In 1948, my mother dressed the varsity football team at Drake University in pink-paper tutus and taught them enough ballet to enable them to win the university talent contest. Now, nearly fifty years later, she shows me a set of creased snapshots and says, still glowing, “Those were my boys.”
In other pictures young women grin and vamp, Betty Grable-style, beside gray-stone walls or stout hedges. My mother points to one picture and says, “She was a real beauty”; to another and says, “She was homely as a mud fence.” I am bewildered; every one of them looks like a 1940s movie star to me in their dark, fitted suits and silk stockings, hair in disciplined waves, lips deeply shaded. These are college sophomores, dressed for campus life. I marvel.
