Monday morning. Its usually fairly quiet, with not a whole lot of chatter going on in our program. Our members have been at home all weekend and they’re usually a little disoriented being back at the day center. Well, in walks Mrs. Hair Lady…
One of our sweeter ladies, Mrs. Hair Lady is very sociable although her hearing is not the best. And by not the best, I mean that one time I popped a balloon by accident when we were taking down some decorations and she told me that was the first thing she heard all day.
Well, Mrs. Hair Lady begun this habit of bringing photos in from her family album so she could better share with everyone about her life. The first couple times she brought in pictures of her daughters’ pets and then she shared pictures of her grandchildren. A few weeks after that she brought in some photos of herself in her 30’s and 40’s (she was quite a head-turner!) where she looked as young as her teenage daughter.
She sat down at our morning table and asked for a hot tea. When my co-worker brought it back Mrs. Hair Lady started looking through her purse for something. Quite honestly, I was trying to be attentive to something else, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her finally pull out some photos.
I assumed these were her usual family photos and didn’t pay much attention to them. Mrs. Hair Lady showed them to my co-worker whose face soon turned to a bewildered horror. Mrs. Hair Lady said, “That was from my 62nd birthday.” She pulled out a third photo and I reached my neck out so I could take a glimpse of it before she handed it over to my co-worker.
It looked like a person was dancing, except their clothes were all nude colored. Wait, maybe the person was nude? I tried to move and get a better look at these three pictures. I got another glimpse from my co-worker and noticed a very thin line around the dancing person’s waist. Stymied, I couldn’t figure out if this person was a man or a woman.
My co-worker started to blush a little and I asked to see what all the fuss was about. She turned over the three photos to me and I saw Mrs. Hair Lady sitting in a chair, receiving the up-close-and-personal nude dancing of a man with very long hair (this must’ve been from the 70’s)! Ah, the small string around his body, he was wearing a thong! And wait, on the last picture, the thong was gone and there was a dark colored box where the man’s manhood should be. By the way, it was a very big box.
I tried to put these photos back in her purse, but by now the others at our program had their curiosity peaked. Of course, Mrs. Hair Lady couldn’t hear me, and I didn’t want to say too much because everyone else was oblivious to the content of the photos, but she insisted on sharing them with the group.
I said to my co-worker, “I’m not sure if this is a good idea to pass around,” rather loudly so everyone could hear. Almost as if on cue, Mrs. Hair Lady said, “Yeah, he was a stripper!” so loud that everyone burst out with a comic gasp.
“I want to see, I want to see,” said one of the other members. And Mrs. Hair Lady wanted to make sure she saw. What was I to do? She got the pictures passed around to about half the group. Most of them were laughing, some were too shocked to learn their friend was getting a very intimate performance from this man with long straight hair.
“My family got it for me for my 62nd birthday,” she said. “I was embaressed. Everyone wanted to come down and see him dance for me. Although, none of the children could come down. They all wanted to know what was going on!”
As a staff, we started to rationalize the incident. They’re all adults we said, there’s nothing in these photos they haven’t seen. To be honest, I’m still cracking a smile over this many hours later. Why would Mrs. Hair Lady bring these in at all?!!! What was the motivation???
I always tell my co-workers, there’s never a boring day where we work. That was never more true than this morning.
