Classic Car Show & Hot Rod Hats

Car-show season has its own vocabulary. Cars and coffee is a laid-back, early-morning weekend meetup in a parking lot, usually over by about 9 a.m., and cruise night and the hot rod are the other names hobbyists type into search boxes. The owners who show up are the ones whose cars are done, with a lawn chair parked by the bumper. The jokes come from that pampered stance. Classic car listings brag that a car was garage kept and never driven in rain or snow, or that it did almost nothing but car shows, and matching numbers means, as one glossary puts it, that the VIN matches the title. Then there is the question every owner hears: is it for sale? One forum poster counted 26 people at the door, and one window sign reads NOT FOR SALE, SO PLEASE DO NOT ASK. These classic car show and hot rod hats start with CLASSIC CAR GUY and HOT ROD as plain badges, then add CARS AND COFFEE, CRUISE NIGHT, NUMBERS MATCHING, GARAGE KEPT and RAT ROD. The sentence hats carry the car that has never seen rain, the one driven only to the show, and the answer to the question. CLASSIC CAR NO IT'S NOT FOR SALE and MY CLASSIC CAR HAS NEVER SEEN RAIN each get a second colorway. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat, a gift for the owner who keeps the lawn chair in the trunk.