Hats Off, Happy Day

Today I thought about hats. And several hat stories from my primary classroom. Then wandering writing tonight to interesting hat held expressions, all really just my hat connections. Who knows why I got so fixated but I did. Thinking about hats in this hatless life of mine.
I look so lousy in a hat now, but I'd love to look great. I'd wear them if I could. No not Easter Parade kinds of hats, I want to wear Diane Keaton hats. Not Bella Abzug ether, thanks.

I love to make hats. I've crocheted and knitted hundreds.My friend Heidi looks great in them. In fact I have a thing about them as gifts....they often are what I think of for a child's cold head. I see all children's heads as cold.....Caps and hats are symbols of something but reading tonight showed me how rich that association really can be from lucky hats to hats doffed to declare a run for President. It's a magical hat day for Sarah.....

But I had no idea the depth when I started my hat investigation. ......

So first I found a hat making project.
It is really about anxiety and depression awareness called the Blue Hat Project.
It has a week in which hat-making and wearing in fascinating ways promotes not only an awareness of depression and associated anxiety but something to do to kind of ..well...help...

The Blue Hat Project was conceived by Waltraud Reiner, a milliner with personal experience of depression and a wish to use the creativity behind hat design as a means of raising awareness of depression in the community.

The project aims to:

• Provide people with a creative outlet through hat making and wearing hats thus promoting positive focus and support for dealing with, or overcoming some forms of depression.
• Provide the opportunity to exhibit blue hats made and donated by people for display and subsequent auction to raise awareness for beyond blue the national depression initiative.
• Provide a platform for people to deal with depression by talking about and becoming aware of the work of beyondblue.
  

BUT WHY I WAS INTERESTED IS.......HERE....

Do you wear any of these hats every day:

Friend, lover, wife, mum, nurse, taxi driver, husband, dad, painter, woodworker, ceramicist, metal worker, artist.

I hadn't thought before about "hats" quite like this but idiomatically they are so rich.
Asking what "hats" one wears in a day, of course a fascinating place to spend some time considering. My "hats" in that sense today included:

teacher, mother, friend, listener, pseudo-nurse, wife, umm...special friend, writer, cook, shopper, driver, customer, repentant library patron, caller, worrier, dreamer, goof-off, patient and maybe on another level....just a person trying to make it through another Day in A Life.

That of course made me want to look idiomatically at hat...cap, "in French mon chapeau"...thinking of course of this song from the Cat In The Hat....and a very old video I show every year.



So looking at idioms I found all kinds of hat related lines of thought....

at the drop of a hat

if you do something at the drop of a hat, you do it suddenly and easily, often without any preparation. I can't go rushing off to Florida at the drop of a hat. We now have a situation where laws may be changed at the drop of a hat.

See also: drop

be talking through your hat (old-fashioned, informal)

to be talking about a subject as if you know a lot about it when in fact you know very little. The man's talking through his hat. He doesn't know the first thing about banking.

See also: talk, through

be wearing your [teacher's/lawyer's etc.] hat

to be acting as you do when you are working as a teacher, lawyer etc., which may be different from the way you act in other situations. I was wearing my teacher's hat at the meeting.

come/go cap in hand (British, American & Australian, American)

to ask someone for money or help in a way which makes you feel ashamed. I had to go cap in hand to my parents again to ask for some money. (often + to)

See also: cap, come, hand

hang up your hat

to leave your job for ever. When I stop enjoying my work, that'll be the time to hang up my hat.

See also: hang

hats off to someone

something that you say when you want to express your admiration for someone. Hats off to her - it takes a lot of courage to go travelling on your own at that age.

I take my hat off to someone (British, American & Australian, American)

something that you say which means that you admire and respect someone for something they have done. I take my hat off to people who do voluntary work in their spare time. I tip my hat to our teachers who've raised standards in the school with very few resources.

See also: take

I'll eat my hat (old-fashioned)

if you say you will eat your hat if something happens or does not happen, you mean you will be very surprised if it happens or does not happen. If we can't beat a second-rate team like Sheffield, I'll eat my hat.

See also: eat, I'll

If the cap fits (wear it). (British, American & Australian, American)

something that you say to tell someone that if they are guilty of something bad, they should accept criticism. Look, I didn't say who was to blame for this mess - but if the cap fits, wear it.

See also: cap, fit

keep something under your hat

to keep something secret. I've got some interesting news, but you must promise to keep it under your hat for the moment.

See also: keep

old hat

if something is old hat, it is not new or modern any more. A 24-hour banking service may seem old hat in the United States, but it's still innovative in Europe.

See also: old

pass the hat around/round

to collect money from a group of people. We're passing the hat round for Simon's leaving present.

See also: around, pass, round

pull a rabbit out of the hat

to surprise everyone by suddenly doing something that shows a lot of skill, often in order to solve a problem. He's one of those players who, just when you think the game's over, can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

See also: pull, rabbit

throw/toss your hat in the ring (American & Australian)

to do something that makes it clear you want to compete with other people, especially to compete for a political position. She's seriously considering throwing her hat in the ring and declaring herself a candidate for the election.

See also: ring, throw, toss

Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms © Cambridge University Press 1998

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Now I'm thinking about hats...and how to say "hat" in other languages...a bit out of the blue.
No matter what I do, can't find a huge translation table.

How about HAT QUOTES. Here is a wonderful collection from a very unique site Hat Shapers.com

But trying to find that simple thing, I run across The Language Hat an extraordinary site that examines language and it's origins. I hope I hold this thought long enough to link while I continue my hats searching.

Then I found a funny hat......well...look at your own risk. Ever watch the movie The Closet, French? You should, it's a great comedy. You'll be glad you did.....trust me.

Speaking of hat fun my daughter referred me to a site that likes to postulate that a Spaghetti Monster created this universe. It asks for equal time in school texts and in curricular development. Pasta-farians are devoted to their notion of this meatball universe concept she tells me. So I found a very funny hat you can wear to join their club. Isn't this the cutest craft project. I really love it. Now that's a hat.

Which of course brings me to thinking about Caps too, for as complex as hat is within our cultural contexts, caps is equally so....my first thought went to a book I read today to my class when the hat bug was biting.

Yes, I really am going to talk about that classic Caps For Sale.......and no I haven't been nipping the sherry. Though I'm wheezing so badly I'm considering doing that.

Not everyone is "ready" for the really, really, really Big Book version of this story. I'm evidentally not completely ready, as I dropped it on my foot several times reading today on a whim, right off my super Big Book Teacher Shared Reading cart. (I had about 20 minutes to while away until the kids went home, so it was "story" time.)
I'm a first grade teacher and this I counted today as "Math reasoning." We counted caps.

Let's see....the history aspect.

Caps For Sale predates most of those handsome fellows I see wearing these caps out in the world...it has a Wiki...saying in part,

"A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business is a 1938 classic children's book by Esphyr Slobodkina. It's a sly take on the saying, "Monkey see, monkey do."
Based on a folktale, the story follows the life of a mustachioed cap salesman who wears his entire stock of caps on his head -- seventeen in all, as depicted on the title page (including his own cap). He strolls through towns and villages chanting, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!"

It's an exciting plot line, as I'm sure the traveling cap business is filled with the wonder of new customers and far away places. He even manages to be a bit hungry from a poor sales day just to let us in on the reality of village to village promotion.

Myself, I favor the colors used in the book( turquoise, orange, red, mustard yellow, gold, brown) which I can only say are as period as the entire thing...folk tradition for sure.
Oh, and I like the checkered caps. And the stacking on the head to avoid a cart, genius.
My class preferred red caps. They prefer purple but it wasn't a choice...Like all good stories there are inevitable complications, poor sales, a rest under a tree (hey we have a tree story in our theme so good tie in) and then of course the town monkeys dive in to give some nice monkey business with their cap-naping ways. And I about fell asleep mid-story for dramatic and sleep-waking effect. I always dozed reading it to my kids it was a nice replay of those fading days.

I read the story as a child, surely just think Scholastic book club, heck my Mom probably read the story as a twelve year old or whatever she was to her baby brother. It's been around awhile. My current class loves mocking and teasing so of course they thought the story was great. But my money was entirely with the peddlar. His disgust is my disgust. My class had 100% identification with the monkeys. I never, ever identified with the "tsk, tsk, tsk" monkeys.

I asked my class what else he could do to get his caps back from the monkeys in the tree before the page where he does get them back a bit worse for wear but in shape and one child I will call Andrew yelled out, "He can take out his gun and shoot them all dead."

It's that kind of a year.

So after another 15 minutes in which I then tried to figure that out and make "my kids and guns and school talk" speech off they went happily into their hood. Ah....you wonder what Slobodkina might make of a book that has sold more than 2 million copies.She must have been amazed. I am. Pretty amazing that caps can generate that kind of cool.

Then Janet, Dad's third wife and a DEAR friend, artist, dancer, quilter extraodinaire wrote, sending me this under the title Purple Hats which just came ..Just now..

Purple Hats
In honor of women's history month and in memory of Erma Bombeck who lost her
fight with cancer. Here is an "angel" sent to watch over you.


IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER - by Erma Bombeck
(written after she found out she was dying from cancer).

I would have gone to bed when I was sick instead of pretending the earth
would go into a holding pattern if I weren't there for the day.

I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in
storage.
I would have talked less and listened more.

I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained,
or the sofa faded.

I would have...it goes on...but I think better to catch the drift...do it now.......

And then my hat-tricks took me to memory of Oliver Sack's story about The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
I'm a fascinated thinker about proprioception.
In part because mine works with irregular glee reminding me that what you think you know, is really a state of mind which can be instantaneously rearranged. (David Bohm especially interesting to read...)I have through neurological dysfunction learned enough to say that my hat really is in my hand.
This story of Sacks, like all of his books about the brain, is fascinating. Today I know a hat took me all the way from here to there. With no time to keep editing and playing I have to boil ten dozen eggs to dye tomorrow with a class....So, yes, funny things are everywhere.

And sometimes my fun is thinking about someone wearing a nice cap and looking like a bit of magic. I can see it. Really.