Pomp and Circumstance

When I finished up with grad school, I had spent so many years and so many tens of thousands of dollars on the education itself that the expense of the graduation robes seemed to my defeated mind like just one more of the mysterious fees that materialized and multiplied on my tuition bill every year. But now when I look back on it, I really do think that the robes are mindbogglingly expensive (for those not so unfortunate as to have been met with the price tag personally: $921.00, after a 10% discount. And that was back in 2005.).

I could have gotten away for about $200 less, if I had gone with the plain black robes and the flat mortarboard hat. But I really, really despise the mortarboard. Never flattering, it looks especially terrible on me: surrounded by the big square hat, my big flat Asian face looks like a charger on a placemat. So I figured that if I was going to have to spend $750 on the robes, I might as well get the slightly less dorky ones.

And so I got the official Carolina regalia package, a sky-blue robe with dark blue velvet panels with the school's crest embroidered, and the round velvet tam for a cap. I'm glad that I got them because they really are lovely, and somehow I like that they so visibly honor the place I earned my degree. But the light color means that I also spend a good part of each graduation day weighing the inconvenience of taking them to the dry cleaner against the possibility that I will sweat onto them, and also hoping desperately that no small children will spill punch on me.

This year, after suffering through a miserably humid ceremony, the odds were definitely in favor of dry cleaning, so I went to drop them off but was disconcerted to find that the sign denoting the family business of the gentle elderly couple had been replaced by a sign for Mark's Shoe Repair. Since there were racks of clothing visible in the window, I stopped in, and a big, burly man with tattoos (Mark?) took my robes off my hands, after first eying them suspiciously and asking, "So what do we have here?"

Upon leaving, I was, predictably, plagued with anxiety, as I had just handed over a thousand-dollar garment to a man who really didn't seem to be a dry cleaner at all. Sigh.