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Sunday, December 15, 2002	Brimming with fun Silly is in style at the Red Hat Society By BEVERLY BARTLETT

The members dress so gaudily. Their titles are a tad too grand.

"The way I got to be the Queen Mother," says Pat Todd, a 64-year-old Fern Creek retiree who leads the chapter known as the Kentucky Ruby Reds, "is I have the computer and I'm willing to do all the work."

Kentucky Ruby Reds recruit Helen Thompson, center, talked with Red Hat Society members who had donned antler hats in honor of the season. Kentucky Ruby Reds member Helen Starcher, left, watched as Bette Stearns, another member, showed her how to tie a scarf at the gathering. Photos by DAVID R. LUTMAN

And their origins so humble. The whole organization -- or disorganization, as they prefer to be known -- was inspired by a poem.

And not some high-and-mighty sonnet. Older women have, by the tens of thousands, gathered themselves into small, outrageously named chapters -- more than 5,000 nationally and more than 20 in Kentucky alone -- because of an easily accessible, popular, humorous poem, one that can be purchased on bookmarks, T-shirts, tote bags and greeting cards.

"When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple," begins the 1961 poem "Warning" by Jenny Joseph. "With a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me."

You could laugh at all that. Go ahead; the Red Hatters won't hear you. They're laughing so much already.

"It's kind of like a pajama party when you were in high school," says Gaye Howell, a 65-year-old retired teacher from Jeffersontown who is among the charter members of the Kentucky Ruby Reds, Todd's group of Red Hatters.

The only difference is that this pajama party takes place not in the private homes of teenagers, but at teahouses, restaurants, theaters, racetracks and other public venues. And the celebrants don't wear pj's, just really elegant purple outfits and bright red hats.

"You can be pretty outrageous when you're wearing a purple outfit and a red hat," says Pam Myers, a 51-year-old Hillview technical writer who is Queen Mother of another local chapter of the Red Hat Society, the Derby Town Divas.

How outrageous?

Well.

"You haven't lived until you've gone to dinner wearing a boa around your neck," Myers says.

Bettie Lewis, a 59-year-old member from Taylorsville, mentions a night at Bahama Breeze when members teased the waiters, who were wearing shorts.

And Myers recalls a bus trip to Nashville that was so raucous a new member was recruited.

Grace Weber, right, a member of Kentucky Ruby Reds, looked at her door-prize ticket as member Loretta Batliner picked winners out of a bag.

"They just looked kind of crazy, sitting there in purple and red," says the new member, Pat Teodorski, a preschool director from Louisville who happened to be on the same bus tour. "Just talking and laughing and trading hats."

One of the dozen members had on a hat with Christmas lights that everyone on the bus just had to inspect. It was, Teodorski says, a wonderful thing to behold.

"I had never even heard of them," she says. "I was just interested -- by the women my age, wearing the red hats and the purple, and just having a ball."

And she found herself encouraged by "just the idea that there is a niche in society for women 50 and over."

Todd says it happens all the time. Women are always coming up and asking the Red Hatters who they are and why they're dressed that way. Sometimes the women are even approached by gentlemen admirers.

The men say, "Wow, that's really neat to see you women in red hats," Todd says. "I guess it's more feminine than seeing them in blue jeans and sweat shirts."

Just a few years ago, Joseph's poem was just that -- a poem. But according to the official lore presented at http://www.redhatsociety.com/, Sue Ellen Cooper, who lives in Fullerton, Calif., gave a friend a birthday gift that consisted of a vintage red hat and a copy of "Warning." Cooper, now the national "queen," thought they'd look nice together on a wall.

The gift went over so well that Cooper did the same thing for another friend, then another, and eventually an unofficial "Red Hat Society" was born. The group went out to tea, wearing purple and red. They had a great time.

Then a friend in Florida started a similar group. A national magazine did a story about the Red Hat Society in July 2000, and suddenly women all over the nation, in tiny burgs and big cities, were asking how to create their own chapters.

There are few rules or responsibilities -- the chapter as a whole must pay a $35 yearly registration fee -- but Cooper did recently issue an opinion that, while "we have no rules, to speak of," she thought that new members should be required to actually wear the purple and red.

"Occasionally, we must put our foot down (swathed in its red tennis shoe, pink scuffie or whatever!)," she wrote.

(One other strictly enforced rule is that, although women younger than 50 are welcome, they are only "in training" and thus must wear pink hats with lavender outfits, rather than red and purple.)

Now the society exists as a loosely organized group of women who share no particular goals or grand plans, but want to be silly and eat out. (They occasionally do a good deed too. Several local chapters united recently, for example, to conduct a toy drive for The Healing Place.)

In the process, they make a place for women who might otherwise have a hard time breaking into new social circles -- a recent widow no longer invited to couple functions, a woman who just moved to town, an empty-nester just beginning to realize how much she relied on her children's activities to keep busy.

Loretta Batliner, 65, a tax preparer from Fern Creek, says she just needed something to get her out of the house, the way her husband's golf hobby gets him out.

"I love to go out and eat," she says. "And this is one of the activities we (members of the society) do."

Todd says that is exactly what it's all about. "The purpose of the Red Hats is to have fun, to go out to eat and make new friends. We've had some great times."

SO MUCH FUN that their initial plan to limit the group to 20 women fell by the wayside. "Once we started meeting these ladies, it was just too interesting," she says.

The Ruby Reds currently stand at about 50 members, and they encourage women to start branching out with their own chapters. If nothing else, it's hard to make dinner reservations for 50.

True to the spirit of a disorganization, anyone -- well, any woman over 50 with a taste for purple and red -- can start a chapter. Details can be found at the Web site.

Myers, for example, started the Derby Town Divas largely because some working women couldn't make the Ruby Reds' daytime events. Howell says frankly that the Ruby Reds try to avoid having to drive at night.

It seems appropriate, though, that the group is so free-form. The poem that inspired it, after all, is a sort of ode to the idea of running a "stick along the public railings" -- of not caring about appearances, of pressing alarm bells and wasting pension money on luxuries like summer gloves and satin sandals.

The writer opines that she can't do those things now, because she must care for the kids and there are bills to pay. But when she's an old woman. . . .

"You know, every woman that you meet has a story," says Todd, who has a red hat with three pins, each shaped like tiny footprints. They represent three children, three grandchildren, three miscarriages.

Every woman has a story, Todd says. "And the story is filled with happiness and heartache."

The Red Hatters talk about that. And they talk about their next trip to the theater and next year's national convention in Nashville and places to buy red hats. They talk about how, these days, it's always the purple outfits that catch their eyes.

"If you find a purple top," Todd says, speaking like an expert, "you will never find purple pants to match it. You have to buy the pair together."