Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 3, 1994 TAG: 9403020057
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JANE GLENN HAAS ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me."
Jenny Joseph bit off each word, relishing the crisp flavor of her phrases:
"And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
"And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter."
The British poet paused, pulling her woven blue wool shawl tighter against the unusually damp California weather.
Sitting before her at flower-bedecked tables ranged in the small warehouse was a rapt audience that included women in purple dresses, purple shirts and purple blouses. One even wore a large, floppy, red velvet hat.
Servers setting out platters of sandwiches and pouring wine wore bibbed purple aprons with the poem printed on the front.
Some guests at Elizabeth Lucas Designs, the Los Alamitos, Calif.-based greeting-card company with exclusive rights to reproduce the poem, had already purchased T-shirts, posters, plaques, oversized cards, tote bags, even soft-sculpture dolls resembling the purple-garbed old woman.
Soon, craft fanciers will be able to stitch Joseph's poem in the calligraphy version written out in 1981 by artist Elizabeth Lucas. The needlework will be in the spring catalog of Alida Industries.
And before the year ends, a Philippines-based marketing firm that floods Asia with products from U.S. companies will stock shelves with even more items, including ceramics such as coffee mugs, also reproducing Lucas' art work.
The poem has become an international phenomenon that amazes even its creator.
She cannot imagine thousands of women ready to shuck convention and run their sticks along the public railings "and make up for the sobriety of my youth."
The lyrical monologue that tosses society's standards into the dustbin "is a sociological thing," Joseph said, "rather like a song of the street."
The song is heard by all ages.
Fan letters come regularly to her home near Stroud in Gloucestershire, England. She recently received a book of photographs, each depicting a grandmother and her granddaughter, 8, in tableau for each line of the poem.
"The grandmother had made all the costumes, and they were quite nice. Imagine that!" Joseph said.
But most people who buy the cards, T-shirts and posters do not even know the poem, titled "Warning," has an author. Some even reproduce the work without giving Joseph a royalty, believing the work to be in the public domain.
Although she has won numerous awards in Britain for other works of poetry and prose, "Warning" has brought her fame - it is included in the "Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse" - and some degree of fortune.
And it has been a bonanza for Lucas, who has sold more than 1 million oversized greeting cards featuring "When I am an old woman" since she secured exclusive rights to reproduce the poem in 1983.
Papier-Mache Press in Watsonville, Calif., has exclusive rights to use the work as a book title.
The publisher has sold 1 million copies of an anthology of writings about aging by various authors - primarily because the title of the book, printed in 1987, is "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple," said Michelle Golden, marketing director for the book publisher.
"People buy the book for a copy of the poem," she said.
And Joseph isn't the only one getting fan mail.
"Every day I get four or five letters from people about the poem," Elizabeth Lucas said.
"Some of them are from men who write parodies, like the man who wrote saying when he grew old he wanted to be a cowboy."
She hears from women who buy T-shirts for all the guests at a birthday party, from store owners who decorate display windows with representations of purple dresses and red hats.
"It's all part of being free, of just being ourselves," Lucas said.
The artist, 57, who specializes in calligraphy, said the verse launched her greeting-card company.
And its message has changed her life.
"Some people are offended by the verse because of the first words, `When I am an old woman.' They say that is depressing.
"But if they would just read it through to the end, they would get the message."
The poem tells of the restrictions in the life of a middle-age woman who must "set a good example for the children" and longs for the freedom to "wear terrible shirts and grow more fat and eat three pounds of sausage at a go."
Lucas savors the end:
"But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
"So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
"When suddenly I am old and start to wear purple."
by CNB