Button It

For people with Parkinson’s disease, getting dressed in the morning presents all kinds of challenges.  In particular, many Parkies struggle to button their shirt.

Maura Horton, whose husband Don, a college football coach, has Young Onset Parkinson’s, came up with a brilliant solution:  shirts with magnetic buttons.  She started a company which produces these shirts for both women and men.  What’s great about them?   They look like the real thing.

I read about Maura and Don in the Washington Post, then checked out Maura’s website.  If shirt buttons are a challenge for you, place an order!

At the moment, I’m fine with my own shirt buttons, except occasionally it takes forever to button some of my dress shirt collars.  Conclusion:  button-down collars are an invention of the Devil.

I recently asked a friend (Ambassador Kathleen Stephens – see recent post) to help me with the collar buttons on a new dress shirt I had, and it took her forever, too.  We were riding the train into Manhattan for a dress-up affair, and presented quite a shocking image to the other passengers.  Kathy had her hands at my throat, struggling over and over to get the two collar buttons into their too-small button holes.  It was practically the opening scene of the Agatha Christie movie, Murder, She Said, with gender roles reversed.