into the show, he answered Shawkat’s
“How are you?” honestly: “I’m a little
tired. I’m a little nervous.”
“Well, I’m one of those things,” she
said. The audience, a portion of which
had been there from the start, laughed.
With less than an hour remaining,
Shawkat got punchy. She kicked off
her heels, knocked over chairs, and,
at around 4:45 P.M., ripped off Man
No. 92’s shirt. (This was Christopher
Abbott, of “Girls,” one of a handful of
professionals to make a cameo.)
Her final scene partner turned out
to be one of the test dummies who’d re-
hearsed with her earlier. “How are you?”
she asked.
“I’m better now,” he said. “How are
you? ”
Shawkat smiled blearily. “Better, too.”
—Alex Barasch
1
DEPT.OFHEMLINES
TEST DRIVE
A
s the typical man trudges deeper
into the valley of adulthood, he
notices that he is increasingly less likely
to embrace novelty. So, when the Wall
Street Journal reports that caftans for
meal, Mr. T. pointed at the long black
apron that his waiter was wearing and
said, “I see that you have a low hem-
line, too.”
The waiter replied, “Well, I’m not a
doctor like you. Is that what you are, a
doctor?”
“No,” Mr. T. replied. “I’m just very
fashionable.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” the
waiter said.
Flushed with validation, Mr. T. wan-
dered over to the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York, where he asked an as-
sault-rifle-wielding police officer where
he could get a ticket for a tour of the
Fed. The officer said that tickets were
sold only online. Mr. T. asked, “This
isn’t about the caftan, is it?” Crushingly,
the officer professed not to have no-
ticed it.
Mr. T. was met more warmly at two
other tourist destinations in the finan-
cial district. Near the “Charging Bull”
sculpture, a Dutch man encouraged
him to pose in front of the bull and
hold out the skirt of his caftan like a
matador’s muleta. At the Fraunces Tav-
ern Museum, Mr. T. informed a ticket-
taker that he intended to keep his caf-
tan on in the Colonial-costume photo
booth upstairs: “I’ll be half Colonial,
half fabulous.”
The ticket-taker nodded calmly and
said, “I think there are wigs up there.”
The next stop was the 21 Club, where
Mr. T. wrongly assumed that the addi-
tion of one of the restaurant’s loaner
jackets would put him in compliance
with the establishment’s dress code.
“I’m sorry, sir,” a maître d’ told him.
“You’d need pants.”
Mr. T. muttered, “Or two X chro-
mosomes.” As he left, he wished that
he had remembered to tell the maître d’
that, in the Ottoman Empire, a caf-
tan was a power look. He worried that
his was reading a little too Eileen
Fisher.
Waiting on the platform of the N/R
train, he asked a man whose blue uni-
form was emblazoned with the New
York Fire Department insignia if his
getup was fireproof. “Nah, I’m a build-
ing inspector,” the man said. “If I went
into a fire, I’d probably catch.”
A scruffy bystander who’d been eaves-
dropping looked at Mr. T. and com-
mented, “You’re kind of a firetrap, yo.”“But I won’t bore you with the all too familiar story
of a dictator’s rise to absolute power.”men are currently having “a moment,”
the news can strike Mr. Typical with
the force of a grand piano from the
sky. He sputters and thinks, Have you
mistaken me for nineteen-seventies
Liz Taylor?
Nevertheless, intrigued by the pros-
pect of wearing gender-neutral at-
tire—caftan-curious, perhaps—one
Mr. Typical recently visited the flag-
ship Brooks Brothers store, on Mad-
ison Avenue, where a friendly older
saleswoman told him that, no, dear,
Brooks does not carry caftans for men.
Mr. T. explained that, according to the
Journal, Chris Pine wore one on va-
cation in Capri. Then he confessed to
her, “I feel like, once I hit fifty, I stopped
exploring.” The saleswoman nodded
empathetically.
His next stop was Amazon.com,
where $20.99 and one click purchased
a lavender-gray cotton caftan from an
outfitter called Jacansi. It looked like
a buttonless Henley that was trying to
colonize its wearer’s ankles. Wearing it
made Mr. T. feel alternately floaty and
as if a large butterfly had died on him.
Pairing it with black lace-up boots and
a veneer of bravado, he headed in the
direction of Wall Street, to Harry’s
steak house. Two Harry’s greeters gave
him a look that he would become fa-
miliar with: an indulgent smile, fol-
lowed by a quick glance footward. Mid-