'Tarts' bare all for charity

Fun group of over-50 women doff their outlandish outfits for calendar

JOHANNA WEIDNER

MATHEW McCARTHY, RECORD STAFF Raspberry Tarts (left to right) Diane Worgan, Jill Dill, Sheku (Janice) Bjarnason, Karis Burkowski and Pat Haney pose at Burkowski's Waterloo home. The women, members of the Red Hat Society, plan a calendar to raise money for Hope Spring, a support group for cancer patients.

WATERLOO REGION (Jan 19, 2004)

Good friends see each other's best and worst sides, but they don't usually glimpse every side.

Every bulge and every wrinkle.

Baring it all is just part of the regular outlandish fun for a group of local women who call themselves the Raspberry Tarts.

The only requirements for membership in the club is a woman must be at least 50 and attend all functions in full Raspberry Tarts regalia, including a red hat and purple outfit.

Fun is the group's only mandate, and the Raspberry Tarts definitely exposed their fun sides -- and everything else -- as they stripped down to pose for a 2005 charity calendar.

In the photos, red hats are the only items worn or used to cover the women's private areas.

"It's showing the world your life doesn't end when you're 50," said Karis Burkowski, who is 54 and a proud Raspberry Tart. "There's a lot of fun still to be had."

Proceeds from the calendar will go to HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre, a non-profit organization that helps people living with cancer.

The women needed little prodding to shed their purple garments. "People stripped off quite happily," said Pat Haney, 62, of Kitchener.

A hot summer day and feast of delicacies actually sparked the first nude photograph during a pool party in Burkowski's secluded Waterloo backyard two years ago.

The women, covered only by bath towels, formed an impromptu chorus line.

Next, they slipped into the pool wearing only their hats, then perched on the pool's edge, exposing their bare bottoms. Snapping a photo of the liberating moment was irresistible.

"We just had fun," Burkowski said.

The Raspberry Tarts enlisted Kitchener photographer Judi Douglas, a woman Burkowski said was crazy enough to fit into the group.

As a junior with conditional membership, Douglas must wear a pink hat and lavender attire until reaching "the birthday."

That's a requirement the Raspberry Tarts lightheartedly enforce as a chapter of the Red Hat Society, a worldwide community of fun 50-something women.

The society began in the late 1990s when Sue Ellen Cooper of Fullerton, Calif., gave a friend a red hat and framed copy of Jenny Joseph's poem, Warning, for her 50th birthday. The poem opens, "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me."

Joseph promises later in the poem to "make up for the sobriety of my youth."

Outrageous and unfettered are a must for the women's hats -- and their behaviour.

Sheku, also known as Janice Bjarnason in her Kitchener neighbourhood, started the club two years ago, assuming the role of Queen Mother of the Raspberry Tarts. (Bjarnason's first name is unknown to many of the Tarts, who deferentially call her Sheku.)

The group of 22 women meet monthly for high tea or to go on fun romps, such as a limousine ride to Toronto to shop at a store that stocks lavish hats.

However, a red hatter's first red hat should be experienced, like the woman who'll wear it.

"All my life I've never ever fit in," said Bjarnason, 51.

But that was only until she served up the Raspberry Tarts, enrolling friends as the first members.

"We dress up crazy and do these crazy things to find other people who are as crazy as we are," Burkowski said.

They met throughout the year to shoot pictures for their calendar, eagerly doffing all but their red hats, which add a splash of colour to the black and white photographs.

"We've had so much fun doing this calendar," said Diane Worgan of Ayr.

The calendar mirrors the hit movie Calendar Girls, a British comedy based on a true story about members of a Women's Institute in northern England who raised money for cancer research by posing nude in a calendar, always without exposing private parts.

Worgan's husband died of cancer, and all the women know someone who's battled the disease.

The first shot for the Tarts calendar shows three women, cross-legged with red hats demurely propped on their laps, in the familiar pose of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

"We got more and more comfortable," Haney said.

So comfortable, in fact, that they stripped and lay on their bellies next to each other for a shot jokingly referred to as the row of beached seals.

Naked, the women have also squeezed into huge flower pots, mimicking the charming baby photographs by Anne Geddes. They've posed on a bench reading a book, fishing in a stream and riding an inflatable whale in a pool.

They already have more than enough photos, but they're eager to shoot a couple of winter scenes and perhaps a Halloween theme featuring the three witches from Macbeth, exchanging black pointy hats for feathery red chapeaux.

"They're all a little risqué, but they're not nudie shots," Burkowski said.

"It has to show fun. It has to be the kind of picture that makes you grin."

"What we want is that every time you look at it, you have a chuckle," Worgan agreed.

They certainly chuckle during the photo sessions where, Bjarnason said, the most common worry is not getting naked but "Is this hat big enough?"

jweidner@therecord.com

HOW TO BUY IT

The Raspberry Tarts calendar, Fifty-Plus and Fabulous, goes on sale at Words Worth Books in Waterloo, likely in the fall.

Copies can be ordered now at http://www.raspberrytarts.com/ or by calling 749-1830.