T-shirts don't particularly appeal to me. (I'm not the Marlon Brando type.) But I recall that when we went to the C.N.E. 40 years ago I bought a tee with a picture of Asterix, the short Gaul in the French comic book who drank a magic potion, got super-strong and beat up Roman soldiers. (His catchphrase is "These Romans are nuts!") In my mid-teens I read a whole lot of Asterix books in their original French, with the help of a dictionary. They're really funny: writer Rene Goscinny and artist Albert Oderzo were a brilliant team. I remember one moment when Asterix sees them building one of those Roman aqueducts and says, "The Romans are ruining the countryside with their new construction!"
The '70s was the golden age of fancy tees. I recall that a lot of people were wearing tees showing Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural, with the caption "Just passin' thru." There were also Fonzie tees.
Around this time we went to a T-shirt store called Crazy David's, where you could get them customized. (The store had a poster saying "Crazy David loves you!") My brother John was a big fan of Monty Python, which just then was getting a cult following on PBS. (I never really got it.) So John got them to make him a tee with the John Cleese line "Wot's all this then?"
When the Pope visited Canada in 1984, my brothers considered wearing Martin Luther tees!
No comments:
Post a Comment