Leap Year Day 2024

 Today, Leap Year day, is often mistakenly thought of as Sadie Hawkin's Day, which actually is in November.

Sadie was a character in Al Capp's  comic strip L'il Abner, who enlarged upon the idea of women asking men for marriage.

From Wikipedia:  Inspired by Capp's satiric race in which eligible women chase down terrified bachelors for the purposes of wedlock, the event reverses the cultural norms of men as the romantic pursuers. Arthur Berger says that the day "represents a fertility rite and awakens an awareness of the relationship between men and women."

  

But according to Irish folklore, the tradition of women taking the initiative came about when St. Briged of Kildare complained to St. Patrick that women had to wait too long for men to propose.   St. Patrick then decreed that women could propose on Leap Year Day.

And from there the tradition traveled the world.

I was thinking about Sadie Hawkins and Leap Year  today, despite the mix up in dates, and recalled a story I'd written some years ago about a Sadie Hawkins Day dance I went to with my date.

The story is called Jimmy Loved Me when We were Seven.   Jimmy doesn't figure into this story but another boy does.

Here's that excerpt:

When I was in eighth grade at the old Central Junior High School on Sixth Avenue in Anchorage, we had a Sadie Hawkins Day dance.  The tradition was that girls asked boys for dates to this dance.

 

I asked a boy whose name, more than sixty years later,  I can’t remember  and I suspect that has a lot to do with the embarrassment I inflicted on him all due to the corsage my mother fixed up for him.   It was a small paper plate with two artificial sunny-side-up eggs and a fake rasher of bacon, all decorated with ribbon.

 

The boy and I “danced” once, then retreated to opposite sides of the gymnasium and became one with the walls. He ditched the corsage rather early after the eggs fell off, and avoided me afterward.   He did, however, have the courtesy to show me the broken corsage.