Miss Manners out to save the world

Before there was an “app” for everything – when children learned to write in cursive and all clocks had hands – there was something called manners.

Please. You’re welcome. Yes, ma’am. No, sir.

Manners have not completely disappeared from the landscape. They are trapped inside the law of diminishing returns.

For the past five years, Julie McAfee has been trying to save the world … one thank you at a time.

She wants people to be kind, respect their elders, sit up straight and leave their cellphones in their pockets at the supper table.

To rescue them, she climbs into character as “Miss Manners.”

Miss Manners is on a crusade against Missing Manners.

Julie did not wake up one morning and decide to dress up as a woman twice her age, wear fancy hats and scarves, and teach kindergarten students the proper etiquette of placing a napkin in their laps.

In many ways, she has been grooming for these moments all her life. She was destined to parade as a modern-day Emily Post, who once described manners as a “sensitive awareness of the feeling of others.”

Miss Manners is not a super hero. She doesn’t need to be faster than a speeding bullet or have X-ray vision to express gratitude and hold the door open for little old ladies.

“It’s not just about which fork to use,” Julie said. “It’s about teaching kindness.”

Her own teachers – her grandmother and mother – were the inspirations behind doing the right thing at the right time in the right way.

Julie grew up in Bolivar, Tennessee, a tiny community about 60 miles southeast of Memphis. With less than 6,000 residents, life in Bolivar was a slow drawl.

“We didn’t have cotillion,” Julie said. “Memphis had cotillion. We had baseball.”

When she was 3 years old, she would sit at her grandmother’s linoleum kitchen table and listen to the elementary rules of decorum. Not only was it a sermon on the fine points of Southern hospitality, it was a recital from the pages of Emily Post’s “The Art of Entertaining.”

Her grandmother, Edith Bell, could have been the twin sister of Queen Elizabeth, right down to the glasses and pocketbook.

“We started out with basic table manners — how to set the table, fold the napkins and clear the table,” Julie said. “She had a great back door with a crystal knob. I would knock on the door and be welcomed as a guest. I would wear a hat and gloves, and she would let me go into her jewelry box and pick out jewelry.”

While her grandmother was her “etiquette teacher,” her mother, Jean Crangle, was her “kindness and politeness teacher.”

“She taught me by example, in a motherly way,” Julie said. “I learned to acknowledge ‘invisible’ people – the waitress at the Waffle House, the person who takes your clothing at the dry cleaners and the one who checks you out at Publix.”

Julie and her husband, Tom, moved to Macon 10 years ago. When their daughters, Zoe and Malin, started school, she began putting her background in community theater to use.

The classroom was her stage. She dressed for as “Wynona the Witch” for a preschool event and was a queen for a “royalty” party. She resurrected a character — Martha Eloise Manchester Manners — from the script of a play she had written for a dinner theater.

A star was born. A regular gig was booked.

She patterned “Miss Manners” after “Mrs. Doubtfire” from the Robin Williams movie. She read them the book, “Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf,” by Judy Sierra, offered lessons on table manners in the fall and the art of formal introductions for a Mother’s Day tea in the spring.

She admits to being an “old soul” – hopelessly old-fashioned and endlessly endearing. She borrows hats from her mother-in-law, Carolyn McAfee, but doesn’t necessarily trot out her “Sunday best.”

“I don’t dress in fancy Sunday clothes because you’re not supposed to just pull out your manners on Sunday,” she said.

She has done programs on manners for the Girl Scouts and was invited to speak to graduate students at Mercer University’s Townsend School of Music, where she discussed etiquette, manners and procedure.

She not only talks the talk, she walks the walk. Random acts of kindness are an everyday occurrence. Each week, she hand-writes three thank you notes. One is to show gratitude to someone in her past who has helped her along the way, like the grammar school teacher who taught her how to write. The second is sent to someone in the present, to catch up with a friend and say hello. And the third is to the future, a person she wants to reach out and get to know better.

When she began her mission, her husband warned her about being under the manners microscope.

“People will be watching you all the time to see if you’re elbows are on the table,” Tom told her. “They will be judging you.”

“I may have my elbows on the table or use improper grammar, but you will never catch me being unkind,” she said.

Kindness is the common core, a fundamental. It can be challenging in a society tainted by a lack of civility. We live in an in-your-face world without filters, held captive by bullying, road rage and fueled by an unsocial social media.

It’s enough to make one want to give up.

But she won’t.

“I think I can change the world,” she said. “You never know who is in that class of 3-year-olds. It’s like that drop of water in the pool effect.”

This story was originally published December 8, 2017 at 2:23 PM with the headline "Miss Manners out to save the world."