The Tenderheart and the Roughneck
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I lived in the same house from the time I was a small child until I was eighteen years old, but I never noticed the two battered shoeboxes that my father kept in a white wooden cabinet in his bedroom. My parents’ TV sat right in the middle of the built-in shelving. Above it were albums full of family photographs and my dad’s family Bible. Below it were two open-door cabinets. Inside, the shoeboxes. Every child knows there is a zone of privacy in their parents’ bedroom, a place where they keep things that don’t concern you, that pre-date you. So I never noticed them. But I wonder, knowing what I know now, if it’s also the case that some things can’t be found until a person is ready to find them.
It was September 2022, when I was forty-four years old and my father, Victor Plohetski, was seventy-eight, that he told me about the shoeboxes. I arrived at his house—my house, the one I grew up in—and began what was, at that point, becoming our ritual. I met him in the living room in his oversize recliner, a chair he rarely left anymore. I unpacked my recorder and turned it on. I pulled out a yellow legal pad. I composed the questions I wanted to ask.
I am a journalist by training, a journalist in my soul the way my father was a roughneck. For a month, I had been interviewing him, determined to understand more about his life. I wanted to answer a question that had plagued me since I was a boy: Why had there been such an unclosable distance between us?
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The baseball cap isn’t much of a hat, really. It’s nothing more than a duckbill visor attached to a skullcap. It throws the face into shadow and can make one’s head look disproportionately small. As for style, it hasn’t got much going for it either. It lacks the panache of a snap-brim fedora; it hasn’t got the larger-than-life bravado of a cowboy hat or the authority of a commodore’s kepi. More often than not, it has writing on it—sometimes the name of a team, but more likely nowadays the name of a corporation or a brand of beer or a slogan, political or otherwise. In this way, the cap denotes belonging. Indeed, as the Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan notes, the red Make America Great Again cap rises to the level of symbol. The MAGA hat “is not a statement of policy,” she wrote. “It’s a declaration of identity.”
The baseball cap is spunky and unpretentious, though; that much can be said for it. And in its way, it embodies the eternal youthfulness of our national spirit.
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Years earlier, 31-year-old Bill Bailey Carter had been a rising star in the southern advertising world, producing commercials that starred Orson Welles. By 39, his agency—and his marriage—had fallen apart. He moved to Seattle to start over, and I moved with my mom to Fairfield, Iowa. As I entered my teenage years, I sought something she couldn’t provide: a model for manhood. So the night before I started eighth grade, I moved west to live with my dad.
I still didn’t know the real reason behind my parents’ divorce, but as I met my dad’s many, many new guy friends, questions filled my mind. He sat me down one afternoon in our Capitol Hill apartment and said, “I need to talk to you about the fact that your father is gay.”
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At 95 years old, William Shatner is boldly going—well, who knows, actually? Morbid as it is, the Star Trek icon has been thinking about death lately, including in a new episode of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned.”
“When you’re 95, you shouldn’t be around. You should be dead,” Shatner tells Esquire editor in chief Michael Sebastian. “There is this trepidation of life that goes with 95, but also the mysteries of what am I going to see. Is there anything after life?”
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“Hold up, this was Mark Hamill?!” “Mark Hamill is completely unrecognizable…” “Did you spot him?”
That’s just a sampling of the reactions to episode 6 of Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series, which closes with a “guest starring” credit for Hamill and sends viewers scrolling back to the beginning to find him. The Star Wars actor is hiding in plain sight in the very first scene, a prologue to the episode that focuses on a phony-baloney fortune teller named Damon Nostra (aka Greg McMurray), who claims to have the power to hear the dead. A grisly scene then plays out as a tearful young woman sits down at his séance table and reveals she can do the same. Or, rather, she can actually do it—and it’s driving her to bloody madness.
Think of it as Hamill dressing up for Halloween. “I remember saying, ‘I want to be as unrecognizable as possible,’ and since he's sort of this mysterious mystic figure, the sky's the limit,” Hamill tells Esquire in his one-and-only interview about the role. “I said, ‘I need a nose!’”
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When it comes to style, Matt Friend is his own man. Unlike most of his fellow comedians, Friend dresses up onstage, opting for sharply tailored suits from brands like Brioni and Zegna instead of tees and hoodies. “I was drawn to this period of show business that has disappeared,” he says. “It’s a different world now; people can make content from their house. But I want to bring glamour back."
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