True Romance, True Story, True Confessions, etc.

07/06/2006

All of us girls read them, didn’t we? I wonder if they still sell the romance magazines of old or have they moved up to novels such as those by Barbara Cartland?

In any event, kids always congregated after school at Cullen’s Store on Reliance’s west side of the street or Hank’s Market on the east. We drank Pepsi with a bag of salted Planter’s Peanuts dumped in. Unh, unh, unh … what an after school treat! And we girls were so curious about the romance magazines. Poor Beth Cullen. It was her lot in life to protect our souls from hellfire and damnation by keeping the magazines away from us. Then there was a murmur across the land about the Kinsey Report. None of us knew what a Kinsey Report was, but we had our eyes peeled. Finally, someone found a magazine with the words on the front so we knew we were in business.

One of us had the magazine concealed in our notebook and as we sat there in Cullen’s Store (little angels that we were) so Beth could see us "doing our homework". One of us got the giggles, I’ll bet it was Maxine, our champion giggler. Then we all started enjoying our homework way too much and here came Beth. Rats! Caught again. We were all marched upstairs to their living quarters and the Catechism lessons began. Eventually, we learned our Catechism books word for word, cover to cover. I expect the little ones still do. It certainly didn’t hurt us any. I wonder if we got to read ALL of the Kinsey Report and how many of us even knew what it meant?

  Which takes me back to the beginning. Where has innocence gone? It is kind of scary if you ask me. I worry about the little ones.