The Reactionary Utopian
                    March 23, 2007


I REMEMBER SANDY
by Joe Sobran

            "Every harlot was a virgin once."
                             -- William Blake

     Today I'll be discussing what is called "sex," 
drawing on my own personal experience, so I hope the 
reader will put up with some frank language. Chiefly I've 
learned that a woman doesn't have to be "sexy." She just 
has to be female.

     It started back in Michigan with my first 
girlfriend, Sandy, when I was about 14. No, not "about" 
14. Fourteen exactly. It's not as if I can't remember. 
How could I ever forget?

     Sandy was not your homecoming queen type. Far from 
glamorous, she was a shy, some would say mousy girl, but 
very sweet, with a soft voice you could hardly hear. Her 
ears protruded somewhat, but I thought they were cute. I 
was probably the first boy who had ever walked her home 
from school. If she didn't have much to spend on clothes, 
I never noticed or gave a darn. Maybe she wasn't a 
knockout, but she was a lot more feminine than most of 
the girls who were. I couldn't have been happier if she'd 
been Audrey Hepburn. In fact she was better. I didn't 
have to worry that Sandy might ditch me for some rich, 
suave Cary Grant.

     She was a pretty typical girl of the time, the 
Fifties, who I guess had played with dolls and dreamed of 
getting married and having babies some day, just as I had 
dreamed of making Little League and, eventually, the New 
York Yankees. She was about as far from being a vamp as I 
was from being a wolf. We were both skinny kids. Somehow 
we wound up holding hands. Necking? Petting? Are you 
kidding? If you wanted that stuff, you waited until you 
grew up and went to the painted women of the big cities 
out East.

     It was the age of Elvis, but I didn't dance, so we 
mostly stayed home and listened to Pat Boone's version of 
"Tutti-Frutti," or maybe Nat "King" Cole singing "Walkin' 
My Baby Back Home." A couple of real Fifties swingers, 
Sandy and I. That was before "baby" was pronounced 
"bye-buh." Not that I'd ever call Sandy "baby"; I let Pat 
and Nat say it for me. I think she knew what I meant.

     Sandy's family was so poor that she could only 
afford one falsie; not that she told me this in so many 
words, but she had a bratty little brother it was hard to 
keep secrets from. Falsies were what the Fifties had 
instead of implants. I tried to assure her that her 
goiter was barely noticeable. She tried to cover it up 
with makeup, if Clearasil counts as makeup. (Tip to guys: 
Later in life I found the line "Goiter? What goiter?" 
useful with the fair sex. It puts them at ease 
immediately. Elementary savoir-faire.)

     Sandy and I never got around to discussing marriage. 
Or even going steady. I wasn't ready to settle down. 
Besides, I was already settled down, essentially. I was 
born settled down. And our chief ambition wasn't to set 
the world on fire. It was just to be normal. That was 
hard enough when that brother of hers kept taunting, 
"Sandy's got a boyfriend! Sandy's got a boyfriend!" (Tip 
to the girls: If you wish to project the image of an 
exotic woman of mystery, lose the kid brother.)

     Sure, I knew the facts of life (by then I was well 
into puberty), but you didn't mention them around nice 
girls. Remember nice girls? They had to learn the facts 
of life by marrying guys who already knew them, I 
figured. We didn't talk about "family values." You just 
behaved yourself -- or else.

     One fact of life your parents never told you about 
was what was then called impotence (when people mentioned 
it at all), now known as ED. Not that I'd have believed 
it anyway. In fact if my elders had told me about it I'd 
never have believed another doggoned word they said. The 
very idea would have seemed inherently improbable. And a 
teenage boy could use a little ED now and then. The least 
of our problems. We prayed for it. And now they want to 
"cure" it?

     In her unassuming way, Sandy taught me all I really 
needed to know about women. Even later, when I 
(inadvertently) encountered those painted women out East, 
I found I couldn't go too far wrong as long as I 
remembered that each of them had once been a Sandy.

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