And in this respect I was hardly alone.
One cold winter's day several of us traveled to Washington to participate in a march opposing the Vietnam War. There were large numbers of young counter-cultural types everywhere around us, and at a distance in which opera glasses would have been a blessing was a speaker who might as well have been singing opera for all my freezing ears were able to hear.
"Do you know who that is?" I asked a freaky looking guy on a nearby blanket.
"Oh, yes," he said "that's Loretta Young."
Loretta Young?
For those of post Baby Boomer years, Loretta Young was an elegant and somewhat straight-laced actress who starred in an elegant and somewhat straight-laced television program called, oddly enough, The Loretta Young Show.
She belonged at a
peace rally about as much as I belonged at a convention of North American
Hunters and Trappers.
Did someone lace Loretta Young’s tea sandwich with potent acid? Had she
been auditing courses at MIT taught by Noam Chomsky? Was she about to burn her
bra in front of us all?"
"That’s not Loretta Young," said a bearded gent carrying a peace sign.
"That’s not Loretta Young," said a bearded gent carrying a peace sign.
“No? Who is it?"
"Coretta Scott King.”
The widow of Martin Luther King and a prominent civil rights leader in
her own right.
Coretta Scott King. Loretta
Young.
“The names do sound alike,” I thought.
I had never quite realized before how many of the others around me were
so much like me.
Nothing really wrong with that, but …
I pushed forward through the cold to try to see and hear as much of Mrs.
King as I could.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And what of the real Loretta Young? Perhaps she wasn't so straight-laced after all. It has been subsequently learned that she had a love child with fellow actor Clark Gable.
For at least one brief moment, it seems she really did let her freak flag fly.
