Hippie-type sunning himself in zoo is remembered

Back some years ago when a hippie was still a rarity, a jolly young bearded fellow took to sunning himself on Sunday afternoons on the rocky precipices of the goat and monkey enclaves of a large city zoo.

      Surrounded by a moat, he watched the crowds watching him with wry amusement and a shade of disdain while the baby animals gamboled about his sandal-shod feet.

There are times now I think back to that fellow, feeling some days that I’m the visitor in a cave full of capricious monkeys, and the only way to save my sanity is to adopt an aura of detached amusement.

      ITEM: The Baron was chauffeuring our son and two of his friends bound for the local cinema showing the adventures of a popular motorcycle-riding hero type.

      Our son was wearing his “Here Comes Bronson” ski cap, tattered blue jeans, and his favorite too-small topcoat. His one compatriot with long hair was wearing blue jeans painted in day-glo colors, and a surplus Navy coat, while the other fellow was attired in bell bottoms and his father’s World War II intelligence-type belted Army overcoat. A lovely bunch of hooligans, I thought.

Our wardrobe source in Towson, Md.

      “Listen,” the Baron was directed, “be sure to pick us up at 10 on the nose! That’s a ROUGH neighborhood.

      ITEM: With one teen-ager out babysitting and another out to a party, how to get through gracefully to their curfew times, ignore the far-off sirens, a spook movie on the late show and the fretful snores of their father on the couch?

      To wait by the front door, checking the lamppost every five minutes is gauche; going to bed and leaving the house in half-darkness, clearly unfeeling. What to do? The Cinderella hour comes and goes. Someone prods me gently on a numb shoulder.

      “Mom, mom,” hissed the pair. “Why don’t you go to bed! We’ve locked up and it’s lated! You crazy or something?”

Chastened, the watchdog, mother-protector of the hearth, goes yawning off to bed.

      ITEM: The telephone at our house rings every four minutes all evening. It is not a restful atmosphere. Friends claim they have been trying to reach us for weeks. “Drop a postcard,” I advise them concisely.

One phone on a short cord
for five people.
Those were the days!

      A “romance” is brewing in the confines of the junior high school. Three girls have telephoned to say Bruce is going to call tonight! Our ninth grader has nervously reset her hair three times, and races through the hallway like a giddy giraffe each time the telephone rings. “I think I’m going to have a coronary,” says the Baron. “Not before Bruce invites me to the spring dance, Daddy, please!” implores Miss Information Please.

      Two days pass. Now Bruce’s friends are calling, laying the groundwork. “Daddy,” pleads Cinderella, “be nice when you answer the phone. You scare them!”

      “That, my dear,” answers father, “is precisely my intent.”

      At last Bruce call, his voice sweet-rough with nervousness. “Tell him I’m not here,” Cinderella whispers, braiding her hair. “He’s a real creep.”

      Anyone else for a coronary?

      ITEM: Feeling guilty about all those ground beef casseroles coming out of the kitchen assembly-line style, I spend all afternoon preparing a three-course roast chicken dinner with sweet and sour salads, warm rolls, creamy gravy, and mountains of whipped cream.

      Number one son has band practice, and his sister has to referee a basketball game. She volunteers to broil hot dogs when they get home at 7. I snap. Little sister has a babysitting job and like a third-rate movie, the Baron telephones that he’ll be home late, about eight, just in time for the chicken to dry out and the potatoes to grow lumpy.

      I fix 5,000 calories and curl up before the television to have dinner with Randolph Scott on the Early Show, and I think wryly of the young hippie perched on the island with the frolicking bands of monkeys and goats.

      Then, why do they always come in and say, “For heaven’s sake, what are you CRYING about?”

--March 1970

Daughters in Dresses, Hose, Shoes a Cause Celebre

      Sunday morning a young lady came downstairs into the dining room, and the Baron jumped to his feet and pulled out a chair to seat her at the table.

      “Oh, Daddy, stop it!” she protested.

      “Pardon me, have we been introduced?”

      This Marx Brothers situation came about only because our daughters, like all daughters in the world, have begun to look like guides for a backpack trip through the Rockies.

      When they appear in dresses, hose, and shoes it is a cause celebre.

      When I was in high school I nearly died of panic because I had to wear oxfords that tied because there “good for my feet”. Now the kids go around bare-footed or in the ugliest possible tied oxfords that make their grandmothers beam in a kind of stupefied disbelief.

      Our 14-year-old has just been fitted for her first pair of “Granny” glasses, which make her look just like -- a granny. I keep waiting for her to offer me one of her recipes.

Diane in her original, and very cool!, granny glasses, usually wearing embroidered jeans and toting an embroidered Army surplus canvas bag. 

      Her major concern these days is the proper placement of all the appliques on her jeans: the peace symbol, the U.S. flag, the white butterfly, the “Right On” symbol. When she goes off to school in the morning she looks just like a Peter Max commercial. When her Superman t-shirt arrives in the mail everything will be complete, I suppose.

We loved pop artist Peter Max!

      I can remember when owning a cashmere sweater meant the difference between acceptance and oblivion. Nowadays it’s someone’s World War II fatigue jacket complete with rips and stains, that spells total success.

      Still being an innocent parent, and not yet cured of the Polly Flinders smocked dress syndrome, I wanted to take the girls shopping for new school clothes at the beginning of the year. Thy were delighted?

      We went and this is what we bought:

      6 yards decorative tape

      2 pairs of jeans

      1 bottle of bleach (for aging the jeans) 

      4 boyswear tee-shirts.

      So what are you complaining about, asked the Baron, beaming as he contemplated the sales slips.

      “What if they ran away?” I sobbed.

      “Whaddayuh mean, what if they ran away?”

      “How would the description sound? 

Blue jeans, long hair, tennis shoes, no makeup, wide belt, old Army jacket, it could fit a thousand kids!”

      “You forgot the braces,” added the Baron glumly.

      “Yeah,” he went on. “I can remember buying velvet ribbons for their pigtails Now they want to know if I’ve got any old ammunition boxes from the Army. You don’t suppose they’re planning to do any drastic, do you?”

      “No,” I sighed. “They just want someplace to keep their air pollution samples.”

      “I dunno,” sighed the Baron. “You give them everything. Fresh orange juice, swimming lessons, wheat germ, a subscription to American Girl. And they all turn out looking like a reunion of the 1929 Harvard lacrosse team.

      I nodded. Just then there appeared on the horizon a lovely creation in long wavy curls, wearing a pastel robe and smelling of lavender. She sailed gently past us like a spring zephyr, and headed for the fresh orange juice in the refrigerator. We beamed. She floated.

      “When Josh comes by,” she smiled, “tell him I’ll be a few minutes late.” We smiled some more, just to keep the whole thing running.

      Josh appeared like a young god, smelling of after-shave lotion and lots of soap. His curls were nicely tidied and his tee-shirt was wrinkleless. We began to behave like lunatic parents, beaming and smiling at every car that went down the street.

      She finally appeared in her “Cape Cod Mess” sweatshirt, the bleached jeans all the appliques, and pig-tails and they were off in a cloud of dust on his 10-speed bike.

      “Oh shut-up!” I said to the Baron.

      “I didn’t say a thing!” he laughed.

October 10, 1971

Men's Panty Hose a Laugh for this Female Wearer

Aside from the plumber’s bill last week, the funniest thing I’ve seen is the advertisement for men’s panty hose.

As one who is marking the days on her calendar until spring and the shedding of panty hose, I fund the idea of men adapting panty hose incredible. But then I laughed when they introduced wigs and it’s I who stays in the cold climes while all the wigmakers go to the Virgin Islands for winter vacations.

Panty hose, along with Friday night suppers, remain the bane of my existence.

Generally I am just about to shake the hand of the senator’s wife or meet Mike Douglas’s cousin from Cleveland for the first time when I look down and see that tell-tale circlet around my ankles.

If I yank at the ankles I get two-inch runners creeping wilding up my legs just as I get to the end of the receiving line.

If I yank at the waist, strange people come up and ask if they can get me something.

By the time I get home, I have two inches of panty hose looped around my ankles like stray bits of rope.

Yes, I know, they come in graduated sizes according to one’s height and weight, and they come in stretch fabrics which are made adaptable to almost everyone’s figure. But, then, I note philosophically, I always have trouble even measuring the right amount of vegetables from the economy freezer pack so how can I make the really big decisions about panty hose?

So I experiment.

By the time they all have runs, I have spent enough to buy a sun lamp and acquire a year-round tan on my legs.

When pant suits jumped into the spotlight last fall I though, wow, great, no one can see the collapsing panty hose, the tell-tale bagginess around the knees.

But, no, they still creep out beneath the cuff of the slack suit and slide gently over the top of my new chunky shoes.

But then I discovered hip-hugger slacks that drag on the floor. By wearing hip-hugger  slacks which drag on the floor no one knows that you are being slowly strangled to death on your panty hose. On the other hand, hi-hugger slacks tend to slide around and leave out two inches of waistline. This is combated by wearing your son’s sweater, which is two sizes too big.

When I went to my first yoga class in this outlandish outfit, the svelte young thins in purple body stockings smiled gently.

“What are all those legs doing hanging in the bathroom? It looks like the late night horror show.” Thus asks the Baron.

“That is $12 worth of panty hose, all of which have runs, the beginning of runs, or serious holes in the feet, which will be runs by next week.”

“Why don’t you just throw them out?”

“I haven’t the courage. Besides, one pair might fit if they shrink or stretch or something.”

Panty hose were perfected, presumably, to make miniskirts more modest. The body stocking was perfected no doubt because many women kept yanking up their panty hose so far they were ending up with veritable body stockings.

There is a little old lady on our block who has been wearing the same shade and type of hose (with the line running up the back) since World War !! ended. Her seams are never crooked; she would rather be seen in a bar than caught with a runner.

Yesterday she was out front cleaning the sidewalks of snow. Had on a cranberry body stocking with a plaid miniskirt and a Norwegian sweater her daughter-in-law had knit. “Warmest thing I’ve had since they stopped making snuggies,” she said, merrily tossing the snow over a three-foot bank. She’s 86 this winter.

Tomorrow I'm going out for one of those purple leotards and let the wrinkles go where they may.

I just noticed two extra inches of panty hose gathering cozily around my right knee, and if I yank on it I know what will happen. It can't be so long until summer and suntans. Has to be soon.

Postscript: Read about the history of pantyhose, courtesy of the Smithsonian.