On the first day of school in Fairfax County, Virginia, kids boarding the bus weren’t greeted by just their driver, they were greeted by a man in a tuxedo.
Lucas Champion, 33, wanted to make a good first impression. “I think it went over really well. People enjoyed it, [and] it helped kind of ease the stress of the first day for some people,” he said. “Why not? I mean, it’s a simple thing. It makes people smile. I think what the world needs is more people smiling and feeling, just happy.”
Champion said to PEOPLE that the decision was completely spur-of-the-moment. The night before, he was with family when ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” came on. “So that came on and then it just sparked in my head, ‘Oh, tomorrow’s the first day of school. I’m gonna do this,’” he recalls. He pulled out his old groomsman tuxedo from 2016 and had it ready for the morning.
But there was one small problem: bus drivers usually wear work gloves to deal with grease, oil, and engine fluids. “That was actually heavy on my mind when I was getting ready to do this,” Champion said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh man, I hope I don’t get, if I don’t get oil or cooling [fluid] on my tuxedo. I better bring my gloves.’ So it was like a very big juxtaposition.”
At first, kids barely reacted. “I didn’t get a whole lot of response in the morning,” he said. “I think some of ’em may have maybe like glanced it and wondered and thought they might’ve just been seeing things or whatever.” But the afternoon was a different story. “Several were saying, ‘Hey, I love the fit.’ ‘Looking sharp, sir.’ ‘Nice suit.’ ‘Why are you wearing that?’”
Parents, faculty, and administrators joined in the fun too. “There were a lot of smiles. A lot of expressions of joy,” Champion said. “Faces lit up [with] smiles of bewilderment.” Some staff even teased him, asking if he was heading to a wedding or a job interview.
Of course, wearing a tuxedo in Virginia’s August heat wasn’t easy. “I was dripping. I had a rag behind me that I was just constantly wiping my head, wiping my brow, all that,” he said. “But, we gotta suffer for our art.”
As for what’s next, Champion is thinking of making it a yearly thing. “So I guess I kind of have to do it every year now,” he said with a laugh. “And hopefully I don’t gain too much weight and I size out of it. Then I don’t have to go get a new one.”
One thing’s for sure…this “sharp dressed man” made the first day of school a whole lot brighter.
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