Title: Why Not Join the Giraffes?
Author: Hope Campbell
Date: 1968
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
ISBN: 0-448-21290-0
Length: 223 pages
Quote: "Why would he be interested in the first place? Don't you know the impression your family gives rubs off on you?...And I don't want to wind up with a starving artist...I want a--a regular, ordinary life!...The kind of boy who buys you a chrysanthemum for football games, and you sit around afterwards talking about stuff by a roaring fire."
Probably the easiest way to summarize this farce is to describe it as a teen-romance version of Irma's Big Lie. That's a short review; can I throw in some more words? Why not? I've laughed at this book for forty years; I can throw in as many words as you want...
Money's getting tight in the Henderson household, with father John "Mark" Henderson between script sales and mother Helene having had another baby instead of a visual art show. (This is not, however, a family that's ever been poor. Their New York City flat is positively posh, and when Suzie talks to other kids at a nightclub she's instantly tagged "Uptown." The alert reader may surmise that one reason why the Henderson parents don't have enough money to send their kids to camp is that they seem to hand out enough of it from week to week for just about anything--faddy clothes, restaurant meals--sixteen-year-old Suzie and fourteen-year-old Sam want.)
Still, Suzie's not exactly thinking far enough ahead to be considered a gold-digger. She's not looking for a rich young husband; how icky, she's only sixteen. She's looking for the sort of nice boy who's interested in (and can afford) the sort of nice dates that interest Suzie and impress her girl friends, of whom only one, Natalie Goldman, is close enough that Suzie hangs out with her in summer. Art museums, medieval flute concerts, meals at her family's favorite restaurant, football games in fall, and proms in winter...as opposed to hanging out and playing with or listening to Sam's rock band. Suzie's the rare baby-boomer (yes, we did exist) whose favorite musical genre does not happen to be rock, though like most of us she appreciates a really good rock song.
Suzie is one of those tall, cute blondes who never have to worry much about finding a date, but in 1968 even those girls couldn't afford to relax. This was the era of an active effort to distract girls from serious competitions for grades, scholarships, or jobs, by obsessing over every detail of their appearance. Not only other teenagers but even adults are judging where Suzie fits into society by whether she puts on the Levis (in which she herself feels grungy and sexless) or the white dress (she must be on her way to be a bridesmaid!) or the pink one (that gets respectful attention) or the tight purple slacks (that make her look to rude boys "like a traffic light that just turned green"). Suzie can't just smile at a boy and expect him to smile right back. Likely he wouldn't smile right back if she weren't dressed for his social circle. Suzie has just said goodbye to last school term's boyfriend Bill, who moved to the suburbs, and now she needs to pay attention to her look in order to attract a similar sort of boyfriend, like new neighbor Ralph, instead of one of Sam's friends and admirers.
Well...Ralph. And he almost deserves it. I didn't care for Teen Romance much as a teenager, and I think my tolerance for this spoof of Teen Romance may explain why. I knew all about physical attraction, as a teenager. Usually it worked only one way, and if a person had any brain she or he kept quiet about it, and it ran its course and went away, like flu. When it was mutual it always seemed to turn out very inconvenient and embarrassing for all the kids I knew who actually achieved couplehood, who were (thank goodness) a minority; whether they just realized that during the next phase of the hormone cycle they didn't even like each other, after having told everyone they were In Love Forever, or whether they actually eloped and were stuck for...oh, pity.
In any case, by and large, the girls I knew didn't idolize teenaged boys. Some of us told friends which boys we thought were cute, meaning they didn't mind being teased about and might even want to be annoyed and disappointed by, and some of us just quietly watched the ones we thought had the potential to become attractive men in who could imagine how many years. Maybe we liked them; some of them were likable enough. What I found hard to believe that any sane teenaged girl could imagine was that a teenaged boy is, or even resembles, the hero of a grown-up romantic fantasy. A teenaged boy can be hard-working and well-meaning and polite and intelligent and a good friend but he is still, dash it all, growing. You can love sharing snarky doodles in math class or recycling aluminum with a teenaged boy, just the way he is right now; you cannot extrapolate any realistic idea of what he's going to look like, sound like, or behave like ten years from now, although you can be reasonably sure that it won't be a knight on a white horse. I remember feeling terribly clever about writing to a friend, "Abdul-Bulbul" (yes, we knew that's not a Muslim name) "has looked into the crystal ball and foreseen -- entering a courtroom with another man, but which carried the briefcase and which the ball-and-chain Abdul-Bulbul seeth not."
What I like about Ralph's and Suzie's romance is that, although the story itself is hard to believe, their relationship isn't. Ralph doesn't seem to be very intelligent in any way; he's certainly not sophisticated enough to interest Suzie for long, and he's apparently no match, as a potential musician or as a potential man, for fourteen-year-old Sam. But he doesn't need to be! Teenaged girls are not, or shouldn't be, stupid enough to set up teenaged boys as parent-substitutes, the way they're always doing in really bad teen romances. A boyfriend is not your counsellor or life coach, she says, sternly, to those of The Nephews who are in literal fact nieces. He's a boy who is, let us hope, a friend, or at least someone you won't die of embarrassment to claim as a friend after the hormone tide rolls out. What Suzie wants Ralph for is to have a nice, clean-cut-looking accessory to take up to the Cloisters for a medieval flute concert, before summer's over, and to watch an occasional football game with or dance with at the prom, after they're back in their separate schools. For that he'll do. Suzie has time to realize that what she feels for Ralph as a person, once she gets to know him, is compassion; that she's going to be even more of a "big sister" to him than she is to Sam. That's how a lot of best-case teen romances go, actually.
The plot? Frankly, even at fourteen I never believed the plot. Suzie thinks Ralph must have come to complain about the noise Sam's band are making, so in order to seem as different from Sam as possible--although they look alike--she pretends to be the baby-sitter, a much more sheltered and overprivileged girl from an even posher block--namely, Natalie's. Trying to think of a name, she thinks of Ginger Rogers and says her name is Ginger, then thinks better of it and says her real given name is Patricia...Goldman. Ginger P. Goldman. She gives him Natalie's address; he looks up Natalie's parents' phone number and tries to call Suzie every fifteen minutes until he can get her to meet his parents, because if they see that he knows a really nice, sheltered girl like her, they'll let him join Sam's band.
Naturally it doesn't take Ralph's parents long to identify this as a lie. Suzie fights back with another lie, but one she can make true--that she's a writer, like her father, doing research. All she has to do is write something someone will publish. Meanwhile, Ralph still needs to be shown up as the immature little brat he is, so the story goes on and gets goofier; Suzie buys a pair of really dreadful purple slacks that are so tight, and so cheap, they fall apart at crucial moments, and she and Natalie ask a couple of homeless boys from "the Village" to be their fake dates at a rock concert...It all ends happily, of course.
Can today's teenagers relate to Suzie's adventures? I don't know. I know this story should guarantee a nostalgia trip for anyone who's ever owned a pair of snug-fitting, garish-colored, bell-bottomed polyester slacks. It'd be fun to share and discuss it with a teenager, if any of the teenagers you know has time to read a trivial work of fiction that's neither a new fad nor a "classic" from some reading list or other. I don't imagine many of them do, so I don't imagine Why Not Join the Giraffes is a good candidate for a reprint...but it's still funny enough that we adult readers might laugh the buttons right off our own bell bottoms. Wear something newer and remember your bell bottoms while reading this book.
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