When The Homecoming Queen Has Scalp Lipoma
Category: Nostalgia
Proper And Pretty But Also Armed
From Morning Call To Last Call
Feast your eyes on these natty Texas Longhorns, travelling to Louisiana for a football game in the fall of 1947. I love their fedoras and cowboy hats, the curve of the cars, that one wide pointed black collar, and the teacup with saucer. Do you use saucers? I have some palm tree ones that go with my palm tree teacups, but we only use them separately now. It’s a perfect size for some buttered toast. I imagine these blokes had a nice cup of café au lait and beignets, the signature items of the Morning Call.
The sign says it’s the “most famous coffee drinking place,” but I have never heard of it before. “Coffeehouse” would have taken up less real estate on the sign, but I imagine that word didn’t exist yet.
Morning Call opened in 1870, eight years after the more powerful and still thriving Cafe du Monde, who crushed them in a bidding war last year, which led to their final closing. Having never been to either, I can’t say as I understand the allure of deep fried dough sprinkled with confectioners sugar. Why not just have a donut? Donuts come in all sorts of flavors, and they’re less messy. Then again, in Texas, we consume more breakfast tacos than donuts, so we’re getting our protein and dairy as well. Perhaps the combination of sugary coffee and beignets led one doctor last year to declare Louisiana as “the obesity-diabetes heartland of America.”
Still, it’s hard to say goodbye to tradition, especially after 149 years. These guys were sad to see it go.
And Yet, What’s Most Disturbing Is Those Vertical Blinds
You guys, I don’t usually share images as recent as only 30-something years old, which I’m guessing this is, but we need to talk about this.
Discounting the obvious crimes of hair and use of cigarettes (and LENGTH of cigarettes; you’ve come a long, long, LONG way, baby), and plaid vest that somehow makes her more street than lumberjack, or even simply the use of THIS as their Christmas card, what bothers me most is those blinds. I remember those blinds in my first years of apartment dwelling. The way they never moved in synchronicity like Venetian blinds or their superior window cousin, plantation shutters. Just try and pull them to the side. You can already hear the swishing and slamming of cheap plastic blind crashing into cheap plastic blind. Erratic! Random!
And oh, what fun to dust them! And even better, what their very existence oft implied, which was sliding glass doors. Who doesn’t love the sliding glass door? You know, the one that only slides seamlessly for a month before catching and stuttering. Or it does that diagonal thing, where it gets off its rollers. Yes, the very same sliding glass door that a criminal attempted to break into in my townhome in the early 90s, when everyone used that same broken broom handle to shove in between the doors as a perfect deterrent. It was only good fortune that my angry queen of a roommate drew said blinds back and showed his horrified face to the thief that saved us. Damn sliding door. Damn blinds. What did they think they would get? A glass coffee table full of Madonna magazines and a TV with an enormous antenna? Hmph.
When Noxzema Night Falls On Wine Wednesday
Tammy Wynette Caught Rolling With Her Homies
With a West Texas State University sticker on the window, students Becky, Judy, and Nancy load up the convertible to enjoy the spring of ’69, cruising the beat sans seatbelts, keeping it under 20mph, for fear that the wind may untease their fancy coifs.
When You Both Hate The Little Drummer Boy
Essential Workers Face Fines
I saw this today and couldn’t help but share.
Christmas Is So Close, I Can Taste It!
Whoever Is Higher To Heaven Wins
During WWII, hats were frowned upon as an indulgence in the UK, and many woman (not daring to go in public uncovered), found that necessity was indeed the mother of invention. These British women fashioned turbans out of headscarves, which not only protected their hair while working, but also added that little pizzazz needed during an era of drudgery.
Sister, if you couldn’t get a man to notice you with this thing on your noggin, it was time to abandon hope.
Zhuzh Up Your Outdated Banister
Tired of walking past those round wooden spindles pre-turn of this century? Ashamed to have guests notice that yellow brown color that dates your abode? I wouldn’t even want to visit a home with this shade of devil’s stain. Why, it’s the shade of nicotine teeth.
Sure, you could replace them with wrought iron balusters, but isn’t that trite? What you need is to get yourself a big honking coconut tree, get your best stabbing knife, and knotch it up at intervals as make-shift steps!
So rustic! So tropical! Won’t your friends be jealous? Test their agility by testing whether rails were even necessary to make it upstairs or just holding them back. Granted, your own kids may miss bumping down a carpeted stairway in a laundry basket, or being able to carry anything at all, instead of having to carefully clutch the sides of a rough trunk to escape the monsoon. But practice makes perfect! And ladies, no more short skirts. Not on this coconut tree!
Worried you won’t be able to deck them out with Christmas festivity, as in days of yore?
Nonsense! Wrap that sucker up with some classic white LED lights. Just make sure not to step on them as you climb. Ouch!
Now that’s what I call sustainable living!
How Not To Lose Your Poise In 1943
These days, you can’t throw a stick without hitting a mom clutching a glass of vino to temper the hours of “social distance learning” with the reality of 2020.
I, for one, am happy to have a senior, whose studies I can entirely ignore. The days of monitoring or supervising are nearing an end. College acceptance takes precedence over anything left in this rotten semblance of a schoolyear. Any reminders for tests or homework go unheeded. So why bother? After a constant barrage of uninformative teacher emails and daily school texts, stating, “Yes, another coronavirus case has been detected on campus,” we shrug and move on. Every day is the same. It’s easily the worst time to be a high school senior since the threat of being shipped off to Vietnam, and I imagine the emotional and social repercussions will be heavy and long-lasting. God, do I need a drink!
In any event, I am not drinking wine nor spirits. Fate has deemed that all alcohol gives me a headache lately, and it could not be timed any worse. So coffee and tea it is, with my beloved Coke at interims. Yes, 2020 has been a nightmare on every level. But at least we have the luxury of Netflix and Amazon in quarantine. We can still be comfortable and feel relatively safe, even without the company of fermented grapes.
During WWII, however, moms had more at stake, fearing for their husbands overseas as well as wondering if bombs would drop on our very soil. Were they encouraged to sample pinot? Alas, no. The power of pulling it together lay in Alka-Seltzer.
Alka-Seltzer kept the “unjust words” at bay. And it had already been time-tested. Even Will Rogers had stamped his approval a decade prior.
The post-war would see the addition of Speedy. Serenity now! Pronto!
But it wasn’t just for ladies about to lose their minds. Anyone indulging in food or drink could make use of it. Instead of a daydrinking suburban mommy, your pre-diabetic uncle kept a roll of A-S in his pockets. Just in case.
As Americans continued to eat up, sales continued to soar. While my association with the product is limited to the “Plop plop, fizz fizz” of the 70s, children of the 60s would have seen a more animated endorsement.
These days, when every other commercial pimps a prescription drug, meant to feed your fears as well as line the pockets of Big Pharma (O-O-O-OZEMPIC!), you have thousands of other choices to provide comfort for what ails you. Most of you probably take a daily prescription to address the imperfections of your mortal coils. But do any of you still take Alka-Seltzer?
I Don't Get It 