501derful.org
This morning I went into Walnut Creek to do a little early Christmas shopping while my wife’s out of town. WC is the upscale shopping hub of the East Bay. The beautiful, the tony shop there—what an old friend of mine used to call “the glossies.” It’s also one of the few places in the Bay Area, I’ll wager, you’ll see young people holding up Bush/Cheney placards at the main intersection.
Before I could do my shopping chore I just had to cruise the Barnes & Noble. As I went through the front doors, out of the corner of my eye, I caught something that got my attention: two women standing behind a table, one wearing a bubblegum-pink bikini and the other wearing very brief denim shorts, a long stretch of bare midriff, and a skimpy American-flag halter-top.
As my head snapped back for the second-take, I saw it wasn’t quite what I thought. The two women were both in the neighborhood of 70 years old. One had silver and the other pure white hair. They were wearing shifts with the clothing and bodies printed on. They were two members of the local retirement community tennis club, and they were selling tennis club calendars with twelve pages of club-members wearing the suggestive costumes. They were selling the calendars for—what else in October?—breast cancer funds. There were no signs—fortunately—that the sale had anything to do with ACS.
What shall I call it: “geezer-porn”? Nah, too harsh. Perhaps “geriatric cheesecake” captures it. But, as I said in an earlier post about boobie-thons, what passes for acceptable taste in raising money for breast cancer varies from community to community.
