Parched and Starched

As a guy, dry cleaning is a simple process, really. You wait until you have two dress shirts left (one for today and one for tomorrow), take the other 24 to the cleaners, and when they are finished tomorrow, you reclaim said shirts by paying a paltry fee for an incredible amount of fabric. Pants and suit coats run on a different schedule and are submitted for cleaning on an as-needed basis. Again, the cost isn’t much, and it sure as hell beats trying to iron and press pants in the comfort of your own home. I suppose a tie can enter the rotation every now and then, but only to combat stains – after all, nothing looks sillier than receiving back a freshly cleaned and pressed tie – on a hangar.

This is all old news, though – YAB covered it here in a “Choose Your Own Adventure Blog.”

Before we get to our reason of posting, let’s try and pull back the curtain on dry cleaners everywhere, shall we? After all, how many people actually know what goes into dry cleaning a shirt? All we know is you hand it over a counter in a crumpled heap (the shirt, not the counter), wait a day, and then pick it up at the same counter, hangar-ed and ready to wear. Sounds kind of mystical, no?

I suppose a little bit of evidence can be extracted from the name “dry cleaning.” The reason for dry’s inclusion is that of all the things dry cleaners use to clean your mustard-covered shirt, water CANNOT be one of them. Anything else? Sure. Just not water. That would be wet cleaning, and that’s forbidden, as per the Sacred Council of Dry Cleaners. (They meet in caves and wear robes made of that plastic sheeting they love so much.) Instead, petroleum-based solvents and other cleaning agents are used in a washing machine-like mechanism that tumbles the mustard right off of your shirt. Petroleum-based solvents? With the world in an oil crisis, I expect us to switch to hybrid dry cleaning any day now. (And for the record, this was invented by the French. Make your own joke here.)

However gents, once married, you can expect the dry cleaning world to change immensely. No, not in the type of solvent they use on the other side of the counter; your world will change on this side of the counter, making dry cleaning far more complex than you can possibly imagine. Why? Women’s Clothing.

Like everything else becoming one with your matrimonial union, so do you daily chores. And since I get the killer discount at the lobby shop on the first floor of my building, it made total sense to consolidate both Katie and my dry cleaning on this side of the fence. No matter, I’ll just be making twice as many trips. (Taking my 24 shirts and her 10-12 pieces at the same time might cause dry cleaning overload and the nice woman at the lobby shop to cry. And crying would count as tears, which count as water – which the Sacred Council will punish with death. I don’t want to be responsible for that sacking.)

There are three difficulties a guy will encounter with doing his wife’s dry cleaning, and they are as follows:

1. The Garment ID – With guys’ clothes, it’s pretty easy to tell the dry cleaner what each item of apparel is. What’s that? You wear it on your legs? Pants! On your torso? Shirt! Stupid piece of fabric around your neck? Tie! But when asked by the dry cleaner what you have in the bag of your wife’s clothes, it’s easy to freeze. Yes, a skirt is a skirt, and a dress is a dress, but what of the many tops a woman chooses to wear to work. You see these? They’re called knit-tops – which is a fancy clothier word for “we have no idea how to categorize what they are, so instead we’ll just call them by how they are made! Brilliant!” Well, in dry cleaning world, your choices are “blouse” or “sweater” Which do you choose? Which DO you choose?
2. The Green – Men’s shirts? A buck apiece. A woman’s sweater / dress / blouse / skirt / jacket? Eleventy billion dollars. Apparently the Sacred Council of Dry Cleaners like to take women to, um, the cleaners.
3. The Getaway – When you take the wife’s clothes TO the dry cleaners in your building, you can cleverly conceal them in the laundry bag. No one is the wiser that you’re carrying women’s clothing. But what happens when you pick them up? Since you can’t park your car in the building’s lobby, there’s a guarantee that you’re walking out of the place which a arm of hangars in the finest floral patterns you can imagine. And no matter how stealthily you scoot to the elevator, it’s guaranteed to open up…with 6 other business men inside. Awkward looks for everybody!