Tag Archives: hat

Dandy

Dandy: (n) a man who is excessively concerned about his clothes and appearance; a fop.

I’m a Yankee Doodle one.

Yes, the British soldiers were so intent on getting under the skin of the American Revolutionists that they accused them of being gay.

That was it.

This the whole meaning of the Yankee Doodle song.

In 1776, a dandy was a man who over-dressed, stuck feathers in his hat—which was a style in France known as macaroni—and was so prissy that every woman, upon encountering him, gave up on any possibility of a night of pleasure.

So what did the Americans do?

Did they go in a corner and cry?

Did they punch people in the nose and throw a fit? (Or maybe throw a fit and punch people in the nose.)

Did they curse? Did they swear?

No. They didn’t even claim they weren’t gay.

They just decided to use the song as a rallying cry for the cause, which certainly must have made the British dandies awfully angry.

When I was a kid, the worst thing you could call someone was “a fag.”  But I will tell you—the kids who survived such ignorance are the ones who didn’t throw a fit, but instead, made fun of their attackers. 

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

A Yankee Doodle do or die.

Yankee Doodle went to town

Riding on a pony

Stuck a feather in his hat

And called it macaroni.

You’ll never get people to stop being bigoted and offering lame attempts at humor to punctuate their prejudice.

You do have the power, though, to absorb their attacks, and turn them into your new marching song.

 

Bumptious

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Bumptious: (adj) self-assertive or proud to an irritating degree.

It’s a beautiful, bright red fedora with a feather in the band.

One of my sons bought it for me and I wear it every once in a while. It’s a moody thing–because my children refer to it as “my pimp brim.”

So when I feel pimpy, virile, naughty, rambunctious and just overall powerful, I don my pimp lid.

Now you may think it would look ridiculous on a person who’s a little older, but it really doesn’t come to play unless I look in the mirror.

I have found that to be true with lots of things. Sometimes I can even pretend that I’m thirty years old if there’s no reflecting glass nearby. My brain has no problem conjuring the image of my arrogant, overly confident former self.

So anyway, I slip on this particular hat as a way of spitting in the eye of the witch of birthdays, and cursing the demon of achy joints.

It is my bumptious attempt to remain viable in the world that annoyingly continues to ask me if I would like to take advantage of “the senior discount.”

 

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