The wife and I drove into the city today to do some errands. I was wearing my Colquhoun Ancient 'tank', Lovat blue hose, and "Real Men Wear Kilts!" t-shirt:



First we had gone to Jo-Ann's Fabrics to pick up some yarn for another pair of custom hand-knitted hose I'm having made. When we were checking out, the cashier (an older Hispanic man) smiled and said, "I like your shirt!". I'm assuming this is in no way related to the "I like your shoes" comment I had gotten recently, and that he genuinely liked the slogan on my shirt.

When we went into Target, one of the employees (a teenage male) said in passing, "I like your kilt!". I thanked him. Then, as we were walking down the aisle a while later, I heard, "Excuse me!" from behind. It was a 17-ish Hispanic girl who was with one of her friends. She said to me, "You look pretty cool. I was wondering if I could take your picture?" So I agreed.

She was very polite about it, and I hope she was being genuine. Although I must admit, I was immediately thinking about the recent Walmart thread, with bad behavior from teenage girls. When we parted, my wife told me that those two girls had been shadowing us across the store. But at least they were polite and asked my permission instead of being rude and uncouth about it. Hopefully she meant what she said, and isn't going to be unkind to me somewhere on the interweb!

I also heard a mother explaining to her young child, "he is wearing his kilt". I'm guessing the kid asked why that man was wearing a skirt. Hey, the kid learned something today because of me!

Later on, we stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few sundries, and as soon as we walked in the door, I heard one of the young teenage girls working there exclaim to another girl, "Oh my God, he's wearing a kilt!" She sounded really excited and overjoyed at it, not insulting, so I just smiled and walked on.

I always find it interesting to see or hear the reactions of people who aren't used to seeing a kilt in public. But it does start to wear on me after a while. As we had been out all day, I was starting to get annoyed by the constant staring. I just really wanted to 'blend in' and not be the center of attention.

Do you guys get that feeling sometimes? I'm not about to stop wearing the kilt... if anything, I'm pretty much wearing a kilt all the time when I'm not working. But I do wish sometimes that Americans were a little more used to seeing kilts, so I could just go about my business without all the fuss!