0:11
There's this fact that I love that I read somewhere once, that one of the things that's contributed to homo sapiens' success as a species is our lack of body hair -- that our hairlessness, our nakedness combined with our invention of clothing, gives us the ability to modulate our body temperature and thus be able to survive in any climate we choose. And now we've evolved to the point where we can't survive without clothing. And it's more than just utility, now it's a communication. Everything that we choose to put on is a narrative, a story about where we've been, what we're doing, who we want to be.
0:50
I was a lonely kid. I didn't have an easy time finding friends to play with, and I ended up making a lot of my own play. I made a lot of my own toys. It began with ice cream. There was a Baskin-Robbins in my hometown, and they served ice cream from behind the counter in these giant, five-gallon, cardboard tubs. And someone told me -- I was eight years old -- someone told me that when they were done with those tubs, they washed them out and kept them in the back, and if you asked they would give you one. It took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage, but I did, and they did. They gave me one -- I went home with this beautiful cardboard tub. I was trying to figure out what I could do with this exotic material -- metal ring, top and bottom. I started turning it over in my head, and I realized, "Wait a minute -- my head actually fits inside this thing."
1:36
(Laughter)
1:37
Yeah, I cut a hole out, I put some acetate in there and I made myself a space helmet.
1:42
(Laughter)
1:44
I needed a place to wear the space helmet, so I found a refrigerator box a couple blocks from home. I pushed it home, and in my parents' guest room closet, I turned it into a spaceship. I started with a control panel out of cardboard. I cut a hole for a radar screen and put a flashlight underneath it to light it. I put a view screen up, which I offset off the back wall -- and this is where I thought I was being really clever -- without permission, I painted the back wall of the closet black and put a star field, which I lit up with some Christmas lights I found in the attic, and I went on some space missions.
2:20
A couple years later, the movie "Jaws" came out. I was way too young to see it, but I was caught up in "Jaws" fever, like everyone else in America at the time. There was a store in my town that had a "Jaws" costume in their window, and my mom must have overheard me talking to someone about how awesome I thought this costume was, because a couple days before Halloween, she blew my freaking mind by giving me this "Jaws" costume.
2:43
Now, I recognize it's a bit of a trope for people of a certain age to complain that kids these days have no idea how good they have it, but let me just show you a random sampling of entry-level kids' costumes you can buy online right now ... ... and this is the "Jaws" costume my mom bought for me.
3:00
(Laughter)
3:03
This is a paper-thin shark face and a vinyl bib with the poster of "Jaws" on it.
3:10
(Laughter)
3:11
And I loved it.
3:13
A couple years later, my dad took me to a film called "Excalibur." I actually got him to take me to it twice, which is no small thing, because it is a hard, R-rated film. But it wasn't the blood and guts or the boobs that made me want to go see it again. They helped --
3:29
(Laughter)
3:30
It was the armor. The armor in "Excalibur" was intoxicatingly beautiful to me. These were literally knights in shining, mirror-polished armor. And moreover, the knights in "Excalibur" wear their armor everywhere. All the time -- they wear it at dinner, they wear it to bed.
3:48
(Laughter)
3:49
I was like, "Are they reading my mind? I want to wear armor all the time!"
3:53
(Laughter)
3:54
So I went back to my favorite material, the gateway drug for making, corrugated cardboard, and I made myself a suit of armor, replete with the neck shields and a white horse. Now that I've oversold it, here's a picture of the armor that I made.
4:09
(Laughter)
4:10
(Applause)
4:15
Now, this is only the first suit of armor I made inspired by "Excalibur." A couple of years later, I convinced my dad to embark on making me a proper suit of armor. Over about a month, he graduated me from cardboard to roofing aluminum called flashing and still, one of my all-time favorite attachment materials, POP rivets. We carefully, over that month, constructed an articulated suit of aluminum armor with compound curves. We drilled holes in the helmet so that I could breathe, and I finished just in time for Halloween and wore it to school. Now, this is the one thing in this talk that I don't have a slide to show you, because no photo exists of this armor. I did wear it to school, there was a yearbook photographer patrolling the halls, but he never found me, for reasons that are about to become clear.
5:00
There were things I didn't anticipate about wearing a complete suit of alumin