Shirt The First: Spinal Tap Loud

I bought the blog background shirt in the late 1990s or early this century. I got it from the Aloha Shirtman, a white-haired old gent who lived in a house a few doors down from my apartment. Whenever he needed money or the spirit moved him, he'd tape a cardboard sign reading "BIG sale"to the pole at the end of the block and put his wares out on the lawn. He had a box piled full of identical 1971 Poppin' Fresh figurines (he was very specific about the 1971 part) and a bigger box of hardback copies of Scarlett.


He also had two pink bicycles and a few VCR tapes of old Westerns, but mainly he had shirts on a clothesline he strung between trees. He must have had a helluva collection, because the shirts in the sale were duplicates and/or not good enough to keep. He charged five dollars each for the shirts at first, but later they went up to six. This is a six-dollar shirt.

A few years later, in a creative writing graduate course, the hungover student across the seminar table looked at me, bleary-eyed, and groaned "Damn, Laurel, that shirt is loud. That shirt is Spinal Tap loud."

The photo doesn't do it justice--the colors really go to eleven. The tag reads "An Original Hawaiian Togs Made In Hawaii."