Avast, Ye Lubbers! And A Happy 4th To Ye! Yarrrr!
No ’tis not so intensely as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ’tis enough. ‘Twill present. — Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Mise en scene 1.
Today, as my little way of celebrating Freedom Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the village mall and paid a young missus $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of fashion word — news in the sense that when brief conversation gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will in good time plummet — requires a bit of family information.
Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before undeviating white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the recently seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was notably taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old hellish & white RCA console in the living office, especially including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Genuineness be told, I didn’t know then and don’t recognize 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 privateer’s earring.
Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight ghastly men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any blunt black men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay treacherous or white men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many jet-black men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my one's nearest was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “imperishable bachelor.”
Anyway, the point here is that in the working kind neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the additional three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of sea-robber gold faded or were repressed or some such. The years passed with my decidedly non-Jewish congress nonetheless still qualified, should I ever convert, for interment in a Jewish cemetery with nary a tattoo and only the orifices that came as individualist equipment.
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: $6.99 
