a lot of this:
and sometimes this:
Marriage
Category: Culture
Gliddy Gloop Gloopy is not Hang On, Sloopy
Dilly Bars & Hungr-Busters
The Higher The Hair, The Closer To Jesus, Part I
However, Blinda’s Leaning Tower of Pisa is probably closer in proximity to The Pope. She’s certainly giving Deb a run for her money.
Teasing was involved on both of these Mary(s), and it appears as though a hairpiece or extension was haphazardly lobbed at their heads, with no regard for rhyme nor reason.
Donnita’s lithe neck can barely support the combined weight of coif and hardened Aqua Net. Any minute now, it could snap like a twig.
I don’t know what to say about Kathy. All I know is she’s in this yearbook twice. Same name, same pic, so it’s no misprint, people. Kathy with a K. Moving on…
Bless her heart.
From the saucy smirks of the Nix Twins to Dennis’s kind eyes (which seem more 48 than 18 years old), to the barrel of whiskey hidden beneath the teased bleached locks of Regina, this pic does not disappoint.
I hate it when people say they gave 110% effort, because there is no such thing as more than the absolute total that exists. Having said that, Linda gave 110%. Have you ever seen a waterfall after a hard freeze?
But Travis. Sigh. Travis Isom, Travis Eyesore, old boy–what were you thinking with that unibrow? Read the page; Seniors Try Harder! You should try harder with some tweezers. Or a razor. This is unacceptable, Travis. Shame on you. Why couldn’t you have copied the simple brows of J.C. and Mike (who BTW, look pretty retro 50s greaser for a 1967 yearbook, if you ask me)?
And the winner of the most interesting hairdo is…Beverly’s ratty flattened mess, complimented by insanely dark arched caterpillar brows! You can bet David wouldn’t touch her with a ten foot pole! She smells like cigarettes and Binaca breath spray, and that scares the pee out of him. Does someone have a ladder so we can climb up there and crown her?
Fill ‘Er Up
A new Fort Worth Premier gas station opening in 1962 depicts great customer service for all your Chevy Impala’s needs. A sister photo reflects the steep price of gas at just over a quarter per gallon.
And check it out: Buy 8 gallons of gas and for only a dollar extra, you get five place settings of fine imported silverware–enough to invite all three attendants in straw hats, as well as the two girls in modest swimwear, heels, and mod flips.
Everybody Cut Footloose
Except you, awkward white people. You need to stop.
The fine print says “Get free dance booklet at your Career Club dealer.” To those of you in your sixties (who were alive in the 60s), is that where you learned your dance moves? Your Career Club dealer? I bet your drug dealer could teach better moves. Stiff and forced, Milton practically begs for a bottle of Schlitz to loosen him up–his hand is already in position. Why, in ten minutes, he could be a poor man’s Davy Jones! I don’t recall ever seeing “the skate” performed on American Bandstand, and I can pretty well rest assured it was never on Soul Train. It looks less like skating and more like “festive ways to fart.”
Have You Seen Me?
I got this in the mail recently, attached to a pizza coupon. I usually don’t pay these things much mind, especially since the woman in question was abducted at a distance of more than several hundred Rhode Islands from my home. However, this one vexed me. It shows that she was thirteen when she was abducted, and through the magic of science, they have age-progressed her to what she might look like at seventeen. Which was two years ago. Which is not what she’d look like now. So what gives? What’s the point of that? “Have you seen me when you time-traveled back to 2011?” Do we only possess the power to age-progress to a four year maximum? I don’t understand.
Lars & The Unreal Siri
I don’t have an iPod, an iPad, a Kindle, a smart phone, any of that stuff. I don’t want one. I dislike phones except for emergency use, and I dislike emergencies even more. My decade-old son, however, has strained both his neck and thumbs, becoming acquainted with his iPod, and has been asking Siri questions. Today, he asked her what her favorite color is, and she said, “Well, I don’t know how to say it in your language. It’s sort of greenish, but with more dimensions.” Pardon?
Then he told her that he loved her. She told him, “You are the wind beneath my wings.” Excuse me?
I am reminded of Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, in which he is enamored with a blow-up doll. Will this generation (devoid of any social interaction skills) skip the deviant inflatable girlfriend phase and go straight into siri-love? Will adolescent boys and young men spend hours alone with their iPods, constructing pretend relationships, using the app “ispeech” to make a woman’s voice say exactly what he types? Isn’t that a new pathetic level of loneliness? That’s worse than bowling alone.
Maybe there is nothing new under the sun: Janis Ian predicted it decades ago.
And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
The difference is–now the lover IS the phone. Yeesh.
Don’t Eat The Apple; Don’t Visit The Big One
In my youth, Pace Picante Sauce commercials were on high rotation, showing incensed cowboys riled up after Cookie attempts to serve them a salsa made in “New York City.” One of them goes so far as to suggest they “get a rope,” presumably to hang Cookie for his offense. From these commercials, I learned that New Yorkers did not know squat about Mexican food. And that meant something was wrong with them. I presume they didn’t show this ad in NYC itself, but from what I’d learned on TV about the city, they were too busy getting beaten up on dirty subways and mugged in littered streets filled with apathetic people dressed only in neutrals.
I watched the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter, and they always seemed in need of a good scrubbing. They lived in a land called Brooklyn, but I knew it must have been close to New York City, because there were no trees around. Where were the pine trees and the live oaks? Did they all live in ghettos and tall buildings with no yards? Where did they learn to ride bikes and rollerskate? Where was the laundry blowing on the clothesline in the sun? Oh, wait, there it is.
I’d stayed up past eleven by elementary age, so I knew the funny comedians lived on the east coast and yelled, “Live from New York” each Saturday night. But I also knew Johnny Carson was in Burbank, and he was happy and funny. The mean, bitter guy with the gap in his teeth and the bald keyboardist lived in New York. Something just wasn’t right with that town.
Movies depicted a congested mecca of highrises and brash, fast-talking businessmen in Wall Street and The Secret of My Success, as well as a decadent drug-infused nightlife in Bright LIghts, Big City. New York was a city where Ninja turtles lived in the sewer, where dirty, grimey homeless people begged for money in Trading Places, and ghosts infested grand hotels in Ghostbusters. Even the muppets had a hard time taking Manhattan and finding work. And it was in NYC where Kramer battled Kramer, the first time that it had occurred to me that a mother would ever conceive of leaving her child to find herself. What kind of sick place was that?
Nevermind the Civil War, Yankees were odd. They talked funny. Their accent was nearly incomprehensible. They said “youse guys,” an abomination of grammar, when we used “y’all,” a contraction of “you” and “all,” which made perfect sense. And we’d heard tale of the Yankee reputation for callousness and poor manners. Not only did they not smile and shake hands with strangers, they ignored them altogether. What kind of hospitality is that?
Consequently, I never had a desire to go to New York, no matter how cool and funky Monica and Rachel’s apartment was on Friends. I knew the truth; a one bedroom could cost a THOUSAND DOLLARS a month, and they had rats!! Yuck!
Then the Twin Towers fell, and we all watched in horror. Our hearts went out to New York City; people in Texas wore “I (heart) New York” shirts and Yankee baseball caps. The whole country rallied around the fallen and felt the devastation. But it just made it even more clear: I never, ever want to go to New York. No matter how good the bagels or the reuben sandwiches, no matter how pretty the trees in Central Park, I never needed to visit that place.
Then in 2005, the Discovery Channel gave me a reason to want to visit The Big Apple. Cash cab. Now that looked fun! Getting inside a taxicab is far from desirable, whatwith the Hep C and polio virus inevitably covering all of the upholstery (is there any regulation as far as when to wipe those with Clorox wipes?), but that would pale in comparison to having Ben Bailey crane his giant bald head around to invite me to get paid (PAID!) to show off my incredible talent for trivia. Oh, glorious day (or night, when winnings were doubled) to ride and play, answering questions about general knowledge.
I still get mad when I watch the episode in which two men risked all their earnings on a video bonus round, which required them to identify the rodent-like animal roaming about. The question even referred to the Captain & Tenille song, but they still got it wrong. How does one not know about a MUSKRAT? “Muskrat Love!!” I wanted to yell through the TV set. I wanted to shake those Guidos, who weren’t even born when the song came out. Well, that’s what you get for not knowing your pop music! Out of the cab. Kick ’em to the curb, Ben. I couldn’t live in a city where people cannot properly identify muskrats. I won’t even visit.
Kilamanjaro Rises Like Olympus Above The Serengeti
So maybe it’s not the Serengeti per se, but it’s hot here in Texas. We just spent an hour and a half at soccer practice, watching a dozen pre-adolescent boys in windshorts, long socks, and flushed faces as they scrimmaged on the treeless field. No trees on the perimeter. No wind blowing. And P.S. it’s 103. Right now. As I’m typing. Now, the thermometer on my dashboard reads 113, but technically, the official reading is 103–with 103 predicted every day for the next week.
There stands one sky-high pole near the field, a light that comes on at dusk if a seasonal game is to be played. The one long eighteen inch-wide shadow that it cast was exactly where I set up my folding chair. To keep my lap shaded meant that my left ear was left vulnerable to the sun’s rays, and it quickly felt singed. Then another parent arrived, and he set his chair a couple feet to the left, closest to the pole (and the adjacent trashcan, around which menacing wasps flew). The others set their chairs to my right, so that we were all aligned perfectly like little planets, lifting our chairs and scooching back an inch at select intervals as the relentless sun traveled across the sky.
Just sitting in the shade, beads of sweat ran down my neck, down my spine, into the spot where a tramp stamp would be, had I been reckless and drunk over a decade ago. Even younger, thinner parents were pouring sweat and pounding bottled water. No wonder the kids, ever in motion, ever in the sun, kept hunching over to catch their breaths. Youth was not wasted on them. They kept up the pace–running, passing, kicking, yelling–stopping to take swigs from Igloos three times total. Those little buggers were tough!
We took my son out for ice cream afterward, where he got a scoop of cookies ‘n’ cream, loaded with toppings that included gummi bears (which he called “nummi bears”–“that’s what all the kids at school say”), as well as “whoopers,” which were really Whoppers, and some caviar-looking seawood fruit pellets with a name like soba. Odd. There we sat, consuming ice cream (not frozen yogurt) in the lovely air-conditionedness of the parlor, while my drenched bra began to cool down. Nothing like a wet underwire digging into your flesh to make you enjoy being a woman. Nonetheless, I felt a wave of gratitude: Thank you, Lord, that I was born in a First-World country, into an era with conditioned cold air, with enough disposable income to buy each family member ice cream with all the toppings you can shove in the cup. It may be hot, but we know how time flies. It’ll be Christmas in no time.
Rally Round The Lawn
Don’t know who these folks are or where this was taken, but it looks to be the 1930s, according to the dresses and hairstyles. I like the ribbons in the girls’ hair, and the restless boys who can’t sit still.
I especially fancy this dress!
But I do wonder why this fella was left holding the baby.
A Gush Of Euphony Voluminously Wells
Remember 1902? Me, neither. This book does. It’s all sorts of “m” words: musky, mildewy, moldy. That’s what happens when you’re over 100. You can see the date at the very bottom.
It’s chock full of stories, poems, and pictures by dead people. This groom looks rather serene on his honeymoon. He basks in the memory of the previous night, while she chooses which add-ins to order for her three-egg omelette. Sounds about right.
Included is a Poe poem (aha! one letter’s difference!), which inspired the post title. No, I don’t know what it means. If I did, my blog would be called, “I Very Much Get It.” Clearly, I do not.
I also don’t get why this painting is titled “Bringing Home The Bride.” Whose home is this?
Pardon me, but why are there old people at her home? Why is that septuagenarian helping the bride disrobe in front of her grandpa? Children at bay windows are witnessing this! Gossip is being told to Teddy Roosevelt. Men lifting suitcases on the staircase should mind their own business. Truth be told, the departure from home seems much more lively. Perhaps she should continue departing.
This volume also includes the courtship of not Eddie’s father, but instead, Miles Standish. I particularly enjoy this line: “She could not walk, he said, through the dust and heat of the noonday; Nay, she should ride like a queen, not plod along like a peasant.” I hear that.
And what do you think of this?
This couple gazing admirably at her ring–it’s very sweet, isn’t it? And who wouldn’t be excited to be engaged to the fourth musketeer? FYI, musketeers protected royal families. I wonder if the little babe of Windsor, soon to be birthed, will have its own private musketeer? No, wait, that’s only French royal families. Nevermind.
Here is an excerpt from The Bride of Lammermour:
Oh, my gosh, you guys. Don’t you HATE reading dialect? What the what? How am I to comprehend the mumblings of a paralytic hag? As if.
Now I thought Romeo & Juliet were supposed to be about fourteen years old. Romeo looks considerably older than that in this picture. Like he could possibly see rated R movies. I think we all know what happens next.
And here we are at the precursor to Say Yes To The Dress.
Is that guy the tailor? He seems pretty smug. Or is that the groom? If so, he shouldn’t be seeing her before the wedding. He’s quite the dandy, no? And what’s with the girl? Is she praying for a similar dress one day or already consumed with thoughts of the reception playlist. “Please play ‘Celebrate’ by Kool and the Gang or I shall just die…”
Read this ditty, and you may be disturbed, and I don’t mean by heaving breasts.
I would have had a heaping helping of sassy backtalk from my bridesmaids, should I have forced them to become Corsican like me. Yeesh.
Now observe this lovely portrait.
It takes a village to make a wedding. And a nice top hat.
And don’t kid yourselves, ladies:
I Don't Get It 