I’ve got to say, my brother-in-law’s wedding is turning into a real hassle for me. I’ve already mentioned that my wife wants me to lose weight for this wedding, because apparently I am now embarrassing to take out in public. And now she’s dragging me from clothing store to clothing store—in public—to buy clothes for our kids. That’s how desperate she is.

Apparently, I don’t know this, because I’m a guy, but what we personally are going to wear to this wedding is apparently a really big deal. Apparently, someone decided that everyone in the wedding party has to match. No one knows who decided this. Everyone’s pointing at the kallah, but I don’t think this was her decision. She’s wearing white.

But whoever’s fault this is, we have to match the kallah’s side, even though we’re not appearing in a single picture with them, unless you include crowd shots. But we are appearing in pictures with my mother-in-law, who’s appearing in pictures with the kallah’s mother, who’s appearing in pictures with her family. So I don’t see what other choice we have.

And then our suits, of course, have to match our ties. The basic plan is to go with black suits, because there are different shades of blue, but there’s really only one black. At least as far as I know. So we need ties that have both black and whatever color the gowns are.

All this is notwithstanding our own dramatic suit-buying politics.

We used to have a store that we liked. It sold kids’ suits that were machine washable, which is definitely something you want in a kids’ suit. But that store closed down. Apparently, clothing is not a big seller anymore. Everyone telecommutes.

There’s also no suit gemach. Though I get it. You wear a suit to a chasuna, no one wants it back. You’d think there’d be a tie gemach, though.

And this is a pretty big issue for us, because apparently, not all my boys even have suits in the first place. I have only one kid so far who’s willing to wear a jacket on a regular basis, and he leaves it on the floor after Shabbos until about Friday, when we yell at him to clean his room, at which point he hangs it up, and then takes a shower and takes it down again.

So we definitely need to buy suits for all of them, and of course we all have to come along. I have to come to help my wife wrangle a herd of boys around a store, and my wife has to come so I don’t accidentally buy dark blue.

It’s not easy to shop for suits with a bunch of little boys. No one wants to try anything on, everyone leaves everything on the floor, and every time you stop to look at suits, everyone disappears.

“Where are they?”

“Inside the racks.”

It’s also my job, as the Totty, to go into the dressing room to check on them. But I’m not that helpful in there. I have an incredibly skinny 8-year-old who insists on going into the stall alone. I don’t know what he’s doing in there, but he keeps coming out, every 20 minutes or so, wearing parts of two different suits. And holding the waistband up with one hand.

My 4-year-old does let me come in with him. But you know how the stall door doesn’t go down to the floor, so you could see legs and know that someone’s in there? Well, this kid’s legs are toddler length. You can see his belly button.

And meanwhile, my 10-year-old is off in his own stall, strewing things all over the floor.

In the meantime, we keep going to stores and buying suits we’re not happy with, just because we haven’t seen anything better. So, right now, we have one suit from the first store we went to, two suits from store #2, two suits from store #3, two tuxes we borrowed from a fourth store for my 4-year-old to try on, and we have to figure out what we want so we can make the circuit again to return everything. And we still need several ties of various sizes that match each other AND the gown, which we don’t have and exists only in a picture on my wife’s phone. And at the end of the day, when we return her gown, we’ll have ties we specifically bought to match some gown we no longer have.

By Mordechai Schmutter

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press and Aish.com, among others. He also has four books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].