By Jim Hagarty
My aunt and uncle were farmers in southern Ontario, good-living people and strong Catholics who got down on their knees to pray every night. My uncle enjoyed a beer now and then but between the two of them, I doubt if they had many sins to bring to the priest in the confessional every month.
One day in the ’70s, as they were getting on in years, they made the three-hour trip to visit my parents on their farm near Stratford. Not wanting to land in on their hosts at noon, they decided to stop at a hotel in the town of Mitchell to eat some lunch before heading out to the farm. So they found a nice table in the beverage room of the Royal Hotel in Mitchell and ordered up some sandwiches.
As they were waiting for their meals to arrive, a pretty young woman wandered over to a juke box in the corner of the room and punched a few buttons. When the music started playing, she walked up onto a small platform that served as a stage, only a few feet from my relatives’ table, and began dancing to the sounds. Now, the dancing was rather entertaining but what came next put a few more white hairs on the heads of my Dad’s sister and her husband.
The dancer began methodically removing articles of her clothing and it didn’t appear that she was doing this because she was too warm. It seemed as though she was intent on continuing to disrobe in an effort to entertain the mostly male clientele who had dropped into the hotel for lunch.
This was a shocking development, indeed, but it posed somewhat of a moral dilemma for my aunt and uncle. With a meal on the way, they could hardly go running out of the place without paying. And once they paid for their food, they couldn’t leave it there and not eat it. They had lived through the Great Depression and weren’t ones to toss away their money.
On the other hand, they were only a couple of arms’ lengths away from a woman who was determined, it seemed, to keep peeling off her clothes till she wore nothing but a smile. Leave their food behind and be wasteful or dine in a strip joint and be sinful. Not an easy predicament.
However, it might have been predicted that the couple would finish their food rather than flee so that is what they did. They kept their heads down and ate while the dancer got down to the bare essentials. Still in a daze, they finally left town and drove to the farm, relating their traumatic experience to my parents the moment they entered the farmhouse.
I don’t know how my mother reacted to the news but my father would laugh long and heartily every time he recalled the story in the years to come. And while my aunt related the harrowing tale with great concern, apparently my uncle hadn’t looked so cheerful in a long, long time.
At least their priest wouldn’t be so bored the next time they went to confession.
