Bill's Musings

I’ve had my fair share of not-so-great incidents with velour. I say that as if everyone has incidents with velour but fortunately this is not the case. It seems that velour and I have always been destined to be at odds.

I once told you about my velour pants. For those who may not have been on the ‘Bill’s Musing’s’ train at the time, I will remind you that my mother bought me some orange velour pants in Germany, Why, you ask? I’ve often wondered over the years myself why someone would torture their child as so, but alas, no answer has been forthcoming. They were orange, they were tight, and I looked a lot like a hooker.

The other ‘malfunction’ with velour that I mentioned was when, while falling into a stupor during a meeting in North Bay with my wife at the Empire Living Center, due to the temperature (it was hot), and the interest-level of the speaker (he was not), I slowly slid down to an almost horizontal position on a velour easy-chair. When break time was called, I snapped awake and upright. My shorts, however, did not follow me. I was butt-naked, so to speak, sitting there amongst the 20-or-so others who had not had the same malfunction, and only some last-minute trickery and a huge assist by Anne prevented the others from noticing.

My third velour festivity occurred in high-school, and was my most embarrassing, if you can imagine. I was reminded of this incident by my son, whose front tooth broke recently, and had to be repaired. What does one have to do with the other? Allow me to rhapsodise about my past somewhat, and you can judge for yourself if velour and I should be friends or not.

I had broken my front tooth at the end of grade 8. I was roller skating and playing hockey with a rubber stopper from the front of said roller skates. I know that paints an odd picture of me, but I WAS by myself. Perhaps this can be a whole other article later.  A rubber stopper doesn’t quite roll the way a ball would, and so, all of a sudden, I face-planted on the cement floor, and picked up my broken tooth in a blazing panic. It took three days before a dentist would see me, and another week before it was fixed.

I managed to traipse through life with this repaired tooth unscathed for better part of the next two years…..until velour once again reared its ugly head. I was in grade 10, and I used to play the baritone for band. A baritone, we baritone players used to say, is an instrument that was the love-child of a torrid one-night-stand between a tuba and a trombone. It looked like a small tuba, sounded more like the trombone, but with spunk and attitude. We baritone players were an aloof lot, not hanging around with anyone in particular, just keeping the beat for the band the best we could. Actually, we baritone players were secretly hoping for more respect, but were too cool to ask for it.

Part of the ‘coolness’ of playing this instrument was in the way we casually cared for our instruments. They were well protected in their cases, so they could take a good beating. And part of this casual aloofness was in how we just threw the instruments in the back-seat of the cars that picked us up, as if to say ‘I just put my baritone in an off-hand way in the back, where it belongs, because I really don’t care if I practice or not!’ And so, I did this, in front of a bunch of band mates.

‘So what?’, you say to yourselves, as you drink your tea. Well, normally, this would have just been another cool moment in a long string of cool moments for yours truly. However, this vehicle had velour seats, and so fate has doomed me to be foiled by this damned material. I threw my baritone casually into the back seat, as planned….then the baritone, instead of sliding easily across a vinyl seat, bounced back because it didn’t slide across velour. And broke my tooth in half…. again.

My band mates ALL saw this. By the next day, the entire school knew. Not bad when you consider that cell phones and the internet had yet to be invented. And it was not like I could conceal the results. Everyone wanted to know how I could be so lame as to let this happen. I tried to explain about the velour, even tried to replicate it for others, but to no avail.

Man, I hate velour.