Gorilla My Dreams

Mamacita says:  The gorilla was minding his own business.  The child was being a child – mommy looks down and then up and he was gone, like a bullet from a gun.

The actual bullet from a gun came a few minutes later.

Who was to blame?  It could have happened to any parent at any time, with an energetic little boy who disregarded his mom’s order to “stay here.”  Four-year-olds are impulsive.  He saw where he wanted to go and he went there.  That he then plummeted down into the home of the gorilla was unexpected.  It isn’t as if the child plotted and planned to murder the gorilla.

I’m really sorry for the mom, who is being upheld online as the worst mom ever.  I’m sorry for the child, who will forever after be branded as the kid who murdered the beloved gorilla.

But mostly. . . .

Mostly, well, this.

Mostly, well, this.

I know, I know.  Children are unpredictable.  Children do awful things.  Children get away from us and only the Flash could catch them.  They’re fast.  They’re wily.  They’re little geniuses who love to run.  They can be found in the most absurd tight-fitting places.  They crawl up vending machine slots and their moms find them on the other side of the glass, just like Dudley in the reptile house.  They pick the neighbors’ flowers.  They drag home dogs and cats with collars and beg to keep them.  They devour scrambled eggs on Tuesday and scream with fury if you serve scrambled eggs on Friday.

And they run.  They run away.  They run from us in grocery stores and malls.  They run from us in parks and pools and parking lots.  We spend a good part of our lives chasing them.

Wise parents leash their excitable, running-away toddlers in public places.  This prevents them from dashing away like a bullet from a gun.

That way, there wouldn’t have to be a real bullet from a real gun.

Convince me otherwise.  I want you to.  Please.

I don't want anything bad to happen to your child. I don't want your child to make something bad happen to anyone else, either.

I don’t want anything bad to happen to your child. I don’t want your child to make something bad happen to anyone else, either.

The zoo made the right decision.  A child is more valuable than an animal, definitely.  I love children.  That’s why I want them to be safe in a large, crowded public place.

I’m sure the internet will continue to label this mother and this child, but it will eventually forget and the furor will die down.  In the meantime, let us try to remember that children do childish things.  They’re supposed to do childish things – they’re CHILDREN.  Moms do not have a sixth sense, nor do they really have eyes in the backs of their heads – that’s Mary Tyler Moore and the walnuts you’re thinking of.

I seeeeee you. . . . . .

I seeeeee you. . . . . .

Shit Bad things happen. They happen to all of us. I’m so desperately sorry for everyone and everything involved here.

Don’t beat yourself up, mom. Help your child not to feel too badly. Badly enough not to do it again, but not too badly.

And buy a leash.

 

What Do You Know About "Taps?"

Breathtaking song, this.

Breathtaking song, this. Taps.

Mamacita says:  How much do you know about “Taps?”  Whether you’re hearing those breathtaking notes from a bugle, from a trumpet, from a choir, from a soloist. . . whether you’re hearing those notes from across a lake, from a mountaintop, from a cemetery, from across a field, in a gym. . . the song is beautiful, touching, nostalgic, heartbreaking, and invokes too many emotions and reactions to list here.

 

Quotation Saturday: Wishing and Hoping

quotation saturday, mamacita's blog, jane goodwinMamacita says:  Dusty Springfield sang about Wishing and Hoping; Cinderella sang A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.

There’s something so uniquely wonderful about a favorite student who grows up and still wants to talk to you regularly.  I have a lot of these in my life, and I thank God daily for them.

This is for them.

1.  If you can imagine it, you can create it.  If you can dream it, y ou can become it.  –William Arthur Ward

2.  Life is a cup to be filled, not drained.  –Unknown

3.  What we need is more people who specialize in the impossibhle.  –Theodore Roethke

4.  Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!  Live the life y ou’ve imagined.  As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.  –Henry David Thoreau

5.  Magic has often been thought of as the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions.  Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.  –Starhawk

6.  Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams y ou want to realize.  Your words are the greatest power you have.  The words you choose and the use establish the life you experience.  –Sonia Croquette

7.  The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.  –Eleanor Roosevelt

8.  In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.  –Luigi Pirandello

9.  Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.  –John Updike

10.  Empower your dreams with deadlines.  –H. Jackson Brown

11.  There are many ways of breaking a heart.  Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream – whatever that dream might be.  –Pearl S. Buck

12.  In dreams begins responsibility.  –William Butler Yeats

13.  All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.  –Elias Canetti

14.  Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.  –Ralph Charell

15.  I learned that there were two ways I could live my life:  following my dreams or doing something else.  Dreams aren’t a matter of chance, but a matter of choice.  When I dream, I believe I am rehearsing my future.  –David Copperfield

16.  A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.  –Walter de la Mare

Never lose sight of your wishes and dreams. . .

Never lose sight of your wishes and dreams. . .

17.  When a dream takes hold of you, what can you do?  You can run with it, let it run your life, or let it go and think for the rest of your life about what might have been.  –Patch Adams

18.  Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so ou shall become.  Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.  –James Allen

19.  Don’t be pushed by your problems.  Be led by your dreams.  –Unknown

20.  In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.  –Janos Arany

21.  The dream is real, my friends.  the failure to realize it is the only unreality.  –Toni Cade Bambara

22.  Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough.  You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.  –Sir James M. Barrie

23.  Dreams come in a size too big so that we may grow into them.  –Josie Bisset

24.  I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.  –Emily Bronte

25.  Before your dreams can come true, you have to have those dreams.  –Joyce Brothers

26.  I dream; therefore I become.  –Cheryl Grossman

wishes

27.  We are not hypocrites in our sleep.  –William Hazlitt

28.  Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.  –H.F. Hedge

29.  All men of action are dreams.  –James G. Huneker

30.  Most people never run far enough on their first wind, to find out if they’ve got a second.  give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.  –William James

31.  When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream.  when we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.  –Dom Helder Camara

32.  The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.  –Elizabeth Gilbert

33.  Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?”  But I dream things that never were, and I say, “Why not?”  –George Bernard Shaw (Bobby Kennedy wasn’t the first to say it.  He should have cited his source!)

34.  Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.  Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.  –Gloria Steinem

35.  Every great dream begins with a dreamer.  Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.  –Harriet Tubman

36.  I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long.  If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.  –Hobbes  (yup, THAT Hobbes.)

37.  Like all dreams, I confuse disenchantment with truth.  –Jean-Paul Sartre

38.  Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  –Charles William Dement

39.  There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.  –Douglas Everett

40.  Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  –William Faulkner

41.  I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.  That myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts – that hope always triumphs over experience – that laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.  –Robert Fulghum

42.  The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.  –Kahlil Gibran

43.  If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  –Marcel Proust

44.  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.  –Mark Twain

45.  If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams about what life should be, then maturity is letting go again.  –Mary Beth Danielson

46.  There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow. –Victor Hugo

47.  Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.  –Virginia Woolf

48.  Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.  Go forward and make your dreams come true.  –Ralph Waldo Emerson

49.  A dream is an answer to a question we haven’t yet learned how to ask.  –Fox Mulder

50.  Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations are legitimate.  They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.  –William James

51.  A goal is a dream with a deadline.  –Duke Ellington

52.  Dreams are wishes caste upon stars, so catch a shining one – take your friend’s hand, and hold on forever.  –Traci Brown

53.  Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn’t all a dream?  –Ashleigh Brilliant

54.  Dreams die hard, and you hold them in your hands long after they’ve turned to dust.  –from Dragonheart

55.  Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  –William Dement

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, one night, set sail in a wooden shoe.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, one night, set sail in a wooden shoe.

56.  Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.  Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.  –Mark Twain

57.  A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.  –Antoine de Saint-Exupery

58.  Dreams are renewable.  No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.  –Dale E. Turner

59.  There will always be dreams grander or humbler than your own, but there will never be a dream exactly like your own, for you are unique and more wondrous than you know.  –Linda Staten

60.  We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.  –Arthur O’Shaughnessy

61.  If you talk to your children, you can help them to keep their lives together.  If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.  –Jim Rohn

62.  Dreams are great.  When they disappear you may still be here, but you will have ceased to live.  –Lady Nancy Astor

63.  When our memories outweigh our dreams, we have grown old.  –William J. Clinton

64.  Sometimes dreams alter the course of an entire life.  –Judith Duerk

65.  Dreams do not vanish, so long as people do not abandon them.  -P.F. Harlock

66.  I had a dream, and it landed right here in my hand.  —Robert Richard Toth

67.   In dreams begins responsibility.  William Butler Yeats

68. Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don’t. –Brett Butler

69. He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. –Douglas Adams

70. All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible –T.E. Lawrence

71. Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. –John Updike

72. Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts. –Unknown

73. Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you. — Marsha Norman

74. Dreams–a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. –Erich Fromm

75. Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams don’t have much. –Unknown

Quotation Saturday: Dreams and Wishes

quotationsaturdayMamacita says: Dusty Springfield sang about Wishing and Hoping; Cinderella sang about A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.

There’s something so uniquely wonderful about a favorite student who grows up and still wants to talk to you regularly.  I have a lot of these in my life, and I thank God daily for them.

This list is for them.

1.  If you can imagine it, you can create it.  If you can dream it, y ou can become it.  –William Arthur Ward

2.  Life is a cup to be filled, not drained.  –Unknown

3.  What we need is more people who specialize in the impossibhle.  –Theodore Roethke

4.  Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!  Live the life y ou’ve imagined.  As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.  –Henry David Thoreau

5.  Magic has often been thought of as the art of making dreams come true; the art of realizing visions.  Yet before we can bring birth to the vision we have to see it.  –Starhawk

6.  Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams y ou want to realize.  Your words are the greatest power you have.  The words you choose and the use establish the life you experience.  –Sonia Croquette

7.  The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.  –Eleanor Roosevelt

8.  In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.  –Luigi Pirandello

9.  Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.  –John Updike

10.  Empower your dreams with deadlines.  –H. Jackson Brown

11.  There are many ways of breaking a heart.  Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream – whatever that dream might be.  –Pearl S. Buck

12.  In dreams begins responsibility.  –William Butler Yeats

13.  All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.  –Elias Canetti

14.  Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.  –Ralph Charell

15.  I learned that there were two ways I could live my life:  following my dreams or doing something else.  Dreams aren’t a matter of chance, but a matter of choice.  When I dream, I believe I am rehearsing my future.  –David Copperfield

16.  A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.  –Walter de la Mare

17.  When a dream takes hold of you, what can you do?  You can run with it, let it run your life, or let it go and think for the rest of your life about what might have been.  –Patch Adams

18.  Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so ou shall become.  Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.  –James Allen

19.  Don’t be pushed by your problems.  Be led by your dreams.  –Unknown

20.  In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.  –Janos Arany

21.  The dream is real, my friends.  the failure to realize it is the only unreality.  –Toni Cade Bambara

22.  Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough.  You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.  –Sir James M. Barrie

23.  Dreams come in a size too big so that we may grow into them.  –Josie Bisset

24.  I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.  –Emily Bronte

25.  Before your dreams can come true, you have to have those dreams.  –Joyce Brothers

26.  I dream; therefore I become.  –Cheryl Grossman

27.  We are not hypocrites in our sleep.  –William Hazlitt

28.  Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.  –H.F. Hedge

29.  All men of action are dreams.  –James G. Huneker

30.  Most people never run far enough on their first wind, to find out if they’ve got a second.  give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.  –William James

31.  When we are dreaming alone, it is only a dream.  when we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.  –Dom Helder Camara

32.  The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.  –Elizabeth Gilbert

33.  Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?”  But I dream things that never were, and I say, “Why not?”  –George Bernard Shaw (Bobby Kennedy wasn’t the first to say it.  He should have cited his source!)

34.  Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.  Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.  –Gloria Steinem

35.  Every great dream begins with a dreamer.  Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.  –Harriet Tubman

36.  I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long.  If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.  –Hobbes  (yup, THAT Hobbes.)

37.  Like all dreams, I confuse disenchantment with truth.  –Jean-Paul Sartre

38.  Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  –Charles William Dement

39.  There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.  –Douglas Everett

40.  Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  –William Faulkner

41.  I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.  That myth is more potent than history.  I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts – that hope always triumphs over experience – that laughter is the only cure for grief.  And I believe that love is stronger than death.  –Robert Fulghum

42.  The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.  –Kahlil Gibran

43.  If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  –Marcel Proust

44.  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade winds in your sails  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.  –Mark Twain

45.  If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams about what life should be, then maturity is letting go again.  –Mary Beth Danielson

46.  There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow. –Victor Hugo

47.  Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.  –Virginia Woolf

48.  Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.  Go forward and make your dreams come true.  –Ralph Waldo Emerson

49.  A dream is an answer to a question we haven’t yet learned how to ask.  –Fox Mulder

50.  Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations are legitimate.  They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.  –William James

51.  A goal is a dream with a deadline.  –Duke Ellington

52.  Dreams are wishes caste upon stars, so catch a shining one – take your friend’s hand, and hold on forever.  –Traci Brown

53.  Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn’t all a dream?  –Ashleigh Brilliant

54.  Dreams die hard, and you hold them in your hands long after they’ve turned to dust.  –from Dragonheart

55.  Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.  –William Dement

56.  Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.  Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.  –Mark Twain

57.  A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.  –Antoine de Saint-Exupery

58.  Dreams are renewable.  No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.  –Dale E. Turner

59.  There will always be dreams grander or humbler than your own, but there will never be a dream exactly like your own, for you are unique and more wondrous than you know.  –Linda Staten

60.  We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.  –Arthur O’Shaughnessy

61.  If you talk to your children, you can help them to keep their lives together.  If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.  –Jim Rohn

62.  Dreams are great.  When they disappear you may still be here, but you will have ceased to live.  –Lady Nancy Astor

63.  When our memories outweigh our dreams, we have grown old.  –William J. Clinton

64.  Sometimes dreams alter the course of an entire life.  –Judith Duerk

65.  Dreams do not vanish, so long as people do not abandon them.  -P.F. Harlock

66.  I had a dream, and it landed right here in my hand.  —Robert Richard Toth

67.   In dreams begins responsibility.  William Butler Yeats

68. Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don’t. –Brett Butler

69. He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. –Douglas Adams

70. All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible –T.E. Lawrence

71. Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. –John Updike

72. Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts. –Unknown

73. Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you. — Marsha Norman

74. Dreams–a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul. –Erich Fromm

75. Never laugh at anyone’s dreams. People who don’t have dreams don’t have much. –Unknown

Sweep Your Steps!!!

Sam Levinson, that wonderful hilarious writer who could tug on your heartstrings and tickle your funnybone with one sentence, said that his mother used to say, “If everybody swept their own front steps, the whole world would be clean.”
This can be taken literally, or it can be made into a very effective allegory; you pick one.  I’ve chosen both.
I do not, and will not ever, understand people who don’t keep their own front steps clean.  It’s not hard.  Think how beautiful the world would be if everybody kept their own front steps clean.  Think how it would look.  Think how it would SMELL – like beauty and goodness and conscientiousness and honesty and hard work and, well, like nice people.  Are there really people who don’t understand this concept?
It’s true that it can all seem impossible – that one’s environment has deteriorated to the point that individuals feel powerless to do anything about it, but that’s not true.  It isn’t true.  Every seemingly impossible thing in all of history has been accomplished by individuals who saw that it needed to be invented or discovered or simply just DONE, so they did it.
If everybody swept their own front steps, the whole world would be clean.  Absolute truth in a few simple words.
It’s about education, isn’t it.  It’s all about education.
By the way, if you haven’t read his books, run, RUN, for the bookstore.  You just can’t waste any more minutes not knowing them practically by heart.  Yes, they are that good.
“Everything But Money” (my favorite), “In One Era and Out the Other,” “You Don’t Have To Be In Who’s Who To Know What’s What” . . . Sam Levinson’s books are classically wonderful.  You’ll laugh out loud, and you’ll cry out loud, too.  Mostly, you will laugh.  I can’t recommend these books highly enough.
The books are old, OLD, and I don’t know if they are out of print or not.  However, they are all still available on Amazon; I just checked.
It’s too bad, isn’t it, that so many people in this world are perfectly content to live with dirty front steps.  I wonder why that is. . . . .
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Dear Teen Girls: You Will Grow Into Women, Not Toothpicks!

Mamacita says:  Little wonder that our students are so confused about what they’re “supposed” to look like. Teen magazines that used to give us ADVICE about our appearance are now telling kids that unless they look like (insert talentless celebrity here), they’re hideous. AND, many kids have no home backup to instill some self-respect and common sense, so they believe this stuff.

Trends come and trends go. Rubenesque women used to be the epitome of feminine beauty. Adult women built like eleven-year-olds (Twiggy) were popular. Breasts are flattened by a board placed strategically under the underwear and tied into place. Breasts are bigger. Breasts are pointy. Breasts are smaller. Hems are high. Hems are low. A waistline is hidden. A waistline is enhanced by a corset so tight a woman can’t even put it on by herself; she needs a winch fastened to the bedpost, later spelled wench and transformed into a person. How empowering it must have been, for women to finally get clothing they could put on all by themselves!

Now, supermodels are built like concentration camp prisoners, and the walk down the runway looks a lot like the walk to the Belsen showerhouse.* These women look like a sneeze would blast them backwards like a bullet from a gun.

(You know, Victorian men must not have seen very many naked women; otherwise, why and how could a man have possibly believed women were supposed to look like a wasp?)

There were fancy schools in Victorian England that had a rule that each young woman must have a 17-inch waist, just like Scarlett O’Hara.

It wasn’t just in England, either. Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of my many literary idols) writes that her mother reminisced to her daughters about how, when she was married, her husband could span her waist with his hands. This, while advising her daughters to wear their corsets even while sleeping or “. . . what your figure will be, goodness knows.”

Mothers nowadays dress their small daughters in clothes that a high-class prostitute wouldn’t be caught dead in. I am, more and more, thinking that school uniforms might not be such a bad idea.

At the turn of the century, schoolgirls wore pinafores over their dresses to help keep the dress clean, but also to hide the curves and allow the girls to be children a little longer. Remember Anne Shirley, Diana Barry, Jane Andrews, and Ruby Gillis? (Oh, I hope you do!) Emily Starr? Marigold Lesley? Pat Gardiner? They all wore pinafores to school every day, and after school, too. When the pinafores were removed for parties, etc, these girls looked like young women, but because they were still girls, really, the pinafores were worn all other times. Anne Frank, at 13 or 14, still referred to herself and to Peter VanDaan, who was 16 or 17, as “children.”

Big booty used to be all the rage, and emphasized with bustles. Now, a big butt is a sign of sloppiness and obesity, and whether or not her butt looks big is something most women worry about daily. Fear of a butt that’s large enough to actually sit on comfortably sends otherwise sane and intelligent women to the liposuction clinic to get all that sucked out, that they might be “beautiful.” Balancing precariously on a protruding tailbone doesn’t seem either attractive or comfortable, but that’s how supermodels have to sit these days because they traded their cheeks for a check.

Tiny feet were a symbol of rank. High-born Chinese women suffered intense pain all their lives, and had to be carried because they could not walk normally on the new-born-size buds that were what had become of their feet. Women used to lie about their shoe size, because small feet were, and still are to some people, a sign of beauty. Now, a woman who wears size eleven or twelve shoes isn’t the exception at all.

Hands were to be kept soft at all costs. Soft, smooth hands indicated servants to do all the work, which indicated money, which indicated good marriage fodder.

There are so many silly interpretations of beauty that I could never go into them all in one post. Besides, I don’t want to.

Clean, kind, honest, ethical, intelligent, humorous, witty, and brave. What outside feature could possibly outrank that? I suppose really shallow people would disagree, and I have a hard time overlooking my own, shall we say, “shortcomings” in the beauty arena, but truth be told, beauty fades and these other qualities are merely enhanced.

Oh, and while it may be true that the old standards of feminine beauty were set by men, I honestly believe that now, women set the standards for beauty. I also believe that women are not very nice to each other when it comes to what’s “beautiful” this week, and what’s “passe.”

Remember Marilyn Monroe? Remember how beautiful she was? Size 12. Elizabeth Hurley has been quoted as saying, “I’d kill myself if I was that fat. . . she was very big.”

I’m not finished yet. I also believe that we women need to start pointing and laughing at 79-pound toothpicks sashaying down the fashion aisle in between bouts of rehab, instead of throwing our money at them and their keepers: the jokers who get rich because somewhere, a woman spends a hundred thousand dollars on a half-yard of fabric, two safety pins, a button, a necklace made of real diamonds that looks like it was strung by an Alzheimer patient on the front porch of a nursing home, assisted by a four-year-old, a hat made of 19 cents worth of purple felt, a feather, and an old rusty key, and shoes consisting of a paper-thin sole, a ten-inch heel, and a single clear plastic strap across the top, in which one cannot walk. As long as there are women who will buy this hideous, overpriced scheisse and wear it, there will be women who pretend to believe that it’s beautiful.

What we need is someone to stand up and say, “The Emperor is naked.” Because, my friends, he is.

*I am NOT being disrespectful here. I am being descriptive. It’s a visual thing.