Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!
No ’tis not so impenetrable as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ’tis enough. ‘Twill minister to. — Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Picture 1.
Today, as my little way of celebrating Self-assurance Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the local mall and paid a juvenile woman $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of the fad news — news in the have a funny feeling that that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will directly plummet — requires a bit of curriculum vitae information.
Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before neat white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the up to date seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was firstly taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old deathly & white RCA console in the living cubicle quarters, especially including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Correctness be told, I didn’t know then and don’t grasp now how to go about buckling a swash or if Flynn even wore an earring in that talking picture, but somewhere along the way in my childhood I became enamored with the idea of getting a sea rover’s earring.
Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight fair-skinned men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any shipshape black men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay Negro or white men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many hyacinthine men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my kith and kin was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “stable bachelor.”
Anyway, the point here is that in the working level neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the periodic three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of copy gold faded or were repressed or some such. The years passed with my decidedly non-Jewish firmness nonetheless still qualified, should I ever convert, for interment in a Jewish cemetery with nary a tattoo and only the orifices that came as genuine equipment.
...
: $12.0 
