Freed from the fear of tackiness

Has the concept of “tackiness” been just completely wiped out of our culture?
In
my youth, it seems like I spent a lot of my time worrying about whether
or not something was “tacky.” Now that I’m eligible to join AARP, the
concern about tackiness rarely crosses my mind.
Maybe it was just
living in the Deep South. Maybe other parts of the country just aren’t
as concerned about avoiding tackiness as I was in my growing-up years,
being raised by two expatriate Mississippians, and later in my college
and younger-adult years living in the Magnolia State myself.
Mama
and Daddy had both been raised in what would be considered “genteel”
Southern homes, where good table manners were stressed and linen
napkins and sterling silver flatware were part of daily life. Having
each graduated from Ole Miss, where they had lived in the rule-bound
Greek culture of the Fifties, and then living the etiquette-bound lives
of a U. S. Naval officer and wife, they were very aware of the dictates
of polite society. Neither of my parents were the least bit snobbish or
snooty, but they were products of their upbringing and culture, and
they each had firm ideas about the “nice way to do things.”
Our
family ate dinner together at the dining room table most nights. We
always enjoyed visiting with each other at the table, but we were
taught never to talk with our mouths full, and we were encouraged to
put our forks down after each bite, and to carefully place our knife
and fork across the top of our plate when we were finished. We kept our
napkins — and our left hands — in our laps.
Putting the ketchup
bottle or the mayonnaise jar on the table was tacky, and was just not
done except in the most hurried-up, emergency situations. Mama would
spoon relish or mayonnaise into a little dish and put it on the table.
We learned not to butter our rolls with the butter knife, but to scoop
some butter up out of the dish with the butter knife and put it on the
edge of our dinner plate (my grandmothers used bread-and-butter
plates), and butter our roll with our own dinner knife. Mama did break
with our grandparents’ family tradition and stooped to using paper
napkins, but with five kids and no household help to iron the napkins,
our grandmothers didn’t blame her.
The concept of not being tacky
encompassed not only table manners, but almost every area of life. For
example, tattoos, especially for a girl, were so tacky they were off
the chart. My daddy even thought pierced ears were not for “nice
girls.” As the oldest of his four daughters, I was the one who asked
first if I could get my ears pierced, probably when I was about 14. He
grinned and told me I could only get my ears pierced if I got a tattoo
first, which in those days was a totally outlandish and horrifying
idea, so I knew he didn’t mean it. The only people we knew who had
tattoos were older Navy enlisted men — certainly not teenage girls.
It
was okay for children to go barefooted when we were at home or playing
in the yard, but for a child to go to the grocery store or anywhere but
the swimming pool barefooted was tacky.
When I went down to Columbus
at age 17 as a freshman at Mississippi State College for Women in 1973,
I learned a whole new set of rules of propriety. We were not allowed to
walk around campus with our hair rolled up. We could smoke in our dorm
rooms — and I’m not proud to say I burned through a whole lot of
Virginia Slims Light Menthols in those days — and we could smoke
outside on the campus, but the rules said we had to be sitting down,
not walking around with a lit cigarette. So my well-groomed friends and
I would sit down on the curb under one of the ancient magnolia trees
and fire up a cigarette anytime the urge hit, and for some reason, that
WASN’T tacky.
Most of us “’W’ girls” had been raised by Mississippi
mamas, and as hard as we tried to be cool, we still couldn’t get past
the major rules that were tattooed into our genetic code. We were so
terrified of being tacky, you couldn’t pay us to wear white shoes
before Easter or after Labor Day. If we had on a skirt or a dress, we
had on pantyhose — it was REAL tacky not to wear stockings. At least we
were a little more liberated than most of our own mothers and all of
grandmothers, who were still under the impression that a lady wore a
girdle at all times, no matter if it was 104 swelteringly humid degrees
outside.
And for goodness sake, wearing pants to Sunday morning
church would have been the tackiest thing we could imagine. Up until
the 90s, we were all wearing heels and our best dresses  — and of
course, stockings — to the First Methodist Church. I can still remember
my shock the first time I saw an out-of-town visitor at a church
funeral wearing a dark pantsuit. A lady wearing pants to church! Lawdy,
Miss Scarlett.
We’ve come a long way, Baby. Most of the time these
days, I live my life free of the burdens of being worried about
tackiness, but I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing, or a loss. We
use paper napkins at our house with impunity. I’ve been known to put
the ketchup bottle on the table (forgive me, Poppy). I wear pants to
church all the time, and sometimes even jeans.
 I even finally got my ears pierced — but no tattoos for me, Daddy, I promise!