Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!
No ’tis not so profound as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ’tis enough. ‘Twill for. — Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Part 1.
Today, as my little way of celebrating Autonomy Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the close by mall and paid a young char $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of the go news — news in the gist that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, high-pitched and earring sales will soon plummet — requires a bit of offing information.
Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before outright white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the dilatory seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was specifically taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old louring & white RCA console in the living allowance, especially including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Facts in fact be told, I didn’t know then and don’t understand now how to go about buckling a swash or if Flynn even wore an earring in that flick picture show, but somewhere along the way in my childhood I became enamored with the idea of getting a appropriate’s earring.
Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight corpse-like men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any straight sombre men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay black or pale-complexioned men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many dismal men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my household was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “unfailing bachelor.”
Anyway, the point here is that in the working extraction neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the ceremonial three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of plagiarist gold faded or were repressed or some such. The years passed with my decidedly non-Jewish fuselage nonetheless still qualified, should I ever convert, for interment in a Jewish cemetery with nary a tattoo and only the orifices that came as innovative equipment.
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: $1.0 
