Harrell: Red Hat Society has fun in style

Sep 17, 2023

For the second Sunday in a row, I was traveling with a tour bus to a musical show, this time to Jacksonville to see "Mean Girls," about which I knew absolutely nothing.

What I did know was not to be late to meet the bus. I had driven through pouring rain and ferocious winds from Bluffton to Savannah to be at Candler Hospital's parking lot at 0710, almost an hour before our 0800 departure time.

Nothing like feeling righteous.

The bus wasn't there, but another car was waiting, and then came another car, and another. No one got out. We sat in our cars as the rain pounded down.

The bus pulled up. It was still raining, and I fiddled with putting up a sunshade on the dashboard. Surely the sun would come out later, and I hate getting into a hot car, so by the time I hop-skipped over a water puddle or two and climbed into the bus, I was the last one on.

At the top of the bus steps and right behind the driver's seat were two women, one I thought was my dear friend Frances. I hadn't seen for ages and ages. But this wasn't her. The woman's name, she said, was Millie.

"Well," I said, "you have a clone," and I struggled on down the bus aisle with my oversized dripping-wet umbrella, walking stick, raincoat, backpack with supplies to last me a month. You never know what you’ll need when you leave home.

I was determined to find a seat in the back of the bus where I could spread out.

When I finally settled down and looked up, I saw a sea of red and purple.

And I thought, they must be members of The Red Hat Society. And I remembered Jeanne Robertson, my very most favorite humorist, and her video about how she spoke to 3,000 members of The Red Hat Society at Opry Land in Nashville and recalled their antics in the ladies room dancing to "Achy Breaky Heart" as a means of getting the motion-activated water faucets to turn on.

I loved Jeanne Robertson. She made me laugh. I was fortunate to meet her when she came to Hilton Head's Art Center, first in the lobby as she strolled through and stopped to talk to people, and later when she stopped her introductory remarks on stage to lean over and watch and wait as I stumbled over feet whispering "excuse me, excuse me," to take my front-row center seat in the orchestra pit. I could have died on the spot.

Jeanne passed on Aug. 21, 2021, a short while after her beloved husband, Jerry, who we all knew as Left Brain.

But how did the Red Hat Society get started? I decided to do a little research and found it began with a Brit named Jenny Joseph and her poem "Warning," about growing old.

Born in Birmingham, England, Joseph held down various jobs, writing for newspapers, working in a pub. She won a scholarship to Oxford where she began writing poetry.

She wrote "Warning" in 1961 when she was 29 years old and included it in her collection of poems "Rose in The Afternoon," published in 1974.

Somehow, the poem found its way across the Atlantic, and the first lines, "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple. With a red hat which doesn't suit me." became the impetus for the formation of one of the world's largest social organizations.

But wait.

In 1980, Liz Carpenter, that's Mary Elizabeth Sutherland Carpenter, a sixth-generation Texan, writer, reporter, feminist, and on and on, the first female presidential adviser (to Lyndon Baines Johnson) and then press secretary to Lady Bird, from ‘63 to ‘69, this very funny lady of acerbic wit, wrote an article for Readers’ Digest closing with the poem "Warning," which led to greeting-card companies adopting it and a claim this was the beginning of The Red Hat Society.

Was it?

In 1997, Sue Ellen Cooper of Fullerton, California, gave a friend a vintage red fedora, you could call it the first red hat, and a copy of "Warning," for her 55th birthday.

Her friends loved it.

They all bought red hats and purple outfits and went out together and had a grand time, and other people heard about it and got themselves red hats and purple dresses or pants or whatever, and they too met and enjoyed life and did good deeds.

And that's how the Red Hat Society started.

I looked down the length of the bus at the members of the Savannah Brown Sugar Chapter, friends with the common bond of being educators who meet once a month ,dressed in their red hats and purple attire, and felt privileged to be an ex-officio, one-time non-conforming bus-rider member of the group.

As for "Mean Girls?"

There was enough energy on that stage to power all of Jacksonville.

Annelore Harrell lives in Bluffton and can be reached at [email protected].