Sadie Hawkins

When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite things to do was to dream about high school and college. I would look through adults' yearbooks and think about how fun it would be to go to school with a whole LOT of people, not just five or six like in our one-room school. Those schools seemed to have a lot of fun events, events that brought out the creativity in the people planning and attending them. One event I thought intriguing was Sadie Hawkins Day.

I really don't remember what yearbook I picked it up from, but my mother explained to me that a Sadie Hawkins event was when the girls asked the guys out. It sounded fun, having the power to choose whoever I wanted to ask. It was a nice twist on the old "wait and hope someone asks you" atmosphere that I'd heard about.

I later found out that Sadie Hawkins Day was a 1937 invention of Al Capp, the creator of the L'il Abner cartoon strip. Hekzebiah Hawkins, a resident of Dogpatch, had a 35-year old spinster daughter who was a homely woman. Desperately wanting to marry her off, Hawkins called together the unmarried men of Dogpatch and told them it was Sadie Hawkins day, which meant he was going to shoot his gun and whichever one of them his daughter caught, was hers to marry.

Shortly after Sadie Hawkins Day appeared in Al Capp's popular cartoon, high schools and colleges took it up as a girl-ask-guy dance event, unheard of before then. The tradition still takes place, so it's said, on the first or second Saturday in November in various towns across the U.S. and Canada. The dances call for the wearing of farm clothes, akin to the fashions worn in the L'il Abner cartoons.

Back to the girl-ask-guy high school events in my world... there was indeed one of those each year in my high school in Singapore. It was a curious thing to have the tables turned. I never asked out the guy I really wanted to ask; I was always too shy. Instead, there was some internal scheming and plotting as to which guy I would not mind hanging out with, and it had to be someone who would likely say "yes" if I asked him, since I couldn't bear the thought of rejection. It was a good experience for understanding what the boys went through for all the other date-night events.

The most fun Sadie Hawkins event I participated in during these years was the one I schemed up with Diana, another girl in my dorm. We decided to ask two boys who we thought no one would ask, who were a bit socially awkward or marginalized. So we asked Harvey and Paul (not their real names). And we asked them as a team.

They asked, "Which of us is going with which?"

"You'll have to wait and see," we responded every time they asked.

On date night we walked over to the boys' dorm to pick up Harvey and Paul, who were all dressed up in their best suits. I took Harvey's arm, and Diana took Paul's. The young men happily settled in, now that they figured out who was dating whom.

After dinner came a walk around the loop on the campus, and then the traditional movie (usually something Disney-esque, since we were in a missionary kid school). As we started out on the walk down the cement roadway, Diana and I switched dates. It's still amusing to recall the flummox-ment of the young men as they were handed off past each other to the other girl. And then we all laughed and enjoyed the second half of the evening with someone new.

"It was the best date of my high school years," Harvey told me later. And indeed, thinking back on it, I think it was my most fun date, too. Sadie Hawkins, ya done good, Girl!