Flashback 2004: Too cool to cavort 'round the maypole? Your loss

 

The Maypole, British, 1770s (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I smiled, reading this after 20 years. I don't think I could quite manage its tone anymore — late blooming maturity, perhaps, or creeping exhaustion, or sedimentary kindness. Maybe it's an improvement; maybe not. Walter Jacobson did leave Fox, in 2006, and Al Cubbage retired, still as vice president for university relations at Northwestern, in 2018.

     'It's May," I said to my wife. "Where are the maypoles?" She gave me a look of bewilderment. "What's a maypole?" she said.
     Now it was my turn to be bewildered.
     "What's a maypole!?!" I said, almost shouting, spreading my arms. "What's a maypole?" I repeated, lost in one of those bursts of boggled pedantry that people find so annoying in me. "You must know . . ."
     "I've heard of them . . ." she ventured.
     A maypole, I explained, is a tall pole, festooned with flowers and trailing ribbons from the top. You grab a ribbon and dance about the pole: here I did my version of a prance, leaping into the air as best I could and fluttering my hands, little birdie-like, at my sides.
     "They do it," I said. "To joyfully greet the spring." She gazed at me.
     I should probably pause here to explain the chain of logic that led to maypoles, lest readers think I've completely lost my mind. I mocked Fox news anchor Walter Jacobson in my last column and had expected his legions of fans to rush to his defense. So I was shocked when no one supported him. Nada. Not one kind word. Sad, particularly for someone paid big bucks supposedly because people like him. It seemed clear that his time is ebbing, and I wondered how Fox would mark the finish.
     Perhaps, I mused, they could put Walter in a tumbrel — a rough wheeled cart, for the dictionary-averse — and drag him past jeering mobs to the city limits. Tar and feathers might also be involved.
     Too busy watching TV to frolic
     Doubtful, I thought, given our reluctance toward public display. And not just derisive display . . . and here maypoles bubbled up. What a pleasant practice! People dressed in white, decorated in the flowers they collected in a process known as "maying." Gathering in parks and dancing, unembarrassed, around a beribboned pole.
     Before I pronounced the practice extinct, I thought I'd better check. If any place would have them, it is the sororities at Northwestern. I reached an "Ellen" at the sorority council. I tried to pry a few words out of her about maypoles, but she referred me to the NU public relations department.
     See? That's what's wrong with people today. Not just too uptight to prance happily in public. But unable to even talk about it . . .
     I understand why women don't dance around maypoles anymore — it smacks of that purity myth they spent centuries escaping. Though frankly, I think a sign of true liberation would be the ability to enjoy yourself without worrying that if it looks wrong you'll have to go back to corsets and slapping laundry against a rock.
     Not to put the onus on women. Men are even less inclined to giddy celebration — unless of course it's connected with sports. Make a touchdown, you get to do an idiotic, wobbly-kneed turkey dance on national TV. Without the touchdown, any cavorting will tar you as a siss as surely as appearing in leather chaps on the cover of the Windy City Times.
     I defy that. I would rather gambol down the center of Michigan Avenue tossing flower petals out of a basket than spend the rest of my life in lockstep with all the other grim, pasty-faced commuters I see trudging toward the grave through the urine-scented netherworld of Union Station.
     More than once — either after catching a glimpse of one of my steadily receding goals, or at the momentary defeat of an enemy — I have managed, if not quite a prance, then a happy sort of a skip through the newsroom. Frankly, I don't think anybody noticed. Then again, the young grinds who increasingly serve as my colleagues wouldn't look up if a calliope hitched to two circus ponies went bloop-bloop-bloopiting past.
     I found record of a few maypoles in recent years at street fairs and, hope blooming, called Al Cubbage, the vice president for university relations at Northwestern, to double check. He fondly remembered delivering May baskets back home in Dubuque, Iowa, and at least knew of maypoles at NU.
     "It was a big deal for years," he said. "There are archival photos, in the early 20th century, of entire groups of spring-clad women dancing around the maypole."
     Cubbage thought that a vestige survived in the school's annual "Maysing."
     "We had it Tuesday night this week," he said. "The men of the Greek houses serenade the women of the sorority houses."
     That sounded sweet. I imagined the guys, dressed in white linen, playing ukuleles and crooning "Harvest Moon" to their sweethearts. I asked him to check into it; he did, but the news was bad.
     College girls don't need wooing
     "They don't even go serenade the girls anymore," he said, I believe, with a trace of sadness. "They no longer dress up. "
     Of course not. They're too cool. We're all too cool to risk looking ridiculous — though why a grown man in spandex undershorts twirling a skateboard is hip, while the same guy manfully capering around a maypole is not, is one of those cultural insanities that defy understanding. Frankly, I'm sorry I brought the whole thing up.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 14, 2004