If it had been left to Beaver, Mom might have looked a bit more like Kim Newsome.
She looked swell.With 11 of her friends from a Bloomington, Minn., church prayer group, all in their 30s, Newsome dressed up for lunch and thoroughly disrupted the noontime crowd at Dayton's fashionable Oak Grill.
"I just want to look you over," an older woman said, beaming. "You bring back memories." Another asked if she could take a picture.
Waitress Mae Range came to take orders. "So are you all having meatloaf?"
The women call themselves the Society for the Preservation of the Apron and the Bouffant. Each assumed a character from the 1950s and scavenged for the appropriate clothes and accessories.
Newsome, in pearls and heels and a dress of ivory satin and gold sequins, was June Cleaver, Ward's wife and mother to Wally and the Beaver on the TV show "Leave It To Beaver."
She said the dressing up was mostly in fun, but "I think we all have the same sense of family values that came through in those shows."
Jody Eifert was Lucille, as in Lucille Ball, "because I'm as nutty as she was" in the "I Love Lucy" program.
"I still watch those old shows," she said. "I sincerely wish that I could live back in that era. It seems like it was a simpler life then. Everything is moving so fast today."
Not her lashes, though. "It's the first time in my life that I've worn false eyelashes," she said, trying - in vain - to bat them. "They feel really strange - kind of heavy."
Newsome also wore her grandmother's gold earrings with pearl insets, a string of costume pearls and gold lame gloves with matching handbag. She did her hair in 1950s fashion herself, with pin curls and rollers.
"We're all suffering from light deprivation, I think," said Susan Keeler.
She was Vivian - as in Vivian Vance, who played Ethel on the Lucy show. Her outfit included a fox wrap and a pheasant hat that looked like about four bag limits.
"I had a hat like that," said Range, the waitress. When the laughter stopped, she added, "Still do."
There were no Wards, no Wallys at their table. But Karen Anderson said she made lunch for her husband before she left for the restaurant.
"Jim loved having me serve lunch like this," she said, primping an outfit that Doris Day might have worn. "He said, `This is the way it should be!' "
The women started lunch with a toast: "Here's to our mothers," some of whom contributed advice, merchandise and perhaps some rose-colored accounts of life in the '50s.
But Deb Van Hoef said that she got advice from her husband.
She wore winged glasses - the same fearsome set she wore in the fourth grade - and a leopard-spot dress with matching pillbox hat, muff and shoes. (When she hiked her skirt to show off her shoes, June Cleaver and a reporter both blushed.)
"I'm the one in the neighborhood everyone talks about," she said, apparently referring to her character, Hazel.
She said her husband helped with her deep red lipstick.
"He kept saying `more red,' " she said, "until it was how he remembered from his mother."