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Parental Advice 1/17/2005 5:19:16 AM
“If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”
The Parental Ode to Peer Pressure. I always wanted to say ‘yes’ to that just to see mom’s reaction, but I didn’t have the courage.
The truth was, I could handle my peer group, it was my mother I couldn’t handle. When I was about eight years old, mom decided that I should become a Boy Scout, probably the last thing I wanted to do. She even became a Den Mother to force the issue. For some kind of costume thing she made me (mom was an excellent seamstress) a gray uniform, drew a mustache on my upper lip with grease pencil, got a German friend to teach me a phrase, and then, in front of a gathering of peers and their parents marched me out on stage, where I dutifully thrust my right arm into space and shouted, “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Allus!” Oh, you could have heard a pin drop. Ten years after the war and I’m playing Hitler! Years later when I was old enough to understand, I really wanted to jump off that cliff. What was mom thinking?
At about the time that I learned about Hitler I happened to discover a certain picture in the family photo album, one my mom had forgotten was in there. It showed a young WAC (Yes, my mother wore combat boots and threw rocks) on an Army Air Base full of men, imitating the famous Betty Grable pin-up shots, wearing, not a one piece suit like Betty, but a TWO PIECE bathing suit!
