Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Friday, September 26, 2014

Banned from the Junior League


In the South, nothing scores higher on the social register for women than the Association of Junior Leagues International, or AJLI. Banishment from its ranks is unthinkable. But there are options…

**********

This year marks the anniversary debut of Margaret Mitchell’s acclaimed book, Gone with the Wind. Its enduring contribution to the South lies in the fact that Southerners no longer name their children Ulysses and Sherman.

The year was 1936. The GWTW novel made its way into a movie, grossing more revenue than any other flick after adjusting for inflation. This acronym should not be confused with LGBT, another novel way to gross big dollars from the public treasury.

Everything is adjusted for inflation now. For example, my brand new red Pontiac Coupe cost $2,400 in 1962, a small fortune then. Today it won’t even buy a weekend trip to Panama City. The dollar’s value has GWTW also.

Margaret Mitchell was a wild and unrestrained member of the Atlanta Junior League. A hoity-toity charity ball was held at the PDC, a swanky private country club living on the fumes of the final days of finger bowls. She and a drunken Frenchman with a thin mustache shocked the starchy crowd with a erotic dance imported straight from the streets of Paris. The JL went ballistic and booted her.

Some years later she was run down by a car while crossing Peachtree Street. It’s rumored that a hit man was employed to salvage the reputation of the JL suffered by Mitchell’s disgusting display of social impropriety. The AJLI is a savage and vicious crowd. Don’t mess with it.

The tragic event remains unsolved. Some allege that a money trail led to the local chapter of AAONYMS, an august group of the Ancient Arabic of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, aka Shriners. Anything’s possible. Aside from being notoriously bad drivers, and some say big boozers, they create spectacles by wearing comical red fezzes and driving midget cars madly down Main Streets.

But women don’t have a lock on the elegant social organizations. Men have their own. Many are not eleemosynary. Some exist for delusionary purposes, like celebrating the primacy of male ego. Rotarians were once a venerable group. Alas, due to its revised by-laws, probation of crude jokes and gender slurs has rendered it impotent. Co-ed crowds are not totally integrated.

Men begin their concept of social order in college fraternities, a legacy of debauchery left behind by the Greeks. This self-elevated concept of immutable brotherhood still consists principally of beer orgies, tailgate parties and black marbles. Hazing is encouraged. Survival is iffy. Expulsion is possible only by revealing the secret handshake.

My fraternity’s handshake was envisioned by R.E. “Hand Jive” Lee. It involved a bone-crushing grip (a vestige of declining manhood), a twist of the palms, a locking of index fingers and ending with a fist bump. A certain effete frat house also used a handshake. Brothers shake and simultaneously tickle the palm of the other with an index finger. It’s reputed to have carnal implications.

After college, little changed. Daughters ransacked their fathers’ pension funds and became debutants, the feeder system for membership in the JL. Frat boys continued unabatedly their post-graduate antics.

One pompous fraternity formed a society known as ‘The Nooners.’ My post-grad brothers, not to be outdone, assembled a motley group known as ‘The Loose Screws.’ These secret societies were organized for continuation of leftover adolescent expressions and hyperbolic fabrications.

Unfortunately, neither group grasped the meaning of the French term, double entendre, a word grouping that ascribes double meanings to things. In the ‘60’s the French language wasn’t popular. Box wine didn’t score high marks. French was thought to be a variant of Pig Latin that originated at the University of Alabama after the Civil War.

The double entendre had dyslexic tendencies and soon became the name of a powerful libation, the Double Intender. It’s concocted with Wild Turkey bourbon, root beer and Red Bull. In sufficient quantities it trashes inhibitions, but guarantees the reward of seeing double and thinking single. Regrettably, the ‘Nooners’ and the ‘Loose Screws’ remain banned from debutant balls but well received in tattoo parlors.

**********

Things keep changing. Margaret has joined her manuscript, GWTW. Social mores are defined by airline passengers. Banishment from the Junior League is no longer a stigma, but is a shoe-in for women for membership in the AMVETS Ladies Auxiliary.

Separate but equal covers a wide landscape…


No comments: