There was a time in my day that the dating game was a perilous and costly venture. First, if you met — certainly not at bar — a girl of your liking you first had to prepare yourself for a meeting with the parents, especially the father; if approved, you had to have quite a few bucks in you wallet because the girl expected you take her to at least a palatial theater showing an early release of her choosing and then to an ice cream parlor for a rather costly sundae or banana split, or at a clean diner for a hamburger. As you got older you would have to take her to a classy night club or at least a quiet pub that had cosy booths and a dance floor in the back. Ordering beer was definitely a sign of lacking class, but in the rarest of cases when a girl did drink beer it had to be from the clear bottle that Miller’s had recently introduced, yet still accompanied with a glass — drinking directly from a bottle was clearly unladylike and draft beer was uncouth. As for dancing, a soft Lindy was permissible but not the wild ones that they used to show in the newsreels or movies; the fox-trot was the norm as long as the low-lights seeped through body contours.
Once out of high school, meeting a girl was usually at a place of work or at a community dance that had strict rules of behavior. If one caught your eye and the requested dance went well, it did not mean you were home. If you were lucky you wound up buying sodas for her friends and if you took her home, you had to drive or walk her friends home as well. If you “scored” it meant you got one French kiss at the doorway. If she happened to be Catholic, you might get a peck on the cheek. After this “stealthy” date, if she liked you, was followed by strictly formal dating and the customary ritual that went with it, which may not have resulted in a permanent relationship — petting only.
This is not to say that there were no “loose babes” around that were willing to carry on sex adventure on the sly, but the pathetic problem here for the girl was that guys were Shallow Hals and feared ever going public by showing off this kind of “date.”
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: April 5, 2004.