If in another few decades your grandkids come home from school coloring pictures of Uncle Sam and his sidekick Aunt Pam, don't say we didn't warn you. Aunt Pam is scheduled to make her inaugural debut this year cavorting alongside Uncle Sam on Pennsylvania Avenue. And she bears all the hallmarks of a feminist icon aborning. After all, Uncle Sam has had the stage pretty much to himself since his creation, supposedly during the War of 1812, making him perhaps the country's longest-surviving manifestation of patriarchy. And when it comes to personifying the United States, why should there be a male monopoly on wearing silly costumes and walking around on stilts?
There is, of course, the small problem of the initials. Uncle Sam's are obvious, but what the heck does A.P. stand for? Well . . . nothing, really. According to Steve Myott, the Winterville, N.C., drama teacher and actor who is the official Uncle Sam of the Inauguration, his stilting friend Pam Horne came along to a local gig six years ago, when a young boy asked who she was, Myott dubbed her Aunt Pam on the spur of the moment. Myott is not without the sort of PR skills that fit in at Clinton-Gore festivities: "Aunt Pam," he says, "represents women in America." And, in a preemptive strike, he says that nothing should be read into the fact that Aunt Pain has shorter stilts than Uncle Sam. It has nothing to do with gender. With fewer years' experience, Horne simply has not yet worked up to the Uncle Sam-scale stilts that Myott uses.