Dressed

By Jerry Mack Grubbs

The word “egg” is a noun. When you take that noun and throw it at someone, the word becomes egged. The word “dress” is also a noun. When you put that noun on someone, the word becomes dressed. As a young Cub Scout, the thought of being dressed in a dress was more distasteful than having rotten eggs hurled at you from a passing car. You could always wash the egg off. You could even throw away the soiled clothes if necessary. But for a young boy to be caught wearing a girl’s dress would be unbearable. We played cowboys and Indians, climbed tall trees, dared each other to do risky things, even chased hogs around the mud wallow, but we never put on a dress and pretended to be a girl.

At least no one in our Cub Scout troop wore a dress until the cub master, my mother, decided that we were going to put on the play, The Wizard of Oz. Our troop had a big problem. The principal character in the story was Dorothy. Dorothy was a girl, a girl who wore a dress. No one wanted to play the part of Dorothy. Mother almost had a mutiny on her hands. Each Cub Scout scrambled to put dubs on one of the other parts. I chose the part of the lion. I didn’t care that the lion had lost his courage. Any part would be better than having to wear that Dorothy dress in front of all my friends. The lion would eventually get his courage back. How could you ever overcome having worn a dress? Whoever had to wear that dress would never live down the shame.

Mother said it was just a play and no one would remember a cub scout wearing a dress. I didn’t believe her and I told her I would run away and live in the woods before I wore a dress. She knew I was serious because mother also knew how petrified I was of the woods in the dark of night.

By some form of bribery or trickery, a secret buried with time and shame most likely, mother convinced my brother Bill to play the part of Dorothy. Everyone else breathed a sigh of relief. Mother took me aside and made me a promise. She said, “If you make fun of your brother I will beat the livin’ tar out of you.” I didn’t know what the livin’ tar was but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out that extracting the livin’ tar from my body was going to be painful.

Mother worked tirelessly on our costumes. Bill’s dress and my paper mache lion head were ready before the first dress rehearsal. There was just one problem. Living in East Texas, we were plagued with humid weather. That humidity worked it’s magic on my paper mache lion head. It mildewed on the inside and smelt like raw chicken parts tossed in a garbage can and left for days in the hot sun. It was too late to make another paper mache lion head so I begged mother to let me do my part without the lion head but I lost the battle. The lion head went on with me holding my breath as long as I could.

Regardless of all my suffering on stage in that hot, smelly, cowardly lion head, I was happy as a toad in a cool pond. All I had to do when my happiness began to sag was look over at my brother dancing around in that Dorothy dress and once more I was content. The play ended and Bill led us all back on stage for a curtain call. It didn’t matter that the loud applause was from the hands of our family members. What mattered most was that I would be able to get out of that stinking lion head.

After the play was over and the threat of someone else having to wear that dress and play the part of Dorothy had passed, we kidded Bill without mercy. Mother said that everyone would forget about Bill being “dressed.” We were going to make sure that no one ever forgot. But time passed and Bill’s dress was gradually forgotten. But I never forgot the lesson I learned on stage that hot summer evening as I tried to breathe inside that paper mache lion head. When I began to feel sorry for myself all I had to do was look at my brother Bill “dressed” up as Dorothy and I was immediately happy to be where I was, just a lion who had no courage. Down deep inside, I knew that Bill was a bigger person for agreeing to do what was necessary to make the play a success but what the heck; mother could have chosen a different play. The year before we had been dressed as Indians and warhooped around an imaginary campfire on stage and got just as loud an applause.

Today I would choose to be “dressed” instead of being “egged,” but try to convince an eight-year-old boy of that while his friends are standing around just waiting for an excuse to make fun of him. Maybe those eight-year-old boys should rethink the definition of friend. The word “friend” is a noun. When someone wraps the arms of that noun around you does that mean you are “friended?”