There was once a time in the 1990s when you couldn't go to a tea room without seeing ladies sporting red hats with purple trim. There were the Red Hat Society, and back when they were new I was still too young to join. They were all ladies over fifty who dared to be fun, even though they were growing old. They faded out of my thoughts, possibly because I didn't see many of them at the rock concerts I attended.
Yesterday I thought of them again, Now that I am almost sixty (next August) I thought thatI would pass the age requirement.
But now there is no longer an age requirement to be a fun, distinctive older woman in the Red Hat Society. So now you don't need to be old to be old enough to not act your age. I shake my head and shake my cane.
Allowing any age into the society perverts the point. It's like repeating the Lord's Prayer in church. Given an example of how not to pray in public with vain repetition, we now publicly vainly repeat it, and now the Red Hats are a society honoring aging women that any twenty-year old can join. What kind of horseshit is this, as my fun grandmother would say.
I suppose it is ageist, or anti-ageist, or somehow wrong to exclude young women because of their age, and that makes sense, but ... still, something wiped out the Red Hats. Perhaps their age policy, or maybe the pandemic closing all the tea houses. Or Trump forever changing what 'red hat' means. Or perhaps women my age, even the fun ones, are now invisible to me. That would be sad.
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