When I was 3 years old, my parents took me to a dinner party. It was the kind of party common in the suburbs of Washington D.C., where everyone brought their young kids, fed them, put them to bed, then moved on to martinis and highballs – a late 1960′s phenomenon.

This particular party was memorable, because it was the day my Dad discovered I could read. He discovered this when I was looking at the word “Fuck.”

Image courtesy of The Realist Archive Project

Our host had hung up a poster over his bar, popular at the time, which said FUCK COMMUNISM. My dad noticed I was staring at it intently, but assumed it would be inscrutable to me. He didn’t count on my daily dose of Sesame Street. “Pretty poster, huh, Peggy?” he said. My reply: “Yes, Daddy. But what’s Communism?”

His first thought: “Oh my God, she can read.” His second: “She probably already knows what the first word means.”

I can just envision my earnest little 3-year-old self, staring at the poster and determined to break the code of what it meant. I wonder what meaning I took away with me that day. Probably that one or both of those words made my dad nervous, and I should file them away as words my mom called “not bad, but impolite.”

Me in 1969 - clearly a subversive

Later, when this story seemed more funny than appalling, my parents told it often. I only have a vague recollection of the incident myself. My dad could recall very little about the poster besides the offending words, except that he seemed to think it had an abstract eagle on it somewhere.

I decided to find it. Which took all of 3.25 seconds, thanks to Google.

It turns out the poster was the work of Paul Krassner, a stand-up comedian, social satirist, cohort of Lenny Bruce, Yippie, and publisher of The Realist, which is where the image first appeared in 1963. More than 30 years later, Kurt Vonnegut called it “a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2.” He went on:

At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable…COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable…By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

My parents and their friends were certainly not Yippies or even hippies – in fact, both Mom and Dad worked for the CIA, and most attendees of the dinner party worked for some branch of the U.S. government. However, what was radical in 1963 was likely more mainstream in 1969. It had the F word, which you still can’t say on broadcast TV and radio, but the sentiments expressed were ones even Ronald Reagan would agree with.

I thought it kind of funny, then, that 40 years later, my dad implored me not to display such a poster in my house. I had emailed him the link to the image, asking him to verify if it was the same poster we’d seen all those years ago. He owned that it probably was, but said, “IF YOU PUT IT UP IN YOUR HOUSE, PLEASE TELL ME YOU WILL PUT IT ON THE BACK OF A CLOSET DOOR, FOR DISPLAY ONLY IN APPROPRIATE CIRCUMSTANCES.” (Forgive him – he writes in all caps, he’s not really shouting.) He continued, “THE WORD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO THE HUMAN CONDITION TO BE USED AS IT IS, BY EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME, FOR ITS SUPPOSED SHOCK VALUE.”

He’s right. We really throw around the word Communism way too much.

Ask the donkey?

This is my shoulder, and it has a story to tell.

When I was 19, I got a tattoo. I got it for the sheer hell of it, and as my friend Jeff Rebello drove me to his favorite tattoo place (Tiger Jimmy’s), I really had no idea what permanent skin statement I wanted. We were listening to the radio station Mighty 690, which at that time played oldies, and as we pulled up I heard the announcer say, “That was The Four Tops with their first U.S. single, Ask the Lonely.” Something about that made me think, “Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s what I’ll put on my shoulder.” I can only blame a misspent youth brooding over Smiths songs and the fact that I’d been sucking down vodka while anticipating the pain of the tattoo needle.

I went in, paid my $15, unzipped the back of my orange flowered minidress, pulled down the right shoulder, and got inked. Seven Marines silently watched me. This was 1985, and back then (pre-Gun ‘N Roses) only hookers and strippers got tattoos. They probably wondered where I worked and if they could follow me there.

Fast-forward 23 years. It’s November ’08. I am at my friend Athan’s wedding in Long Island. Athan is a longtime music freak, so I am surrounded by music-industry types. My ASK THE LONELY tattoo has remained lonely, as I vowed to have only one (and have a standing bet with my friend Jesse that I will get no other – he claims they’re like Lay’s potato chips, you can’t have just one). Over the years, as I worked in the music industry, I often used my tattoo as a trivia question: “What was the first U.S. single The Four Tops had? It’s 3 words that are tattooed on my shoulder.” No one ever answered correctly, even A&R guys and rock music critics. I remained smug in my knowledge of Motown and steely one-tattoo resolve.

Or so I thought.

I got busted, hard, by a guy at the reception with an iPhone.

I’d gotten many answers to my trivia question over the years, the funniest one being, “Walk Away Renee?” (Yeah, I’m going to tattoo Walk Away Renee on my shoulder. Try again.) But no one ever said to me, “You’re wrong. The Four Tops’ first U.S. single is not 3 words.” That’s what Mr. Smartypants was saying to me now.

ME: No way.

HIM: Way. Look.

He holds up his iPhone, and the screen shows me how ill-informed I’d been all these years: The Four Tops’ first U.S. single was Baby I Need Your Loving.

I gaped. My husband gaped. I said, “I’ve been asking that question for over 20 years. I thought I knew the right answer. No one busted me. No one.”

Not long afterward, I bought an iPhone. Never again.

My choice of mobile phone is not without consequence. I work as a learning technology specialist for Qualcomm, and I felt it incumbent on me to never carry a phone that didn’t have a Qualcomm chip in it. For this reason, you could have found a Palm Treo 650 in my purse at this wedding. I grabbed said phone and desperately tried to disprove Mr. Smartypants, but couldn’t get online (DAMMIT!).

What led me to defect to the iPhone was (1) the powerful evidence I’d just received that I was waaaay behind without it, and (2) the fact that I pay for my own phone, and thus can pick whatever I want. I also believe that you can’t beat the competition by knowing nothing about them.

What led me to finally blog about this experience was hearing that Qualcomm’s president, Steve Altman, actually welcomes the iPhone because it drives users to the 3G network, which Qualcomm helped invent and reaps royalties from. And because one day over beers I told the story to Amanda Coolong and Dan Tentler, and they said, “You have to write about this.”

Now that my illusions are shattered, I might as well let go of some other long-held beliefs. I just noticed that my tattoo has gone from its original black to a kind of blue-green. It also looks like it says ASK THE DONKEY. Maybe it’s time for a touch-up?

Just don’t tell Jesse.

1989, when my tattoo was still crisp