Virgie Bell's View: Circles

Today I received an E-mail from my friend in Amherst, Texas. She and I go back so far in the past that I can hardly believe how fortunate I am to have someone like her to share my day with. I just cannot tell anyone how much it means to me.

When we lost Aaron, I was in the hospital in Lubbock because of a flesh eating bacteria. I felt very alone at the time because of course, everyone was busy with the arrangements for the funeral. Jerry was allowed to stay in the room with me that first night because the staff and the doctors were worried that the devastating news and the upcoming surgery under anesthesia would pose a threat to my being able to overcome so much at one time. This wonderful friend got in touch with my brother to find out which hospital I was in and to check on me. She did it a few times after that and now we share E-mails and get to check up on each other more.

She is helping with an event that sounds like it was right out of our lives in the fifties. I have been aware that this was going on in her life for a few weeks. I even offered my formal from the Junior/Senior Banquet in those days so long ago, yet so dear to me. She is wearing her squaw dress from when we were in high school together. It was so different back then, back when the world seemed to go at a different pace. The Hollywood female stars were of course ‘M-M’ or Marilyn Monroe, if you were not cool in the 50's. Actually I don't remember the word that we used back then to describe what we found right in our world. If clothes are back-in style every twenty years then how about the new celebrity news. M-M herself or the now grown-up Elizabeth Taylor. The famous Monroe and the infamous Anna Nicole. Trust me there is no comparison.

Norma Jean was the name Monroe grew up with. She was an illegitimate child and never knew who her father was. Her mother was in an asylum for the insane and she spent her most formative years gazing out at the lights of one of the major movie studios in Hollywood from the window of an orphanage. Everyone has to have dreams of the future in order to survive such a grim reality. I guess I’ve read every book about Marilyn Monroe. She is just fascinating to read about. She hit the very top to become the forever signature blonde in history. She was also talented in acting and singing. She could dance with the best of them and it seems like only yesterday that Elton John wrote a song about her which he titled Candle in the Wind.

Both Monroe and Anna Nicole are blondes, but the similarity ends there. Anna Nicole was a flash in the pan putting the original dumb into being a blonde. Every low life in the world is claiming to be her five month old daughter’s father in order to inherit into the vast fortune that might come from the original old saw. There is no fool like an old fool. In his nineties to her twenty six, whereas, the great baseball star, Joe DiMaggio, paid to have a fresh rose placed on the grave of the legendary Marilyn Monroe, everyday, until just a few years ago.

The star that sailed to the top as a child in National Velvet was 18 when she married Conrad Hilton Jr. The marriage was so brief that if would have not crossed my mind if it wasn't for another Hilton of our day. The ever outrageous Paris Hilton. She is famous for being famous and that about covers it. The male stars of the fifties had to be Gary Cooper and Marlon Brandon if you had to pick just two, though they number in the dozens. Heartthrobs. The real deal.

My favorite book of the fifties was The Caine Mutiny which I recently read. My goal was to read all novels by Herman Wouk, and I am well on the way to getting that accomplished.

The world was rocked by the Korean War after the North invaded the South. This was in 1950. We still have boots on the ground in South Korea and Kim Jung IL, the ruler of North Korea, threatens us on a regular basis with a nuclear bomb.

Circle skirts doubled as conversation pieces in 1950. We Amherst High School girls called ours Squaw dresses, and it all made news on a blog entitled Gunz Up in 2006 and 2007—and my friend from the fifties is still my friend today, fifty seven years later. SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

ps. Joy, the tornado missed us