First of all, I’m not waiting until I’m old to wear purple. I wear it all the time. But I guess the point of the poem is that the old lady wants to wear purple with a red hat because suppsedly it doesn’t go together. So why does she have to wait until she is old?
Second of all, I don’t want to wear a red hat. I don’t want to wear a hat at all.
So fie on you, Red Hat Society! I hope that, when I am old (in about 100 years), the whole red hat thing is completely played. I’m not doin’ it!!! It is not funny; it is not cute. I am sick of it! I am sick of the little red hat things in gift shops! I am sick of going to restaurants and seeing a bunch of ladies in red hats!
Personally, I think it’s quite ironic. The Red Hat societies seem to have a lot of rules that the members are supposed to follow…and the poem is about breaking the meaningless rules that society imposes. For instance, women under 50 are supposed to wear pink hats and lavender dresses.
I’ll continue to go on wearing whatever color I want, whenever I want. And I’ll probably avoid Red Hat merchandise.
Those women are crazy. When I was the entertainment editor at a newspaper, the local chapter would send me lame pictures and idiotic stories about silly things they did the past weekend (like drinking tea at a bowling alley). Then they would threaten to kill my pets if I didn’t run them.
Well, maybe they didn’t threaten, but those bullies would harass the hell out of me to run their ridiculous crap. Finally, I had to tell the local chapter leader that until they did something newsworthy beyond the limits of their freakish cult, or at least learned how to take a decent photo, I would just as soon run a photo of my bony ass on the front page of the paper than run their crap.
Well, maybe I didn’t say that exactly, but that was the jist.
Heh! I love that poem. I’ve loved it since well before this whole Red Hat thing took off…I remember seeing an embroidered sampler of it in a store window in State College when I was going to Penn State 15 years ago. Instantly fell in love with the thing and would have bought the sampler if hadn’t been a poor college student with no money.
I built a shopping website for one of these ladies. Lots of purple crap and red hats. She seemed fine for a few weeks but I ended up having to tell her to get someone new to work on the site.
THANK YOU!! I have always thought the Red Hat club was some of the lamest shit ever. “Ha ha ha, look at us, we’re WILD AND CRAZY (in our identical red and purple UNIFORMS)!!! We’re SPONTANEOUS AND FUN (as evidenced by our doing this month’s WACKY PREPLANNED ACTIVITY)!!!”
They’re strange, but the ladies who do it seem to have a good time. So let em at it, I say. They’re no more a bother to me than any other organization that has meetings.
I knew that the RHS site would have a scrapbooking section. I just knew it.
As far as the society itself, I guess some people like the safety-in-numbers aspect of it? And sad as it sounds, maybe some women do need to be “shown” how to have fun.
I’ve never been much of a joiner in the first place, and the society’s dress codes (hey, I qualify for the red hat!) and registration forms don’t exactly tempt me.
Yeah, it all seems rather contrived and not a little ironic, but I’ll not sneer too much at those ladies. I remember reading the poem before, too, and at the time, I thought, I don’t need a poem to tell me how to age, but I’m glad it’s out there.
I guess that’s how I feel about the RHS as well.
My mother in law is part of one of those groups. It has always appeared to me just to be an older version of teenage asserting-my-individuality-along-with-all-my-friends. Like when kids wear all black or get a piercing or tattoo or listen to their shocking shocking music to show how individual they are, and how wild and crazy and rebellious, and they don’t care what anyone thinks! They are individuals! Just like all their friends!
Meh. I don’t think they are bad, in fact if they draw some women out a little and they find new friends and activities I think that’s great. Sometimes it is safer to ‘be different’ in a group.
Happy, that cracks me up. I have a vision of them sending you threatening notes and forming a little Red Hat Mafia in hopes of one day controlling the Press. One day you will wake up with a red hat in your bed.
My mom is a Red Hat Vice-Queen and her best friend is the Queen of their self-formed chapter. She really enjoys it.
It’s gotten her out of the house & making friends. She’s done a Red Hat fashion show and will do another. She’s done voice-over work for a local Red Hat-friendly clothing store’s radio adds. She’s made a purse out of a red bra & purple ribbons. Seriously. It’s kind of cute, until you look at it and realize, “Oh my lord, that is a heinous red bra that has been mercilessly resurrected as a purse!”
I love my mom, and I’m glad she’s having fun. She’s always been very self-conscious because she’s tall & plus sized. She also had a stroke & two TIAs in February, and sometimes she can’t find the right words like she used to. She has a hard time reading because of visual field loss, and she was an avid reader. She’s also emotionally labile from the stroke. I think the fashion show & radio ad are really amazing things for her to be doing at 65ish. I’m proud of her for trying new things.
This is just one of those situations where it doesn’t matter how crazy I think the Red Hat stuff is…all that matters is she’s getting something positive out of it.
But, if she EVER suggests I do the Pink Hat thing, I’ll have to run screaming from the phone. Ugg. Yuck. Ptouy.
I’m another who always loved the poem - and my SIL is a official Red Hat. I do wear hats - all sorts of them - but with red hair I’m not about to put on a red one. If I didn’t spontanously combust, the fashion police would get me.
My grandfather died after a long, long, battle with cancer, during which my grandmother basically dropped everything in her life to look after him, and when he was gone, she found herself at a loose end. She had dropped out of a lot of her social groups, and quite a few of her old friends had also died (for instance, she’s the only one left from her euchre club.) and our family is scattered around the country.
She joined the Red Hats and has made a lot of friends with the other women in the group, from a wide range of ages, and I couldn’t be happier about it. It’s cheesy and not very spontaneous, but I think of it as rather like the Elks or the Moose lodge, but founded for women (And better than the women’s auxiliary of those groups because it doesn’t constantly remind her that she’s missing part of herself now).
