WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsor Aunt Betty, a naturally thin woman, had no qualms about skipping the main course and diving into a second helping of chocolate whipped-cream cake. My parents would only let me have dessert if I finished my entrée.

She’d talk of an article she read in The New Yorker (my parents’ reading didn’t go much further than the Evening Bulletin) or of a play she saw on Broadway. Then, we’d catch a matinee at one of the opulent movie palaces on Chestnut Street, usually a romantic comedy starring Fred Astaire, Cary Grant or Rex Harrison.Īfterwards, over dinner at the Pub Tiki or Horn & Hardart, Aunt Betty would order a whiskey sour, light up a Pall Mall, inhale French style and speak of things never mentioned in my home. First, she’d pour through racks of impossibly expensive clothes in the Wanamaker’s designer salon, debating the merits of Dior and Balenciaga as if her life as a civil servant at the Frankford Arsenal called for spangled chiffon evening gowns. (If she had a trace of vanity, it was about her feet.) I can still see her in her Ann Fogarty dresses, white gloves and extra-narrow Andrew Geller shoes. Every Saturday, I met Aunt Betty at the Eagle at John Wanamaker’s. Although no one ever told me the details, it seems she had never been in love or, more to the point, no one had ever proposed. It was also a derogatory term, not to be spoken in front of Aunt Betty, my mother’s unmarried older sister who had “bad skin” and lived with my grandmother in a row house in South Philly.īetty was to be pitied.

When I was growing up, Old Maid was a card game that, along with Go Fish and Gin Rummy, occupied us kids on rainy days.

Old maid card game princess