Decked out: (adj) decorated or dressed up

Nothing makes me giggle more than remembering something I did and trying to grasp what caused me to do it.

The truth of the matter is, life refuses to match up with itself.

What I mean by that is:

• When you need to look your best, you have your least money.
• When you need to perform your best, you’re too inexperienced.
• And when you need to be making really quality decisions, you find yourself completely uncertain, staring down at your shoes.

I think life enjoys this.

I think life relishes offering us opportunity when it knows we can’t possibly take it.

I am sure life thinks it’s funny—giving us rare glimpses into success when we’re so dopey that we couldn’t possibly muster the reasoning to pull it off.

When I was young, I traveled on the road with a music group. We were pretty good—but we were very poor.

Even though it’s very important to dress up for a performance—or at least look clean and well-laundered—it is difficult to achieve this when you’re dressing out of the back end of an old, brown Econoline van.

I remember arriving at a performance one night and discovered that it was going to be much bigger than I  thought.

I had two outfits to wear onstage. The first was a leisure suit—powder blue and white snow.

The second outfit was a gold shirt with a pair of plaid pants, which, for some reason or another, were considered cool for that season.

I wanted to be decked out for this show.

I should have thought of that two days earlier—because the leisure suit had a two-inch stain on the right leg. The gold shirt and plaid pants were wrinkled. And I couldn’t find my belt.

I sat for a good fifteen minutes trying to measure whether it was better to be stained or wrinkled and beltless.

Then I quickly slipped on my plaid pants and gold shirt and went out to finish the setup of our equipment.

It was a fiasco.

The pants refused to stay up.

Finally, to my embarrassment, they dropped down to my thighs before I could grab them and yank them back up to the border of decency.

I looked around the room to see who might have caught a glimpse, and there, in the back of the auditorium was a little girl about eight years old, shocked and ready to scream, who beat a trail to Mommy.

The pants and shirt were not going to work.

I went backstage and changed into my leisure suit and spent the whole night trying to lay my arm over the stain so nobody would notice.

But it, too, was a little wrinkled, so I never really felt like I achieved “decked out.”

I was nervous about my stain all night.

And lo and behold, my left shoe picked that night to break a lace.

I thought I did adequately until one of the girls in our band walked up and patted me on the shoulder and said, “Nice stain.”