Free Belle Weather by Celia Rivenbark Page B

so.
    So yes, I suppose cotillion could teach a few good lessons and the National League of Junior Cotillions seems to be trying to stay relevant. For older students, there’s even a class called “Digital Courtesy in Public Places.” I’m not sure but I think it means to never give anybody the finger.
    There’s even a course in sports etiquette. Perhaps Barry Bonds and his size nine hat could teach that one. (“Hey kids! When injecting extract of bull pituitary gland directly into your buttocks, try to avoid unseemly flailing and screaming.”)
    Raising a proper young woman in the South isn’t as easy as it used to be. Apparently, things aren’t any better if you’re an international star.
    Madonna has announced that she won’t let her daughter date until she’s eighteen.
    Of all the moms I expected to have my back on the dating thing, Madonna had to be the least likely. This is the woman who wrote a coffee-table book called Sex that was so steamy it was shipped to stores individually shrink-wrapped.
    But motherhood changes everything, don’t it, Madge?
    We’re always reading about what a strict mom Madonna has turned out to be. If young Lourdes doesn’t pick up her clothes off the floor, they’re thrown out “to teach her a lesson.”
    She’s not allowed to watch TV (“rots the mind”) or eat any junk food (“rots the body.”) And Madonna famously wouldn’t let the kid try out for a movie role because she wanted her to have as normal a childhood as possible. As though any kid whose nappies were designed by Versace could have a normal childhood.
    Madonna admits to being furious when her ten-year-old wears jeans that are too tight.
    So far, it seems as if Lourdes’ childhood is shaping up to be almost as much fun as toe fungus.
    Who would’ve imagined it? Madonna’s conservative views on child-rearing make Laura Bush look like a hillbilly heroin-addicted pole dancer by comparison.
    She has even announced that she wants Lourdes to wear her Stella McCartney–designed wedding gown when she walks down the aisle, like a virgin of course.
    The gown is, I’m sure, sitting in a box somewhere having been dutifully “preserved” at the dry-cleaners just like any good Southern mama would do.
    Madonna appears to be channeling the hopes and dreams of the Birmingham, Alabama, Junior League mom rather than the cone-bra wearing slut puppy we thought we knew.
    Naturally, I agree with Madonna on all this stuff. We’ve told our kid that she won’t be allowed to date until she’s about thirty-two and then only with her daddy and me riding in the backseat. Sure, the sound of our his-and-her oxygen tanks clicking away will be somewhat disruptive but so be it.
    If you think Madonna and I are overreacting consider that just last week one of the little boys in my kid’s fourth grade class called her a “h-o-e ho!” Clearly he didn’t mean that she was a garden tool. And clearly, my Precious is no ho or hoe. Dude just knew it was a bad word for girls.
    The same day, I saw an article in Seventeen magazine that showed, with graphic illustrations, how to help your boyfriend put on a condom.
    Because only a loser seventeen-year-old would actually read Seventeen , it’s not lost on me or Madonna that this stuff is being read by girls more in the thirteen to sixteen range.
    Although never by our girls of course.
    The thing that Madonna will never have to contend with that every Southern mother trying to raise a decent daughter must deal with is the damn beauty pageant.
    Look, y’all, for the last time, pageants are moneymakers. They don’t give a shit about your kid. Didn’t any of y’all see Little Miss Sunshine ?
    As Sophie retrieved the mail not long ago, I cringed when I saw the return address: The National American Miss Junior Pre-Teen Pageant.
    “Throw that crap away,” I told her.
    “You shouldn’t say ‘crap’,” she said.
    “You’re right, honey. Throw that shit away.”
    “But it says right here