Girls Just Wanna Have "Fun"

Mrs. Cook was my seventh and eighth grade teacher at Sacred Heart School in Dobbs Ferry. Sacred Heart had what they called modified departmental classes. That was an elaborate term for having two teachers, in two different grades that switched classrooms for part of the day. Mrs. Cook primarily taught American history and algebra—but she also dabbled a bit in teaching language arts.

At some point, for what seemed to me like no particular reason, Mrs. Cook decided that as a class, we should memorize some Shakespeare. She thought it would enrich us. She thought it would make us erudite. And she chose the soliloquy from Julius Cesar---you know—the friends, Romans countrymen speech. And I did memorize it. And I can still recite the most significant parts of it. But when I was 13, the meaning escaped me. And I will admit most Shakespeare still eludes me, the language is too tedious and I have to think too much about its literal content.

 My grandfather Vespo—my mother’s father-- was quite old when he passed away. He was in his nineties when he died. As a result, he had outlived many of his contemporaries, and the ones that had survived were quite elderly. At his wake, an elderly woman, hunched over from osteoporosis, with labored breathing (she had COPD), and a deliberate protracted gait, who walked with a walker, entered the funeral parlor and made her way to the casket to pay her respects. This woman was in bad shape. I feared that the short walk to the casket might do her in and she would end up in a matching casket next to my grandfather—she was that decrepit.

And I remember turning to my Aunt Fran, who was sitting near me at the time and asking her Who is that? And my Aunt looked at her and my Aunt’s demeanor changed. And my Aunt straightened her posture and with an all knowing tone said Oh that’s cousin so-in so. And then she whispered--She’s the puttanna (the Italian word for a woman of loose morals).

Here’s the thing. This decomposing woman, who was so close to death the rigor mortis was already setting in with every wheeze-ful breath she took-- and yet still found her way to this wake--- in her youth—65 or so years earlier—liked to have “fun” (not specified—it is the word my Aunt used.) And because she had a reputation for having “fun,” when she got married to the person I suspect she had “fun” with (again not specified), she was not permitted by the Catholic church to wear white on her wedding day.

Yet by all accounts, she had long monogamous marriage and raised sons who grew up to be contributors to society. And suddenly Shakespeare made sense: The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred in their bones. Yep. Nice observation William—even 500 years later.  It didn’t matter that cousin so-in-so became a dutiful wife and mother. It didn’t matter that despite her physical afflictions she “did the right thing” and showed up to my grandfather’s wake. The fact that 65 or so years earlier she liked to have “fun” was going to stick with her forever--even after her death—it would stick with her as long as there was one person who still remembered that little detail about her. They might as well as chiseled a scarlet letter “P” on cousin so-in-so’s gravestone.

I was born in 1960. By the time I went to high school and then college my generation had reaped the benefits of the free love movement of the sixties. I watched Diane Keeton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Richard Gere in American Gigolo. I listened to Cyndi Lyper and understood that girls just wanna have fun. And by the eighties the Catholic church had opted for a “don’t ask don’t tell policy”—so everyone wore a white dress when they walked down the aisle no matter how much “fun” they had had before their wedding day. And my girls---a generation later, use colloquisms like “man whore”—a derogatory term for men that did not exist in my day.  My daughters are the product of the nineties and Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And in their world having “fun” is a given—it is a celebrated choice--it is no longer “evil.” It doesn’t mean evil still doesn’t live after people and the good still is oft interred in their bones anymore—it just means that the behavior which constitutes evil has changed. And it’s too bad for cousin so-in-so. Unfortunately for her, she was born ahead of her time.  Puttana-dom is barely a thought anymore. Even porn stars wear white dresses on their wedding day.