At the intersection where performance art meets downright helpful chore-doing we find this new installment/service at Pete’s Candy Store. Pete’s is known for its cool events, its diabolically difficult trivia night and for having a nice backyard in which to hang. Now it’s the place to get your clothes ironed, for free, while you drink. Greenpoint dad James Hook told the Brooklyn Paper he loves ironing so much he wanted to bring it into a public forum, and is offering to do it for free every Tuesday night in July, from 9pm-midnight.
“I love ironing, I really do,” Hook, who works at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden when he isn’t ironing for his three kids, told the paper. “I feel in order to perfect it, I need to bring it into a public forum — I feel you need to have people judging your work beyond your friends and family.”
Whether this is performance art in the vein of artisanal pencil sharpening or just do-gooderism we’re not sure, but it’s moot: Ironing is the actual worst, a lugubrious and space-consuming task that feels like a relic of another age, when wrinkle-shaming and pleat normativity grasped their prim hands over society and started to squeeze. But until we overturn workplace norms and bring back slobcore to its rightful place in mainstream society, you might still have to iron every now and then.
Hook will be armed with a prosumer-level Black & Decker steam iron and a standard-sized IKEA ironing board; it’s BYO hanger though. He reserves the right to reject any item of clothing for any reason, but is up for most challenges.
“Pleated skirts, linen shirts, silk ties to tye-dyes: I’ve seen and ironed it all,” he said in a press release. “I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to do justice to whatever wrinkled duds get thrown my way.”
Get your stuff ironed for free every Tuesday night in July from 9pm-midnight at Pete’s Candy Store, 709 Richardson St. in Williamsburg.
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