Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!
No ’tis not so chasmic as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ’tis enough. ‘Twill help. — Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Site 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 neighbourhood mall and paid a young lady $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of create news — news in the mother wit that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will in the near future plummet — requires a bit of curriculum vitae information.
Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before level white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the recent seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was outstandingly taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old dismal & white RCA console in the living area, especially including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Reality be told, I didn’t know then and don’t be versed now how to go about buckling a swash or if Flynn even wore an earring in that moving picture, but somewhere along the way in my childhood I became enamored with the idea of getting a filibuster’s earring.
Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight pure men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any unmodified black men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay foul or white men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many baneful men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my dearest was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “perpetual bachelor.”
Anyway, the point here is that in the working taste neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the incidental three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of steal gold faded or were repressed or some such. The years passed with my decidedly non-Jewish association nonetheless still qualified, should I ever convert, for sepulture in a Jewish cemetery with nary a tattoo and only the orifices that came as autochthonous equipment.
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: $6.99 
