Preparation, Staging & Costume

For most of my adult life I have been a freelance commercial artist. I live and work in a century-old schoolhouse in the Canadian countryside, only bothering to put on pants if company is expected or if a courier's been called. I set my own hours. When work is bumming me out I go take a nap or walk the dog or drink a beer.

On Mondays I send out e-mails asking for money and then a few weeks later cheques come in at the General Store, which I pick after walking the dog or while shopping for more beer. Working in this way I have acquired for my family the standard Western portfolio: transport, shelter, sustenance, medicine, clothing and broadband Internet access.

Granted, we do not live like kings. The water from our well is free but metallic. Our clothes are second-hand. To take a hot bath requires boiling pots of water on the stove. The car sounds like a biplane and drives like a shopping cart. During the spring it rains nearly as much indoors as it does outside, and the telephone stops working.

When our first child was born we tightened our belts and made due. I sold storybooks over the Web and took on painting commissions for extra cash. Home soon became a busier and more frenetic place with a toddler underfoot, and finding the peace to work became a challenge. Finding the time to grow the business became a challenge, too.

As my wife began to swell with our second child we both began to suspect that the system would not survive the strain.

So, after nearly a decade as an art bum, I decided to get a job.

I've signed up to be the art director of a corporate communications company, and I start Monday.

Last week I was still a shameless hippie. My wife passed our son without analgesia in an inflatable wading pool at my mother's house and I crouched behind her in the water in my worn corduroys, reminding her to pace her breathing as she screamed.

The midwives hovered over her bits, discussing a wayward lip of cervix which wouldn't stand aside. The Nigerian medical student we'd invited to watch leaned in to get a better look through the ruby water, her teeth shockingly bright in her round brown face. My sister served as doula, beads jingling every time she moved.

My wife screamed again.

And then suddenly I had two kids -- one of each flavour. The newest recruit lay on my wife's breast and hummed like a meditating yogi, little blue fingers turning pink as he squirmed. "Hello, friend," I said.

His birth-cry was a herald of change.

Two days earlier I had received the official offer from the communications company I'd been courting, the product of weeks of negotiations, a PDF dimly glowing on my craptop's screen with everything spelled out and itemized and specific. I telephoned my new office and told them I would like the accept the offer as is, and then they all took turns telling me how excited they were to have me aboard and so on.

We set a start date. I took my wife out for spicy Mexican food, which some sources say may ignite reluctant labour. Then we had hot porno sex for the same reason and went to bed. In the morning her uterus ejected its mucus plug and started twitching. The progress of that particular situation kept my mind off my job for a spell.

Then, like I said, the kid cried like a rooster. A new day had dawned.

As I began to consider my new life with renewed seriousness I realized certain preparations would have to be made. I released the bladderful of urine I'd been keeping during the short strokes of labour and considered myself in the mirror: scruffy quasi-Islamic beard, faded cotton T-shirt, sopping pants and no shoes. In nearly every respect I appeared to be the antithesis of a decent working man.

"I'm going to need new clothes," I said.

"Of course," said my wife. "But I don't think I can come with you."

"Yeah," I agreed. The junior midwife was stitching up a small tear in her perineum. The sight of my wife's blood recalled to me the soul-blanching sounds of her screams moments before and I felt dizzy. "I'm just going to leave you two to this," I said, ducking out.

The baby was in the bedroom being measured and weighed. He was still humming. I poked my thumb at his palm until he closed his fingers around it and tugged.

My mother asked me what sort of clothes I would need for work and I gave it some thought. The big boss wears a sweater and slacks, sometimes with a tie and sometimes without. The fellows in the art department, in contrast, dress like standard-issue twenty-first century tidied-up man-boys: unpleated baggy trousers and round-collared cotton shirts, often with logos on them.

My mother suggested that I would be more comfortable with the latter benchmark, as it most closely resembled my own careless uniform of worn cotton -- but her saying so crystallized for me my desire to avoid camouflage. As the art director it would not be to my profit to be mistaken for just another production geek.

My step-father, a veteran of business, agreed. My choice of clothing was an important statement about how I wanted to be perceived within the company and to clients, he explained, and would go a long way toward setting a foundation for my authority.

Controlling perceptions, especially for first impressions, is important. I knew this a decade ago at art school when it became plain that if you dressed the part you would be received as a more serious student by the faculty. By wearing a paint-stained pair of white coveralls I was considered dedicated to art and therefore able to win the attention and time of my mentors.

I reckon some people would call that pretentious, but it never seemed so to me because it chiefly meant I didn't have to bother to change my splattered clothes after painting all morning. The wardrobe of a messy and obsessed artist is both affordable and easy to maintain, especially if you actually are a messy and obsessed artist.

That was when I was twenty-one. But I'm thirty-one and it's time to regear again. This time I'm not trying to hog the resources of the faculty but rather trying to build the authority I'll need to be given the latitude I want.

Everyone expects the art director to look like a man-boy. And, since it is the art director's job to generate unexpected ideas, I figure the most unexpected thing for me to do is to go formal.

Therefore I have elected to adopt a suit as my new uniform.

My step-father took me to the tailor's. I already have one nice grey suit but it's a bit drab so I made the salesman trot all over the store until he found me a nice charcoal fabric with thin, low-contrast pinstripes. The salesman had some difficulty following my directives (he was trying to bluff his way through an ignorance of the definition of contrast, for instance) but he eventually found the mark.

As we shopped I mentioned to the salesman my various preferences, all of which he echoed with an enthusiastic cry of, "That's exactly the same with me!" This unbroken train of coincidence strained credulity upon repetition, especially when he claimed to exclusively favour "solid colour ties" while an elaborately patterned tie scintillated on his chest.

He offered up a striped tie and opined, "This one is pretty solid."

Solid colour ties are the bane of my formalwear-shopping existence. The last time I bought a suit the salesman tried to explain to me, at first gently and then bluntly, that solid colour ties were out of style and that a gentleman of any quality wouldn't be caught dead with one. He appraised the clothes I was wearing with disdain and suggested I should heed his experienced counsel.

I bought my tie elsewhere.

This salesman, in contrast, simply didn't seem to understand the concept of pattern. He was eager to be helpful. He wanted to crack this particular nut, and he tirelessly brought me patterned tie after patterned tie in an unending parade of earnest ineptitude.

My step-father read his book about the history of the British Navy and yawned.

Once I was able to paw through the tie drawers myself I came up with two selections, and then we proceeded to choose shirts. Throughout this later part of the hunt I maintained a steadfast refusal to be clad in either Dilbert white or Mafioso dark but rather championed a middle road of sand and copper, which I felt would nicely frame the blood- and rust-red ties I had picked.

(Prussian Blue is my favourite colour but ever since I redesigned my website last autumn in a decisive effort to get away from the slatey-blue and grey that decorates so much of the Web I've found a new love of Oriental Lucky Red.)

Once at home again I took a long shower and then used the beard trimmer my wife got me for Christmas to actually trim my beard. I shaved it down from my cheeks and cleared my neck, then sheared the remaining scruff to a uniform length. Next came my head, shaved down to the no-guff zen of near-military shortness.

I bought antiperspirant. Funny stuff!

My daughter doesn't want me to go to work. She breaks my heart, telling me how she "won't be able to wait" for me to come home. "You won't be able to wait?" I echo as she sits on the counter and watches me shave.

"No," she assures me.

"What will happen when you can't wait any longer? Will you explode?"

"Maybe or not," she says sadly, nodding.

My step-father's non-Terrorist Arabian mechanic found a car for me, too -- a used Volvo in excellent shape, save for one dented door and mis-matched interior fabric. The price is such that I should be able to afford it fairly soon, and my step-father may offer me a short-term no interest loan if need be.

He also found me a replacement laptop on eBay after my wife inadvertently cranked the hinge off my existing craptop during the early stages of labour, so now I won't have to walk into work looking like I stole my personal computer from a homeless man. I gave the old unit to my brother, who will use his genius to give it new life.

(I am able to cover the price of the new used laptop in part due to generous contributions from readers like you. Since I am now employed in a traditional sense I have taken down the donation button from my blog. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who chipped in while the campaign lasted. Soon I will be in a position to click your donation buttons.)

My daughter disapproves of the new laptop. Ever since her brother was born she's become wary of any kind of change. "I don't like it," she says, lip quivering. "I want you big 'puter back."

"The broken one?"

"Yeah please."

The next element of my new wardrobe was footwear. I don't care for shoes and tend to wear them only in winter to avoid frostbite. When I need to go into restaurants I might put on a pair of foul-smelling blue Chuck Taylors -- the famous "all star" canvas shoes with less support than a wet napkin. Mocassins for honkey.

The furthest I could bring myself to close that particular gap was to buy a pair of new Chuck Taylors that don't yet smell funky. For some inexplicable reason they cost a bazillion dollars. I'm not very good at shopping.

Finally, my mother persuaded my step-father to donate to me a leather overcoat which looks considerably more dashing than my giant green-not-blue-or-brown parka. It has fur around the collar, so that's two kinds of dead animal in one sleek package. (It's hard to be less of a hippie than to wear two kinds of dead animal, unless you wear two kinds of dead animal while eating veal.)

So, I've got a shiny laptop chocked full of iTunes goodness, well-groomed non-Islamic facial hair, a good suit, non-stink shoes, an adult overcoat and my very own Volvo in my future. I have a bullet-proof haircut and a song in my heart.

I go to wage war on the mortgage.

My very first task as a corporate teat-sucker? On Monday morning I'm off to direct a photo shoot of $FAMOUS_HIP-HOP_ARTIST for the cover of his new album. The boss is out of town, so I am being sent alone. I won't even have some chick with a clipboard to back me up.

Cross your fingers for me. Whee!