The Cardinal Dress

Dear Charlotte,

I grew up playing ball because my dad played for the Cardinals — the oldest continuously running football team in the United States. He played for them when the team was based in St. Louis. My mother was a nurse on vacation in St. Louis when a hurricane hit. She did some volunteering and that’s how she met Dad. He got hurt rescuing someone.

When I was nine, mom and dad separated and my mom and I came back to live in Canada. Away from Dad, my passion changed from playing ball to playing guitar. Mom loves music; her favourite thing to do is to sing and play music with me.

Dad stayed in touch. He’d call regularly and he’d visit. We’d play ball when he did. Then he remarried and I started hearing from him less and less and then he had a son, Matt, with Marjorie, his new wife.

I joined a band. We were kind of grungy and punky. We called ourselves the Pleated Skirts and got really popular. We played all our school dances and got weekend gigs at the roller rink and a club in the Mission district.

One summer Dad said he was coming with Marjorie and Matt. I got really excited because they were due to arrive on the Friday before a music festival that we were part of.  We were on at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon, so Mom invited them all to the concert.

Hayley plays keyboards and she’s our band manager and we are a couple. So I thought I should give Dad a heads up before their arrival. And Mom had news too; she had a new man to introduce them to, so we called them and told them everything and a few days later Dad called back and he said that they were still coming but that they’d stay in a hotel. When Marjorie got on the phone, she tried to be nice but she told Mom that she didn’t want Matt around lesbians.

I wasn’t mad, I was sad. Instead of looking forward to Dad’s visit, I started dreading their arrival so Hayley suggested we do something to change that.

We had a tradition of wearing things — usually buttons or scarves or doodads on our instruments… things like that, as a secret message to family or partners in our audience, so she thought we should do one for Dad. We always told our friends to look for our silent love letter but I didn’t want to call Dad.

Hayley took two seconds to come up with her idea. She had always been really impressed with Dad having played for the Cardinals and we were singing a song in our set called Angry that’s a break-up song. And in the chorus where there’s a line that goes, “where I wouldn’t go, where it’s black as a crow” she said we should sing, “where I used to go; where Cardinal’s know.” The Cardinal dress was her idea. I loved that the first sight he and Matt would have of me would be as a Cardinal.

I couldn’t move around as much as I usually do in the dress, but it was easier to watch everyone without all the jumping around. But they didn’t come. Dad doesn’t call any more either. He’s born again now like Marjorie. I get Christmas cards but they send them just to me at Mom’s house, not ours.

Good luck with your dress show and thanks for wanting to include one like ours.

Love,

Shirleen Davis

Photo attached.