Attendees at last summer's triennial gathering donned some jaunty hats in the photo booth!
And on the lighter side, let’s talk about hats. Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee is nearly upon us, and in honor of that milestone, the BBC has assembled a retrospective of many of her distinctive hats over her tenure as Britain’s monarch. For any lover-of-hats, it’s not to be missed!
Back in 2005, when Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, some fabulous hats attended the wedding ceremony. Anna Pickard of the London newspaper, The Guardian, wrote a contemporaneous Internet blog that was quoted in the New York Times. Pickard described the hat of Trudie Styler, the wife of Sting, as looking “like the sort of thing you could train hamsters to jump through.” Sophie, Countess of Wessex, was reported to be “wearing what from this angle looks like an upturned galvanized bucket.”
Of course, the show-stopper was the hat worn by the new Duchess of Cornwall – a gold-ostrich feather hat tipped with Swarovski diamond crystal tips. In what might only happen in hat-happy England, the Times of London reported that the bride had six fittings for her outfit and 10 for her hat!
I have a few hats in my closet – but certainly nothing to rival the Queen, Camilla, Sophie or Trudie. But all the talk of hats got me thinking about the many hats we wear as women. We have skimmers and bonnets that we wear for no other reason than their sheer beauty. We don mortarboards as signs of our learning. We put on a nurse’s cap and bring about healing and wholeness. A baseball cap is good when gardening or on a long walk or run. Hard hats and helmets are needed when everything is falling in around us. Sometimes we even hide under hoods and veils, masking reality and preventing us from confronting injustice.
Even when we wear many hats, may God keep us from wigging out!
Linda Post Bushkofsky is executive director.