Dress for the job you want: cower in place 19

ike many people these days, Kathleen and I are trying our hand at making face masks. It has finally vindicated our hoarding tendencies.

I’m not talking about the now-popular plague hoarding of toilet paper and hand-san, I’m talking about what’s been our habit for years now, that just recently we’ve decided to stop.

But maybe not just yet! We had fabric to sew into masks, and some elastic (some big hair scrunchies if nothing else works), but I didn’t know where we’d find the flexible piece of metal that shapes the mask around one’s nose.

Aha! A few years ago, I was replacing a worn out windshield wiper on our car. As you may have noticed, some windshield wiper blades have a thin piece of metal maybe 1/8 of an inch wide, sitting immediately behind the rubber squeegee part to stiffen it. That metal piece is called, apparently, the flexor. “I wonder if this metal would ever be useful for anything,” I mused at the time. “I’d better save it, just in case.”

And sure enough, five years and one zombie apocalypse later, I really did have a need for that thin metal strip. I had another source too, from another hoarding action. You know those metal reinforcers that are glued inside hanging file folders? Well, we didn’t hoard those reinforcers (that would be bizarre), but Kathleen and I both hoarded a bunch of work files from jobs we had 10 or 15 years ago, and by golly some of those files were in folders, and some of those folders had those metal reinforcing strips. Pay dirt! Proof that “Hoarders Always Prosper”, if you wait long enough.

I’ve made a couple of masks now, but they’re not much good. I’m still relearning how to follow sewing directions and patterns (I used to be quite facile at it, back in my hippie, make-it-yourself days in the distant past.)

Kathleen and I wear face masks when we take Archie for his walks. I know they say that face masks are primarily to protect other people from your contaminated body fluids, and not to protect you from them, but I don’t buy that. I can think of four ways that wearing a face mask will reduce your risk of catching the coronavirus.

(1) Even a simple cloth mask or bandana does afford some protection, stopping maybe half of the airborne particles that would otherwise collide with your face. And a 50% reduction in risk from this particular pathway is (ahem) nothing to sneeze at.

(2) A face mask makes it harder to touch your face. You have to really work to get to your nose or mouth, so you’re not going to do it without thinking, and if you think about it, you’ll probably decide not to do it.

(3) A face mask, like a uniform, is a form of wordless communi­cation—it transmits a message about you to other people. “I’m taking this whole virus thing seriously,” it says. “Keep your poxy self six feet away!”

(4) Wearing a face mask can exert peer pressure on others to also wear their face masks (and that’s where the real protection to you comes in!). We live in a semi-rural, semi-“red”, quiet older neighborhood, and the number of people we’ve seen wearing face masks in this neighborhood is exactly two: Kathleen and me. There are careful people here who take the virus seriously, we’ve talked to them, but they come out of their houses very rarely if at all.

And clearly the hardest social hurdle to wearing a face mask is you don’t want to be the first one in your neighborhood to do it, or you’ll look silly. But Kathleen and I, as a public service, have relieved our neighbors of that burden. We’ll be like the lone applauders in the audience before everyone else joins in, and march proudly with our faces covered.

Here’s one of the masks we made. To show it in the best possible light, I’ve photoshopped it onto the face of Tyrone Power, star of that great swashbuckler, The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Basil Rathbone and Linda Darnell.

This is from the one scene in the movie where Zorro wears a mask covering his nose and mouth, instead of his more iconic bandit eye-mask (). I thought I remembered that this scene was the first time he went out as Zorro, and I figured that he just hadn’t invented his signature eye-mask yet at this point in the movie.

But while fast-forwarding through a youtube of the movie looking for this image, I saw that his eye-mask was actually introduced in an earlier scene when he tore down the poster about taxing the peasants. Then he robbed the evil Alcalde wearing the protective face-mask in the scene above, and then in all the later scenes he was back in his eye-mask. So I don’t know what is going on in this scene, maybe his other mask is in the wash or something, but this whole thing bothers me probably more than it should.

So the moral of this story is if you’re not staying at home, wear a face mask in public. If you don’t have one, make one, it’s not that hard. Protect your neighbors, and maybe they’ll get the message and protect you too!

Thanks,
Dorn
4/7/2020