Rainbow Girls

Jeanne may remember being forced to join the Rainbow Girls as a pleasant experience that fostered a sense of community among young teenaged girls....but me, not so much. By the time I was frogmarched into the Rainbow Girls, the Masons had built their lodge in the field across from the house - and everything that went on there could be seen from the dining room window. That meant that on any given Weds night when Daddy would invariably ask "Hey, isn't there a Rainbow meeting tonight?", I couldn't just say no and get away with it. Believe me, I tried. It wasn't just the awesome bride of Dracula dresses we had to wear, either. This dress I wore was the second one I had during my time with the Rainbows. The first was the dress Jeanne wore - the same one that Ruthie wore before her with considerable alterations. By the time that dress got handed down to me it had yellowed in the armpits and the netting was brittle to a point where I looked like a zombie prom queen in it. I remember Jeanne describing it as looking like the inner lining of a casket and she was RIGHT! Ruthie finally decided to upgrade the look after I was in Rainbow for a year and made the dress I have on in this photo. I loved it with its empire waist - but the sleeve that always seemed to be shorter than the other was something that dogged her. My arm length varied from one arm to the other arm unpredictably like the Marty Feldman character's hump in Young Frankenstein. 

My favorite memory of Rainbows was the one night when hell froze over. Daddy was a stickler for Rainbows and making sure I went to EVERY. SINGLE. EVENT. NO. EXCEPTIONS. This particular winter's evening I got called out of the main sanctuary - an interruption in the inner workings of the meetings that was mostly unheard of. In order to call someone out of the room, a series of Rainbow rules had to occur - the three raps on the outer door, three responding raps on the inner door, etc. etc. Once inside we didn't get to just leave, we had to maneuver a labyrinth of ancient ritual. This night, I was told that my mom called and that I needed to go home RIGHT AWAY. She had to promise a life was in danger to wrangle me free. Panicked, I ran across the parking lot to the house and found Dicky and Ruthy there grinning at me. Daddy was away on business, and Dicky had driven down from ISU to take us to see Gone with the Wind, which was showing at one of the downtown theaters. When he found out I was at Rainbows, he talked Ruthie into calling over and getting me out on a fake 'emergency'. HOLY CRAP - that wasn't done in our house, and most certainly not when it came to the Rainbows!! I was in heaven. I had never seen the movie Gone with the Wind until that night and it remains to this day one of my very favorite movies because Dicky, probably without even thinking about it, rescued me on that one evening in more ways than just to see a movie. 

There are a number of memories of Rainbows that are better off forgetting from those days, but none more cringeworthy than the time I was initiated into the group by being kidnapped in the middle of the night out of my bed by the older girls. Every other initiate got a heads up from her mom and was abducted wearing her best pjs and amazingly good hair for having been dragged out of bed. For years Ruthie would apologize out of the blue for not preparing me for that midnight rousting. The reason for her apparent (and yes, well-earned) guilt was that at 13, I was at my very, very most awkwardly pathetic. I grew seemingly 10 feet in that one year between ages 12 and 13, and most of my clothes had yet to catch up with that growth - none more so than my old nightgowns. When I was kidnapped out of my bed, I looked like they'd dragged me from a cardboard box in an alleyway. At the temple, all the other pleebs looked like they just stepped out a Sears catalog, complete with lipgloss. One look at me and my nicely coiffed abductors felt they at least succeeded initiating mortally embarrassing one of us properly. To make it even more enjoyable, we couldn't alter our appearance until after the Masons and Demolay boys came by later to make and serve us breakfast. 

......I remember not speaking to Ruthy until I went away to college.