Seniority: The poem that started a movement

The poem that started a movement

A California woman took to heart the ode about wearing a red hat when she became "an old woman,'' and now the Red Hat Society has 770 chapters around the world.

By BABITA PERSAUD

"Warning," the poem begins.

"When I'm an old woman, I shall wear purple "When I'm an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me. . . ."

"I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

"And pick the flowers in other people's gardens

"And learn to spit. . . ."

Sue Ellen Cooper first read that poem on a T-shirt in a funky California gift shop when she was in her mid 40s. She was not thinking about starting a revolution.

"Cute," she thought. "I'm going to be like that when I'm older."

At 50, she kept her promise, donning for a whole day an $8 red fedora that dipped over one eye. She loved the feeling. And dared not keep it to herself. She gave red hats as gifts to friends when they turned 50.

One day, in April 1998, they all went out to tea.

The five friends in the dainty Springfield Tea Room in Fullerton, Calif., were in full regalia: red hats and purple dresses, just as the poem instructed.

"It's hard to say why it was so much fun," said Cooper, now 57. "You remember you used to be girls and you can be again."

One of them said: Let's do it again. And they did.

Friends told friends. Soon, a second group formed, in Homosassa. The Red Hat Society Steel Magnolias, they call themselves.

Another formed in Boise, Idaho: the Red Hatters Wild Ride. And in Peoria, Ill.: the Prairie Building Chapter RHS.

"I want to do this," said Christie Musick, a Lutz travel agent, who read about the movement in a magazine last year. She formed the Scarlet Women of Tampa Bay.

"We have a lot of classy ladies in St. Pete," said J. Kay Leonard, a member of the Pelican chapter. In New Port Richey, there are the Mad Hatters. The Godiva Girls of Pasco County are a nudist chapter. They wear red hats and purple towels.

Sun City Center has the Foxy Red Hatters, and south Tampa favored a French twist: Societe du Chapeau Rouge de Tampa.

At last count, there were 34 branches of the Red Hat Society in the Tampa Bay area and 770 chapters worldwide, including Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Ireland and on the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"I just stand there with my mouth open and just watch it," Cooper said during a telephone interview.

The club has no agenda, no rules, no minutes, no president. There is a leader, called the Queen Mother, but her role is minimal: She gives out name tags at the beginning of meetings. The cost to join is the price of a meal.

A chapter forms when one woman takes the initiative, thinks of a name and registers it on the Red Hat Web site, www.redhatsociety.com. Then she gathers friends and strangers for once-a-month meetings.

The meetings can be in restaurants, but sometimes the groups venture out on what the Pelican chapter calls "adventures." Members of that club rode the Duck Tours, a Big Bird-yellow World War II amphibious military vehicle, through downtown St. Petersburg.

"It was absolutely a hoot," Leonard said.

Another time, the women toured the Salvador Dali Museum. A cloud of red hats trailing the tour guide created a surreal moment in itself.

At a recent Scarlet Red Hatters meeting, 18 women wearing red hats, smiles and many dangling earrings sat in a side room decorated with dinner plates at Antonio's Pasta Grille on 56th Street in north Tampa.

Topics of discussion bounced from Afghanistan and the U.S. military to planning a Christmas party.

The women don't necessarily talk about husbands or children. Mostly they discuss "things we want to do," said Pat Corell of the Pinellas Crimson Chicks.

"This is a selfish club," Musick said. "A play group. It's not about doing anything for anybody but ourselves, and darn it, we deserve it."

Some red hatters wear baseball caps and meet in pubs. Others drink mimosas and don red berets. There are crafty types who hot-glue feathers and flowers to the brims of their hats, and others who buy their bonnets online.

Joan Strauman is an actor, active in community and college theater. Leonard of the Pelican chapter is a retired Air Force protocol officer. Corell of the Crimson Chicks teaches personal writing part time. Joyce Stafford, a retired postal worker, wants to start an investment club.

The red hats are a catalyst for silliness, said Cooper, the society's founder, but they have a serious purpose.

Lots of things happen when you're a woman turning 50, said Cooper, who married right out of college, never worked outside the home until her two children were grown and then was a freelance greeting card artist.

"As we get older, we get invisible," she said. "If you are fairly attractive when you are younger, you get very used to the attention. When you get into your 50s -- I don't care if you are still fairly attractive -- men are not doing that any more. Before you know it, it's like they don't see you. And dang it, we're not ready to be invisible."

The red hats work. A man at a nearby table saw the women from the Pelican chapter at the Pier one day and bought them a round of Pepsis.

Cooper has seen the club grow from a file folder to an office in Fullerton, where she takes her dog Frosty, a curly white poodle mix.

"None of it has been planned," she said. "I spent my whole life trying to make things happen, and when I finally just didn't try, it happened."

In October, more than 300 Red Hatters met in Mount Dora for the first All-Florida Convention. In April, the society will have its first national convention in Chicago. There is a junior division, the Pink Hat Ladies, who wear lavender dresses until they reach the half-century mark.

"Could world domination be far behind?" the Web site says.

Jenny Joseph wrote Warning in 1961.

The poem first was published in literary anthologies. Then it was read during radio broadcasts. It appeared in a Readers Digest story during the 1980s, then on greeting cards, tea towels in Yorkshire, stitchwork patterns in Patagonia.

In 1996, participants in a British Broadcasting Corp. TV poll voted it the best-loved poem in Britain.

Joseph, 69, is an Oxford-educated lecturer in English literature. She lives in a cottage in Gloucestershire, England.

-- BABITA PERSAUD, Times staff writer.

Warning

Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick the flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.