I personally knew a man and his wife who were good-living farmers and strong Catholics who got down on their knees to pray every night. The man 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 some relatives on their farm near Toronto. Not wanting to land in on their hosts at noon, they decided to stop at a hotel in a small town to eat some lunch before heading out to the farm. So, they found a nice table in the beverage room of a hotel and ordered up some sandwiches.
As they were waiting for their meals to arrive, a pretty young woman wandered over to a jukebox 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 the visiting farmers’ 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 the old folks.
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 the innocent old couple. 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 good-living, unwasteful farmers 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 they were to visit, relating their traumatic experience to their relatives the moment they entered the farmhouse.
I don’t know how the housewife who hosted the visitors reacted to the startling hotel news but her husband would laugh long and heartily every time he recalled the story in the years to come. And while the visiting woman related the harrowing tale with great concern, apparently her husband hadn’t looked so cheerful in a long, long time. The speculation was he had stolen a few glances at the stripper while slurping up his soup.
At least their priest wouldn’t be so bored next time they went to confession.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
