne, who worked at Oak Hall in Memphis. He sold me a couple of suits (one of which, a dark olive, went perfectly with this tie) and two or three ties, and this one is the last remnant of that very sale. Way to go, ‘Toine…you sold me a good one. At least it will be viewed 18 years later by, if I’m lucky, 18 people.

That’s a great thing about ties. As long as they’re classically designed, colored and styled, they can come and go within a wardrobe for years. I have seen some awful ties at resale shops that I can hardly see how or when they were in style. But, I keep my eyes open for ones in basic colors that still catch the eye with a timeless quality that demonstrates that the designer knew what he or she was doing. I’m sure some of you will deem some of my ties too ugly for blog content, but I am pretty confident that I have very few F-uglies on my tie rack.

Enjoy the end of March. Happy Birthday, my beautiful Julia.

Thanks for reading…Brooke

This entry was posted on March 30, 2010 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Tie du Jour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.