John R. Powers - Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?

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I know John Powers. Actually, I've never met him, but I know him because he tells the stories of my youth. We grew up as near-contemporaries on the South Side of Chicago in the late fifties and early sixties. I'm sure if we engaged in the Catholic South Sider's second favorite pastime, asking "Do you know So-and-So from Saint Whozit's?" within thirty seconds we would discover multiple connections and thus be able to locate each other in the South Side's unofficial social register.

My friend, Tim Unsworth, likes to say, "There are only six people on the whole south side." I agree, and three of them are my cousins. Unsworth served as a brother at Powers's high school around the time Powers was living out and collecting hilarious anecdotes to fill this book. Unsworth recalls the time he needed to organize a fundraiser involving the families of students and alumni. He gathered a team of four dads to review a roster of some 2,100 names. Unsworth came away amazed there were a mere handful of people on the list who weren't known, related, or otherwise connected to at least one of the four men through family, job, parish, bowling league, or other shared history. Life for the people on that list was a network, a web, an entire social cosmos where everyone knew the same stories and played by the same rules. And the rules were set forth by the church.

Thus, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? arrived on the scene in 1975 like an astute anthropologist's report from the field, detailing the mores, social structures, and courting rituals of a rich and complex culture in full flower-just as it was about to change forever. Perhaps because it observes a world on the brink of change the book was not only popular when it was first issued but also continues to touch hearts so deeply. It captured and conveyed a way of life that had been so fully "the way things are" even as people were coming to realize it had now become "the way things were."

The book is blessed with a title that, in a single phrase, conj ures up that vivid time and place with characters whose foibles and longings are all exposed. Did any nun actually ever warn a classroom of pubescent girls to keep their provocatively glossy pumps tucked away in the closet? Possibly, but it doesn't matter. Powers spins his yarns on the level of myth, not veracity. With exaggeration and mischief he tells tall tales that people can find themselves in.

You probably know Powers, too, or somebody like him. He's the good friend you hung out with who observed everything and missed nothing. The one who would have you in stitches just recalling the common events of your daily life together. The one who could recount your shared history in a way that not only opened your eyes to life's hilarity but also its humanity and its gold. Readers believe Powers's stories because, to one degree or another, and in their own situation, they've lived the life those stories evoke.

After all, who didn't recoil from the class bully or egg on the class clown? Who didn't suffer an inept teacher who was driven to nervous breakdown by merciless students? Who didn't walk into a dance absolutely certain that everyone in the place was staring at the pimple on their chin? Eddie Ryan and his pals lead us through such rites of passage, vintage 1962. We reenter the world of basketball rivalries and after-school jobs, sock hops and first dates, "permanent records" and lasting memories. We relive the excitement of first cars and first loves along with the agony of first car-repair bills and Christmastime breakups.

When we meet him, Eddie Ryan is on the verge of two new worlds, both of them seemingly beyond comprehension: successful adulthood and meaningful faith. And if you read the book on one level, most of what he is offered is bad advice and miscues about his future. Of course, that bad advice and those miscues provide much of the humor of the book. (Considering the churchs decision to deal with Catholic teens' budding sexual desire by keeping boys and girls separate leads Powers to say, "most likely the church would try to get your mind off food by starving you to death.")

The priests, brothers, and, especially, nuns of that era were popularly ridiculed for their tactics and obsessive fussing about dating and sex. Every Catholic student of a certain age has their own story to tell of nuns on purity patrol brandishing rulers to measure hemlines and keep slow-dancers at least a phone book apart from one another, or priests whose nervousness at discussing "the marital act" made Barney Fife look like a cool customer. And yet the emptiness of today's courtship rituals, exposed most sadly in the so-called reality-dating programs, amply demonstrates that these celibates' worries about sex that is divorced from care and commitment were not misplaced. What's more, that group of nuns, priests, and brothers, along with a dedicated array of lay people, shaped and prepared that generation of young women who would take their place as lawyers, doctors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs in record numbers. Many of the first feminists, whether they claimed the name or not, were classroom nuns who stoked the ambitions of girls and young women. I know. I'm gladly married to a product of such formation and training.

As in any good story, there's more to Eddie Ryan's story than first meets the eye. He may be able to easily dismiss ill-conceived advice on sex, relationships, and his own potential, but he can't dismiss the broader medium that carries that wayward message his community. The urban Catholic world of his era was an extremely effective and far-reaching force capable of forming a cohesive culture and passing on its values. Big corporations pay megabucks to consultants who can help them approximate even the smallest degree of that culture-building capability.