Russell Frank offers two columns this week. For a more serious read, click here.
At 9 a.m. on Saturday, I asked Mary across the street if she could spare some cheap vodka.
She didn’t bat an eye, and not because I’m known as the neighborhood drunk.
In fact, I had no intention of drinking the stuff. My plan was to decant it into a spray bottle and spritz my gown – by which I mean my academic regalia, not my dressing gown or ball gown.
Why would I do such a thing? When I pulled my ceremonial garb out of the attic at graduation time last May, I spied a hole the size of a cigarette burn that could only have been made by a Tineola bisselliella, better known as a clothes moth.
How do you combat clothes moths? With mothballs, of course.
So my cap, gown and hood sat in a plastic bin in the company of a packet of mothballs lo these many months. At midweek I began airing them out, expecting the mothball smell to dissipate in time for me to suit up for commencement on Saturday.
By Friday night it was clear that the mothball smell was not going to dissipate in time for me to suit up for commencement on Saturday.
What to do? An online search recommended dry cleaning. I checked the hours of local dry cleaners, hoping they could do a super-rush job in the morning. Or if they couldn’t, maybe they knew of a super-quick deodorizing trick. None were open on Saturday.
Further research revealed that mothball fumes are not merely unpleasant. They’re unhealthful. Unhealthful as in carcinogenic — in large doses.
I thought about all the times I’d given my gown the sniff test in the preceding two days. My mouth was dry. My head hurt. I went to bed thinking I might not make it to commencement after all.
In the morning, head cleared, I had an idea that should have occurred to me sooner. I put out the call to Penn State’s faculty listserv.
Subject Line: Help, my gown reeks of mothballs!
Message: Anyone have a gown they’re not using today that they’re willing to lend? Commencement’s at noon. I’m about 6 feet – or was before I began to shrink. – RF
The message went out at 9. At 9:04 I heard from Andrea Tapia, the interim dean at IST (College of Information Sciences and Technology). Instead of offering me a gown, Andrea offered me a remedy: the cheap vodka spritz. As I’m sure you realize, this is not because cheap vodka absorbs that mothball smell better than the good stuff, but because you wouldn’t want to use the good stuff for non-tippling purposes.
Mary across the street proffered a bottle of Svedka, made, not in Sweden, nor anywhere else in the world’s vodka belt (Finland, Russia, Ukraine, etc.), but in Owensboro, Kentucky.
I gave the Svedka two hours to work its magic. By this point I had received three loaner gown offers. One was from my friend Leif Jensen, a professor of woo-woo (rural) sociology. I told him about the vodka spritz, adding that it might result in my going to the Jordan Center reeking of vodka instead of mothballs. His response: “You’ll fit right in.”
Next I heard from artist Linna Muschlitz, who swore that 20 minutes in a closed container with a bowl of vinegar would do the trick.
Linna attested to the efficacy of this method thus: “Vinegar took away the dead animal smell when the kitty brought a baby bunny into the house and it died under a bookshelf.”
With an hour to go before showtime at the BJC, I pivoted from vodka to vinegar.
With a half-hour to go, I gave my gown one more sniff. It smelled of mothballs, vodka and vinegar.
My new plan: If I heard from Leif before I got to the Jordan Center, I’d borrow his gown. If I didn’t, I’d resign myself to being the skunk at the picnic. I didn’t. (I found out later he’d put the gown out for me; all I had to do was pick it up.)
In the bowels of the Jordan Center, I told my colleague Frank Dardis how I’d spent my morning. After the vodka, the vinegar, and the abortive attempt to borrow a gown, Frank pointed to the simplest solution of all: There in the Green Room was a rack full of emergency backup gowns. Problem solved, right?
Not exactly. I attached my hood — the article of academic plumage in one’s school colors—to the odorless gown. But my hood was not odorless. It smelled of mothballs, vodka and vinegar.
For the next two hours I tried to focus on the Glory of Old State, but by the time the 20th Morgan crossed the platform, I began to feel woozy. The right-to-left shifting of the new grads’ tassels could not come soon enough.
Commencement, we tell our students, is the beginning of a lifetime of learning, not the end. Take me. I just learned, after 25 years on the faculty, not to deploy mothballs in the fight against Tineola bisselliella.
