100 Days, 100 Ties

An army without leaders is like a foot without a big toe. And Sergeant Hulka isn’t always gonna be here to be that big toe for us. I think that we owe a big round of applause to our newest, bestest buddy, and big toe… Sergeant Hulka. — Bill Murray (as Pfc. John Winger), Stripes

For our final week of Tie Week Month, we are celebrating stripes. Striped ties will be featured, along with one of my favorite comedies of all time. Um, it’s Stripes, if you couldn’t tell from the opening quote.

As many of you know, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were the stars of the film, but the other characters added so much more: Francis “Psycho”, Dewey Oxburger (late great John Candy), the perfect 80s hotties PJ Soles and Sean Young, Cruiser, Judge Reinhold’s “Death Before Disco” guy, Capt. Stillman (John Larroquette was dead on) and the perfectly cast Warren Oates as Sgt. Hulka.

It’s not a stretch to say this for many boys/men of my and my brother’s ages, but this flick (along with Caddyshack and Fletch at 2nd & 3rd) gave me and my brother a great deal of our lexicon that we used growing up. To this day, I can call my brother Grant out of the blue, and we’ll go through about 7-15 seconds of the script and hang up.

A couple of years ago, I had the chance to thank Harold Ramis himself for gifting us this banter. He, his wife and kids were at the movie theater here in Evanston, and I gathered my thoughts, approached him and said, “Mr. Ramis, I want to thank you for making my brother and I laugh for decades.” Or some piece of crap like that. What a speech fart on my part…he winced, his wife chuckled, I groaned. I couldn’t have made him feel older if I’d tried. I retreated to a corner of the lobby and thought of 5,832 ways I could have said it better.

Calvin Klein? It's written all over your underwear.

Oh, yeah, my striped tie for the day…it’s a peach/pink and blue and brown number from Calvin Klein that I picked up a couple weeks ago at TJMaxx. I love the blue in here, perhaps because it’s squeezed in between the other colors.

A couple of weeks ago I busted out a couple of postcards from the collection Catalog Man: Mail Order Fashion Hunks, that was given to me by my friend Susan Frischer, proprietor of MarketFresh Books. Here are some good (read: bad) pics of Guys With Bad (read: still bad) Ties.

Two Outta Three 'Staches Ain't Bad

Crimplene: an affliction of the crotch?

Flare Play? What miserable copywriting...

Enjoy the cheesy pix.

Thanks for reading…Brooke

This entry was posted on August 23, 2010 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Stripes Week, 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.