The bride will wear red - on her head. She will also wear a slinky, purple dress and purple shoes. As would be expected of a Red Hat Society member.
All of "The Intriguing Ladies" (as the Greenwood Senior Center group is called) will wear similar outfits for the Catholic ceremony, albeit without the bridal bouquet, and the other guests are encouraged to follow suit.
Alice Everett-Oswalt, 65, had wanted her wedding to be an event for her fellow Red Hat members, and the 76-year-old groom, Albert Farrar Jr., was happy to oblige. In fact, he is wearing a purple shirt for the occasion.
Even Everett-Oswalt's bridal shower last Wednesday, May 18, was a Red Hat affair. About 15 members enjoyed a hamburger lunch at the senior center in their Red Hat attire before Everett-Oswalt opened the numerous gifts wrapped with red and purple paper and ribbon.
The bags and boxes were scattered around a cake decorated with red and purple frosting roses and a glass Red Hat lady sculpture that Everett-Oswalt commissioned. Small, handmade, red hats decorated the other tables.
The bride even brought her teddy bear Polly, who also was dressed with a red hat and purple dress.
The Intriguing Ladies provided more colorful items as they presented Everett-Oswalt with red and purple lipstick cases, a hat box, potholders and an apron. One Lady gave the bride a purple nightgown.
The Red Hat experience
This group of Intriguing Ladies is one of 35 registered groups in Seattle. With 22 current members, the group meets monthly on the second Tuesday at various local restaurants for lunch and day trips to such places as the Seattle Aquarium and the Meeker Mansion in Puyallup for high tea.
Queen Mother Fae Rasmussen founded the group in September 2003, after moving from Florida, where she was a member of a Red Hat group there.
According to Rasmussen, she "kept fussing about not having a group" in Seattle so someone suggested she start a group at the Greenwood Senior Center. Two days after putting up a notice, she had 20 members, she said, and many of the members have stayed, as this group has only seen about 30 women in its two years.
"It shows there's a need for it," she explained. "Older women [like to] get out and socialize."
Greenwood's Daisy Mak, one of the younger Red Hat members at age 57, said she joined the group because she deserves to have "fun, fun, fun," the group's motto.
Mak learned of the group while on a trip to Leavenworth with a friend who shopped specifically for a red hat. Now, she wants to spread the word about the Red Hats and "share the fun with other people."
Everett-Oswalt shared her Red Hat experience with Marguerite Daoura, 65, by inviting her as a guest to a Red Hat outing to a casino along Aurora Avenue North. About 40 to 50 people attended, as a Ballard Red Hat group also went.
Daoura still wears the same red hat Everett-Oswalt made for her for that first meeting, and the Bitter Lake resident is already thinking of starting a Red Hat chapter in Snohomish County.
"I encourage people to join our group and have fun with us, get to know who we are," she said.
Getting to know one another
The wedding couple met over an on-line dating service. Both had lost their spouses - Everett-Oswalt's husband of 44 years to muscular dystrophy; Farrar's wife of 28 years to cancer.
Each sought companionship and dated a few people before Farrar sent an e-mail to Everett-Oswalt.
"I wasn't looking specifically to marry, but to have dinner [with someone] occasionally," he said.
Farrar explained that he had seen his future bride's picture on-line, but he wasn't in the age group she specified. But there was something about her picture that always brought him back to it, he said, and he wrote her in August 2003.
Everett-Oswalt responded with a lengthy e-mail, and they met that Labor Day at the Greenwood Safeway store and spent the entire day together.
"I felt close to him immediately," she recalled.
"We have a lot in common," he said. "We're very comfortable together. We get along very well."
They've been together since, learning to ballroom dance, sharing each other's short stories and poems, walking and playing cards at Farrar's local senior center in Puyallup.
But because he felt it was still too soon to marry after his wife' death, Farrar said, he didn't propose to Everett-Oswald until this year, on the day after Valentine's Day.
"I asked her at the spur of the moment," he said. The happy bride-to-be elaborated that it happened first thing in the morning, at 6:30 a.m.
Now, the preparations are being made for the June 25 wedding at St. John Catholic Church in Greenwood, with the invitations being mailed out, the family helping with the cake and a senior-center member handling the wedding photos.
The upcoming nuptials show that "at our age, we can still have a good marriage, a good life," Mak said.
Vera M. Chan-Pool is editor of the Herald-Outlook. She can be reached at 461-1346 or needitor@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
