After President Bush's approval rating dropped to an all time low 32% last week, White House officials scrambled to stop his popularity plummet. Karl Rove should've called me; I had a guaranteed tip to improve Dubya's standing amongst female voters, particularly those down south.
My advice? Don a seersucker suit and head to Louisville, Kentucky. If the President had roamed Churchill Downs Saturday decked out in crinkled white cotton with faint blue stripes, his ratings - and sexual confidence - would have soared to post 9-11 heights.
It has been my experience that most women have a thing for seersucker.
Last December, I got a Christmas card from a friend who grew up in upstate New York, but has spent the past ten years in the Bay Area after completing her swimming career at Stanford. The card featured a picture from the Cape Cod wedding of a former teammate. In the photo, two lucky men find themselves surrounded by tall, athletic, gorgeous women. One guy is a Stanford alum and husband of one of the ex-swimmers. The other guy is me. Dozens of recipients have responded, "Great pic! But who's the guy in seersucker?" Exactly.
In the spring of 2005, I attended the wedding of two friends who work in Hollywood. The afternoon reception was held at a ritzy location in Palos Verdes overlooking the Pacific. A famous director and several producers and actors were in attendance and dressed, like most of the men, in dark suits. The bride's mother asked to dance with me. You know what I was wearing.
Southern women, though, take it to another level, instinctively reaching for seersucker the way Italians reach for bread - like it's encoded in their DNA. No belle can resist rubbing the cloth between her fingers, even if it's draped on a stranger and her boyfriend is standing nearby.
I'm a simple man. I like to drink during the day, watch sporting events on which I have wagered, yell at athletes and stare at pretty girls. On paper, then, the Kentucky Derby had already qualified as my favorite sporting event before I ever attended it. But then I went to Churchill Downs in 2004. There, I saw with my own eyes that the seersucker suit is not merely a piece of clothing, but the fashion version of a Jedi mind trick - "I am the droid you are looking for." The Derby was even better than I had imagined.
I won't bore you with the statistics on how many attractive, female strangers smiled coyly at me while rubbing manicured fingers against my white and blue striped upper body, but let's just say the Axe body wash commercials are based on my experiences and a lawsuit has been filed. I called my parents and told them, "I feel like Justin Timberlake!" Cricket, cricket. "Uh...I feel like the Beatles!" Mom and Dad cheered.
To think I almost blew the whole thing.
"Make sure you bring a suit," Boyd, my host in Louisville, told me on the phone.
I hadn't given much thought to what I'd be wearing to the Derby, and I'd forgotten stories about everybody at southern colleges getting dressed up to go spill bourbon on themselves prior to football games. Even though I had a nice tan suit that would have sufficiently gotten the job done, I decided to survey a few women with southern ties, just to be sure. The response was unanimous: seersucker. My mind filled with images of Jay Gatsby, I went shopping on line.
Jos.A.Bank offered the least expensive seersucker suit. At $225, it was a deal breaker. Since the pharmaceutical industry (I was a sales trainer at the time) is one of the last to require strict business dress, I already owned eight suits. The thought of buying another didn't excite me, especially one that I'd wear just once a year. I shared these thoughts with a southern redhead with whom I'd been spending some quality time and she assured me those would be two hundred and twenty five of the best dollars I'd ever spent. When she requested a private fashion show, I decided to follow her advice. (I drew the line, however, at buying white bucks.)
When I landed in Louisville, Boyd informed me that we did not have tickets to the Derby; we were going to the Kentucky Oaks, a day of races on Friday. He explained that Oaks was actually more fun than Derby because it attracted more locals and less "amateurs". As Fred Dryer used to say on "Hunter": Works for me.
By the time Friday rolled around, I had already fallen in love with Muhammad Ali's hometown. Never before had I encountered a city that so completely embraced an event the way in which Looavul reveled in the Kentucky Derby. It was as though every citizen was a de facto ambassador intent on making sure my visit went as well as possible. On Oaks morning I nervously emerged from my bedroom wearing my new seersucker suit (and blue and gold Notre Dame tie), feeling like a teenaged girl in a prom dress for the first time. But Boyd's delightful wife Heather let out a whistle and I knew everything was going to be all right.
At the track I didn't see many guys wearing seersucker, probably because they've all learned how tough it is to get bourbon stains out of white cotton. I started to get nervous. And then the smiling started. Followed by the touching. I looked to Heather for assurance that this was reality, and not simply my first Mint Julep talking. She winked.
Boyd, Heather and I were seated in a 3rd floor clubhouse box, a very nice location to watch the races made nicer by its immediate proximity to two attractive women in their mid-twenties. Before the 9th race, one of the women, "Katie" (names have been changed to protect the slim chance I might get great tickets to future Derbies), nodded to me and said, "Nice suit." Game on. I quickly struck up a conversation with Katie and her friend "Melissa." An hour later, Melissa received a brief call on her cell phone. Hanging up, she turned to Katie and nodded. I felt like I had just seen Tony Soprano get the call letting him know "that thing" had been taken care of.
Melissa's call had come from a 5th floor suite, a.k.a. where the horse trainers hang out. One of the unique attributes of horse racing that makes Pete Rose green with envy is the fact that all the owners and trainers can - and do - bet on the races. Consequently, people "in the know" are always receiving tips. Apparently, Melissa's father ran with the cool crowd.
Melissa asked me if I wanted to walk with her to place a bet on The Kentucky Oaks race. This request was amazingly unnecessary, like a girl in high school asking if I wanted "to go for a walk outside" the keg party. I tried not to run down the stairs to the betting windows.
I was instructed to place a "trifecta box" bet on the 1, 3, and 6 horses, meaning if those three horses finished in any order of win, place or show, I'd win. I handed over the necessary cash as skillfully as Woody Allen doing cocaine in "Annie Hall." The nice lady handed me my tickets. Melissa and I got another round of Juleps and headed back upstairs to watch.
We won. The 1 and 6 horses immediately bolted way out front and stayed there. That 3 horse, though...he tried his best to make me cry, before finally pulling away from the 4th place ride down the backstretch. And, yes, people speak the Truth when they say nothing in sports is more fun than cheering on your horse at the end of a race.
"Reidy," Boyd screamed at me, "Do you have any idea how much money you just won?" In all the excitement, I'd forgotten about the winnings. Math was never a strong suit of mine, so I guessed, "A couple of hundred?" Before Boyd could slug me, the official results were posted on the Big Board. I'd won $2500. Commence hugging.
When a woman wins you a coupla grand, it really gets a relationship off to a flying start. I asked Melissa for a date later that night and she agreed. We got along famously. The next morning, as Boyd, Heather and I struggled with our hangovers, my cell phone rang. Melissa was calling to offer us four box seats to the Derby that her father had left over. No charge. Boyd turned to Heather and said, "Find a hat."
I won $200 that day on Smarty Jones.
To recap: felt like Justin Timberlake, won $2700, got free box seats to the Kentucky Derby. All because of a crinkled white cotton suit with faint blue stripes.
Think President Bush could've used some mojo like that last weekend? I can just picture him sauntering through the grandstand in his seersucker suit, waving to an adoring crowd as a television crew handpicked by Tony Snow captures it all for the evening news.
Heck, even the Dixie Chicks might give ol' Dubya a vote of confidence after seeing that.