Hanging It Up: The Movie

I live in a house with three other roommates. And of course, each of us has our weekly laundry needs, which we can handle easily, because we have a washer and a dryer right in the house. Now, in many families, everyone's laundry gets washed together, then sorted out and distributed when clean. In a house of four guys, naturally we'd never do this; it's just too weird. So the machines are running about four or five days out of every week.

There's a wooden bar in the laundry room, just like one in my closet, running from wall to wall next to the dryer. Since I hate ironing, the key to having (mostly) wrinkle-free shirts and pants, aside from choosing the right kind of fabric when buying said clothes, is to hang them one at a time immediately upon removing them from the dryer. Open dryer, pull out one shirt, close dryer, restart dryer, hang shirt. Inevitably there are hangers left over after doing this, and they just stay hung on the bar until next time they're needed.

One thing we will inadvertently share is our clothes hangers - each of us has happened to buy different color hangers at one point or another, and we know when we're using someone else's. Nobody seems to mind, because we'd rather use the ones that are hung there than go all the way back to our bedrooms to get our own.

I was thinking about this today as I was hanging up a couple of empty hangers belonging to someone else, and I got this thought: Could there be a day when we all come together with all of our unused hangers, and resort them according to owner? The Great Hanger Reconciliation of 2005, it'd be called. Each of us walking to the common area of the house loaded with armfuls of wire and plastic, nary a word spoken, cold stares, inaudible grunts of disdain. The music, the drama, the tension! Tossing the pilfered hangers into a heap, tangled and gnarly like a pile of discarded willow branches. Each man allowed to retrieve his possessions according to his chosen tribal colors, and retreating to his bedroom to realign them on his closet's crossbar.

This would make a great short film. I know it.