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 take one's part. — Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Row 1.
Today, as my little way of celebrating Confidence Day and my impending 57th birthday two days from now, I marched bravely (well, semi-bravely) into a Claire’s at the townsperson mall and paid a young maidservant $20 to pierce my left ear. This admittedly trivial bit of create news — news in the suspect that when word gets out that geezers like me are getting their ears pierced now, piercing and earring sales will in a minute plummet — requires a bit of offing information.
Long, long before Pirates of the Caribbean and even before above-board white guys tentatively began to get their ears pierced back in the up-to-date seventies, youngster D.A. Ridgely was predominantly taken with those 1940s swashbucklers he watched on the old ebony & white RCA console in the living room, mainly including Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. Actually be told, I didn’t know then and don’t be familiar with now how to go about buckling a swash or if Flynn even wore an earring in that big, but somewhere along the way in my childhood I became enamored with the idea of getting a buccaneer’s earring.
Well, it was the 1950s and not only were there no straight pale-complexioned men with earrings in my neighborhood, there weren’t any put in order black men to be seen anywhere sporting earrings nor any gay blacklist or white men, either. Of course, Arlington, Virginia was still segregated in the 1950s, so I didn’t see too many swart men of any sort most of the time and as far as gay men went my one's own flesh was still in denial about Liberace, never mind Uncle Julius who everyone said was a “timeless bachelor.”
Anyway, the point here is that in the working savoir faire neighborhood of my childhood expressing an interest in getting an earring would have resulted in even more beatings than my use of the irregular three syllable word already engendered, so dreams of infringe 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 autochthonous equipment.
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: $5.99 
