If you are reading this post you can see my profile picture, and while I do have more polished or even flattering photos to share with the world … this is the one I HAD to use on my “I miss Memphis” post. Because I’m wearing my piggie hat.
The piggie hat is sacred. It symbolizes my love of all things Memphis – especially my wonderful Memphis friends. You see, I picked up this fuzzy fashion statement during my “moving away party” … which was really just a dozen or so otherwise professional upstanding members of society wandering in and out of every downtown establishment I wanted to experience on my last day as a resident. It was the finest pub crawl I’ve ever experienced. Rendezvous half slab for lunch, blues in the afternoon at B.B. Kings, a Big A#$ beer in Handy park and then on to A.Schwab for some souvinirs … which is where I spotted Miss Piggie. No Beale Street T-shirt or Elvis post card or giant pair of overalls (huh??) for me! I’m wearing the pink pig hat … besides, what says Memphis more than a pink pig hat from A.Schwab?
Then it happened, I made the first of many ”piggie proclamations” I would give that day. Everyone had to buy a hat that “spoke to them” the way piggie spoke to me. There we were – a king, a penguin, a pimp, a viking, a moose, a nun, a sheik, a statue of liberty, a couple of cowboys/girls, a completely random birthday cake and a guy with a bandana on his head (he got there late) all proudly walking down Beale Street during the day like a group of tourists without fear of seeing anyone we knew. It was a beautiful site!
So what were my other piggie proclamations? Where do you go from making all of your 30- and 40-something friends wear silly hats in public in broad daylight? Well, our crew of hat-wearing misfits were found partaking in all sorts of Memphis traditions that day:
Even after the crowd was gone and the hats had long been taken off, I refused to remove piggie from my head. There we were, King Matt and I (at this point my patient boyfriend was the only one my proclamations had any power over), sitting in Blues City eating late night tamales. Not because we were still hungry, but because I just kept thinking of things I had to do before I left. Three months later I am still thinking of things I want to experience on my next visit to Memphis that are unique to the city … of course hats will be strictly optional.
