Susan Watkins: The Queen of Red Hats and Belly Laughs

When I first meet Susan Watkins, she is on the hunt for a unique addition to a costume she expects to deliver maximum belly laughs at an upcoming event with the Wacky Wild Women of Texas, a chapter of the Red Hat Society in Fort Worth. The finishing touch? A prosthesis of very low-hanging breasts.

We are speaking via Zoom and Susan, 77, is wearing a red cowboy hat with a rhinestone strap and a sparkling tiara stacked on top of it. She tells me that out of the five Red Hat Society (RHS) chapters of which she is a member, the Wacky Wild Women of Texas is probably her most active group. They host a themed party every month. August was RHS red, in honor of it being their group anniversary month. September was Pirate month.

“October is Halloween and we’re having a booby party, as in BOO-bee,” Susan tells me. This is where the prosthesis comes in. “I’m going to wear a short top. We’re playing bingo. And I’m just going to raise my arms up and go ‘Bingo!’ and expose my chest, my fake chest.”

Susan first heard about the Red Hat Society 17 years ago when her friend Trish rang her up one afternoon and said, “Your 60th birthday is coming up and we should celebrate it by accompanying my mom to the annual RHS convention in Nashville.” To which Susan replied, “‘Not only no but, ‘Heck no!’

“At the time, I thought the RHS was all about a bunch of old ladies that sat around a lunch table wearing red hats,” she recalls, with a wistful smile.

Knowing her friend’s weakness for dress up and cultural activities, Trish persisted. There would be themed parties and museum visits, they’d be going on the Jackson River Boat Cruise and attending the Grand Ole Oprey.

“I hung up the phone and googled RHS to find out how to pack,” Susan says.

Google told her that RHS is a social organization for women that ‘just want to have fun’: no causes, no fundraisers, no men around to roll their eyes. She scrolled pictures of themed events with ladies dressing as crazy as they like. Susan apparently took this as a challenge of sorts. She ordered a blow up doll companion and matching outfits for herself and her doll, which she named Lovie. Lovie would be her dance partner at night. During the day, at the pool parties, fitted with a red swim cap and purple bikini, Lovie doubled as Susan’s raft, to waves of laughter.

“There were a thousand ladies attending, all in Red Hats. It was a sight to see,” she recalls. “Lots of them asked me how long I had been a Red Hatter because I was acting so crazy fun.”

Susan had found her people; she’s not missed a convention since. (In talking to a number of Red Hatters, there is a pattern: Love at first convention.) When she returned home, she immediately started looking for a local chapter to join near her home in Arlington, Texas. Today, in addition to being a member of four chapters she serves as Queen to a fifth, The Red Roses of Texas. Queens are responsible for organizing events and managing members.

When the Barbie movie came out, Susan and the gang turned out in all pink. For the Elvis movie, the ladies attended a screening in full 50’s attire. Earlier this summer when there was a butterfly exhibition at the Botanical Gardens in Fort Worth — a clutch of Red Hatters fluttered in, dressed up like butterflies.

“It just makes you giggle and laugh to see yourself and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ she tells me. “But we were a hit and all the little girls were like, ‘We want to take a picture with you!’”

In an email, Susan gushes that 17 years of Red Hatting has kept her extremely busy in retirement but “with play not work.”

Play was not in abundance growing up in Indianapolis. Susan says her mother was abusive and she had few friends and not much fun as a girl. Then as a young mother of two daughters and a son, Ross, who is autistic, opportunities for cutting loose with gal pals were scarce. She says the desire to make up for lost time having fun with friends is a sentiment that resonates with many of the women she’s met in RHS, women who come from all walks of life. (And she tells all of them to check their eligibility to get their dues reimbursed through the RHS partnership with Grouper!)

What’s more, Susan counts six women among the hundreds of kindred spirits she’s met through Red Hat as the kind of friends she can call anytime and share her deepest emotions.

“One of them, I texted last night, at midnight, I said, ‘Do you and your husband want to come over tomorrow night for dinner?’ I got the message this morning, ‘We’ll be there.’

Perhaps most importantly, Red Hatting has enabled a special connection between Susan and her daughters, Rene and Dawn, who she set about recruiting almost immediately after that first convention in Nashville.

“I can’t believe you keep going out with women in drag,” Rene, 54, recalls thinking when her mom started showing her pictures of RHS activities and inviting her to join the fun. “Fat chance of me doing that!”

Then an RHS convention came to Wichita, not far from where Rene was living. “Mom said, ‘You’re going and you don’t have a say in it. Go buy pink hats and anything lavender.’” (Ladies under 50 wear pink and lavender until their ‘Reduation’, that’s when they turn 50 and wear red and purple.)

Rene won a best dressed award at that convention, and there was no turning back. In 2013, she was crowned Queen of the RHS Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. “I led the parade in a cake costume and a humongous blow up bra,” she says. Rene is currently active in three RHS chapters.

Dawn, who is 11 months older than Rene, similarly found resistance futile. She got a pink hat for her 40th birthday and was told she was going to the RHS conference in Grapevine, Texas, and that was that. Today she’s the Queen of the Victorian Red Hat Ladies, a chapter that formed during Covid – and now boasts 300 members – and meets virtually every month. They do themes and games and celebrations.

“There are so many opportunities for women to spiral down in life,” says Dawn. “Red Hat spirals them back up.”

Dawn and Rene both reflected genuine gratitude not just for what Red Hatting has done for their mother’s happiness but for their own personal fulfillment.

“I didn’t understand how important it was to my happiness to have a real social group,” says Rene.

For his part, Ross, who still lives at home, is always there to see his mother out the door in her beautiful outfits. “I’ll walk out and he goes, ‘Oh, you look so pretty,’” Susan says.

A few weeks after our first interview, I’m curious to hear how Susan’s BOO-bee costume is coming together. Turns out her low hanging breast prosthesis search has been rendered moot: another member located one and will be doing the Bingo gag. Undeterred, Susan is now happily at work on a different costume.