Rollicking Red Hats Hardly Spitting Image of Decorum

Their aim was as obvious as the red hats planted squarely on their heads: Let the good times roll.

The women of the Red Hat Society streamed into Ventura on Saturday by car and by train. They wore berets and bonnets, all of them red. One woman wore a red baseball cap advertising Fresno Livestock, while others labored under lace-laden scarlet chapeaus that looked as if they could have cradled the heads that rolled in the French Revolution.

Groups strode into Main Street’s antique shops and thrift stores. They took over entire restaurants, whipping their feather boas around, laughing and carrying on as if there were no tomorrow, which was exactly the point.

“Why not?” asked Sue Ellen Cooper, who founded the group in her Fullerton home and is known as its Exalted Queen Mother. “Who cares? We deserve to take the train somewhere and shop all day if we want to. The sky won’t fall.”

The group was accidentally started by Cooper a few years ago, when she sent a friend a red hat and a poem titled “Warning” by Britain’s Jennifer Joseph. The red hat was just for fun. The poem, which Cooper first noticed on a T-shirt, was more serious, a warning of impending eccentricity by a middle-aged woman who wants to “make up for the sobriety of my youth.”

“I shall wear purple,” she vows, “with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.... “

The narrator also plans to indulge in other mild outrages: To “learn to spit,” to “run my stick along the public railings,” to “gobble up samples in shops.”

With that as inspiration, Cooper and a few friends started getting together for tea and chuckles, decked out in their red hats and purple dresses. Visiting a laser tag arena en masse, they startled local teenagers playing the high-tech version of paintball. Soon women elsewhere heard about their good-time group and asked to start their own chapters.

Thus was born a pinkie-raised, tea-sipping, road-tripping, belly-laughing, damn-the-torpedoes international women’s movement, a comfortable cross between Martha Stewart and Auntie Mame.

With offices in Fullerton, the Red Hat Society estimates its 2,600 chapters have some 60,000 disciples. Most are 50 and over, with a scattering of younger women required to wear hats that are pink. The group’s first convention will be held in Chicago next month, complete with inspirational speakers and a pajamas-only breakfast.

At Ventura’s train platform on Saturday, some 200 members trooped off the Amtrak Surfliner to be jubilantly greeted in the parking lot by another couple of hundred. Here, four or five women chimed in on an off-key but enthusiastic rendition of “Jelly Roll Blues.” There, a few Red Hatters from Santa Barbara took swigs from water bottles, puffed out their cheeks, and practiced that which they never learned as young ladies: spitting.

“It’s an acquired skill,” explained Susie Stratton, a retiree who was gingerly dabbing excess water droplets from her chin.

Most Red Hatters aren’t much on expectoration. Getting together for tea or dinner, schmoozing and dressing in the group’s trademark colors are all they need.

Nancy Spranger, a nurse in Modesto, said her 82-year-old mother has worn the Red Hat garb not only to club functions but also to church.

“It was like watching a bird in the front yard puff up,” Spranger said. “It just changed her whole outlook--like, ‘Yesss! I’m somebody!’”

Spranger’s group enjoys the occasional cocktail and is thinking of renting a limo for an evening at the opera in San Francisco.

“I’ve worked since I was 15,” she said. “I was a single parent and raised three teenagers. Now it’s time for me.”

That’s just the point, says Exalted Queen Mother Cooper.

“Who is that internal person saying you’re too old or shouldn’t want to have fun?” she asks. “That inner voice is lying to you.”

On Saturday, Cooper rallied the Red Hat troops in a building at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. Throngs stood three-deep at tables stacked with framed copies of what group members call The Poem, Red Hat pins, Red Hat T-shirts, and, of course, red hats.

Cooper also peddles such items on the group’s Web site but says she’s not Exalted Queen Mother just for the money.

“It’s all about sisterhood,” she said. “When you get a bunch of women together in these colors, you can’t ignore us--no matter how hard you try.’

Men are not formally barred as companions at Red Hat functions but only a handful, including Cooper’s husband Allen, showed up Saturday.

“Some of them are wistful,” Cooper said, “but a lot of them just don’t get it.”