Elvis and Me (Vintage Elvis Portrait and Collectibles)

Good morning!

Whoo-wee, did I have a lousy afternoon at work yesterday. Nonfiction was overrun by people, from all walks of life, who do not assign due importance to the use of deodorant and practice of personal hygiene made necessary by humid southern months, right up in my face, taking temporary passes for the computer. Towards the homestretch of the early-evening shift, I was harangued, at length, by a patron who was certain that by restarting his computer after a technical glitch, I was in some way sending his personal information first-class mail to the tin-foil people in the sky he reports to, and let me tell you, he was not having it any other way. Blessed with a Jimmy Stewart like sense of perseverance, somehow coupled with the withering sarcasm of someone with an actual mental disorder, it was a soul-crushing example of the "sit there and take it" I have come to associate with working a public information desk. Ugggggh. There are days that I hate civil service worse than others, and Tuesday mid-day was one of them.

However! The universe rewarded me, kind of sort of, in a laugh-forget-your-sorrows trip to Great Escape in Madison, by offering up this consolation prize for a day that was "I just quit" worthy. Don't we make a sweet couple? Check out me and the Big E:

I've broken the cardinal rule of never posing in a photo with Elvis that I set down years ago in this blog post.
Oh well!

Ain't he a pip? The image is screened on canvas and bears a copyright on the back that dates it to "PORTRAITS OF THE STARS, INC." and the year 1979. I can't wait to find a suitably enormous, ornate gold frame to put around this guy! The relatively realistic rendering of the man himself, coupled with the weird, fiery red background, makes for a lot of vintage bang for my buck, here. I love it!

While he spent years and years under my radar, just to the periphery of the oldies' I was interested in, I read Peter Guralnick's INDISPENSIBLE two volume biography of Elvis Presley the in-between freshman and sophomore years of college summer I was a Girl Scout camp counselor. Almost immediately, I sank like a stone in a deep pool of Elvisophilia. I can remember sitting in my bunk, doused in OFF bug repellent but still smacking mosquitoes off my shining shins, so deeply interested in the Greek tragedy like rise and fall of the 20th century's most recognizable musician that I would be loathe to rise and lead the little cadettes off to the mess hall for dinner. So engrossing!

Over the years, I realize I have amassed a number of Elvis related vintage items, some of which you can see here:

1) T-shirts:

These I've mentioned before, but never had a chance to photograph and share with you guys...AMAZING Elvis iron-on t-shirts from probably a little after the King's untimely death in 1977. I picked these up at an estate sale where there was TONS of Elvis memorabilia, ranging from coffee table books to multi-cassette box sets to a pair of lamps with bases shaped like EP in the "Hound Dog" phase of his career. Strangely, right down to the cassettes, everything was priced between ten and thirty dollars (ie, between five and thirty dollars more than any of it was actually worth in an estate sale setting), except this stack of t-shirts, which were ONE DOLLAR apiece. Now, knowing from my post on rock n roll concert shirts how freakin' hard it is to not be a Miley Cyrus level celebrity who can spend $500 on a t-shirt, and get rock n roll t-shirts for anywhere near a reasonable price, you can imagine I almost had a heart attack in this transaction.

2) Photo Plus Frame:

While the perspective in these two photos make them look similarly sized, the one on the left is 12'' x 36'', and the one on the right is maybe 6'' x 8''. Gold-suit Elvis came from a 50% closing sale at Hollywood Video, and just couldn't be resisted. That suit was made by western tailor Nudie at the behest of Presley manager Col. Tom Parker, and worn together only once for the cover of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't be Wrong. Elvis, who had a sincere interest in clothes since his early days in Memphis buying shockingly rockabilly items for his wardrobe at Lansky Bros, thought he looked goofy in all gold, and would wear the shirt with a black pants, the jacket with a white shirt and black pants, or the pants with a black shirt, but never the gaudy combo all together as you see it here. To the right, an Elvis Presley Enterprises "Love Me Tender" plastic frame with "signed" Elvis candid inside. "Best Wishes, Elvis Presley", the inscription reads. DREAMY. Found this at an estate sale in Clarksville almost a year ago (and blogged about it then!).

3) ELVIS BUST

One of my most prized vintage items is this Elvis bust, which was spotted at an estate sale in the Neely's Bend area of Madison for one dollar. ONE DOLLAR, you say. How is that possible?! Well, at the time, EP looked a heck of a lot more like Liberace, with the skin tone you see painted in, but his shirt, eyebrows, eyes and hair a ghostly white. I think this was intentional, is the weird thing-- someone bought the bust unpainted, did the skin, and went "Hey! He looks kind of freaky like this! Let's leave him!" Luckily, my sister Sus had both the art supplies and the skill to restore EP to his rightful color scheme. Thank you, Sus!

As you can see, I have kind of a thing for Elvis. And I'm glad my Tuesday was made a little more bearable for the fact that I could snap up this awesome portrait to add to the collection.

Do you have any pop-up, mini-collections of things just based on your fondness for a certain public figure or thing? Any Elvis memories or memorabilia floating around in your life? How's work been treating YOU lately? Let's talk!

Gotta get back to the grind. Pray for me that the guy from yesterday's verbal debacle does not return. Either way, have a lovely Wednesday and I'll see you on the other side!

Remember Mix Cds? (OSFM Mix cd, 2008)

Good morning!

Well, I am worse for wear this morning, kiddlings. I went over to Emma from The Fiercest Lilliputian's darling apartment last night and had a WHALE of a time cooking mushroom mutter masala (Vegan! Delicious!), expressing jealousy over the fine appointments of her furniture selections, and gabbin' my little head off. I had so much fun, I lost track of time and ended up staying way past my usual "at-home-by this, in bed-by-this" schedule (but for a very good cause!). Upon stealing home late-in-the-night-for-me, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea  to watch the latest episode of Mad Men that had queued up on Amazon Instant Video (the drama! the chills and thrills of last night's episode!!). All that adds up to, I had an unusually  awesome Monday night, but I am a sleepington. Lord! You could really open a grave and just lay me in it for how tired I am this morning. Coffee! Buoy me up, sweet, sweet coffee!

Whatever the preamble, and in the interest of keeping the steamer that is She Was a Bird afloat, I nevertheless present you with today's subject, a relic from the ancient past....a mix cd.

Matthew and I started dating in late June of 2008...what was the first thing I did, in classic maybe I am that guy from High Fidelity fashion? I made him a mix cd. Natch! The cover (above) features an illustration of a Mohawk Indian from a sixties' children's encyclopedia, gleaned from the discards bin at McKays' in Knoxville some years earlier. I used to hoard vintage primary school textbooks and young adult illustrated novels and college-level science workbooks for all the weird and wacky illustrations dedans, in the interest of making cd covers and gifts. As you can see, sometimes this hoarding comes in handy.

If you're one of those girls (or guys), you remember the delicious indecision that was trying to cement the setlist for a "first mix" [tape or cd...format at this point had compelled me to use a CD-R, but I started out on 90 minute blank Maxells or Sonys just like everyone else]. You want to look cool to the potential or newly minted significant other, but you can't put too many unlistenable or alienating tracks on the dang thing. Nobody wants to know how unabashedly into Woody Guthrie you are at first glance...you gotta ease 'em into the good stuff. My friend Kelsey and I spent most of our high school careers perfecting the art of the well-balanced mix tape (first-class-music-nerds), and I didn't want to let myself and my new beau down. After many hours of planning, here's what I came up with for July 27, 2008:

Congenitally bad handwriting. It is what it is!

"OSFM" was the name I gave all mix cds post-2003, coming from the sizing tag abbreviation for "One Size Fits Most" and the idea of FM being like FM radio. I know, dorky, but still. It's nice to have uniformity in titles. I still stand by almost all of the decisions here. I'm bummed that a couple of the songs didn't show up on Spotify, but for the most part, this is what it sounded like (isn't the future amazing? I just playlisted a physical cd in a digital format. Mind blown.):

                                               

[Tracks that are on Youtube but not Spotify: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Jim Morrison-esque b-side "Come Into My Sleep", the RZA and Vincent Gallo's collaboration on "(Something I Want) For Real", the theme song from the Japanese spy girl show "Playgirl", Malay sixties' pop group Naomi and the Boys' almost atonal "Bad Loser" and South African jazz singer Dolly Rathebe's "Tlhapi Ke Noga"]

Hi, vintage Nick Cave. Love you! (source)

Something that occurred to me as I was tracking down these cuts online-- the ubiquitous mp3 blogs from my college days have gone the way of the dinosaur! I hadn't thought about how anti-piracy legislation and heavier restrictions on what you can share online would affect me until I thought about where a lot of these songs came from in the first place. I know there still ARE some, but many of the mainstays of my college autodidacticism are gone, gone, gone. I would have never known about the thirties' track "Adam and Eve in the Garden" by Chris Bouchillion, which I have committed to memory in its entirety over the years, without the prewar blues and roots blog Honey Where You Been So Long, last updated in 2010. There was another called Bubblegum Jukebox that introduced me to the Spanish version of "Come and Get Your Love", which, if you ask me, is better than Redbone's original. For a couple years there, people with amazing and obscure taste in music were sharing it all over the world... I get bummed out thinking that the era of being able to discover new, truly off-the-beaten-path music is over! Back to the analog drawing board.

Remember me? (source)

I have to try and rise to the occasion of work today, through my sleepiness, but let's talk about mixtapes and cds. Were you the type to swap cds practically a second after phone numbers on the dating trail? Where did you find inspiration for new music? Did you have any particular rules in making cds or tapes? Any wildly ambitious mixes you made back in the day? What do you think about the mix I assembled above? Do tell!

That's all I got for today. See ya back here tomorrow, once I've had some rest! Til then.

Couroc Trays (Gotta Catch 'Em All...)

Good morning!

Today, for your viewing pleasure, I've assembled three Couroc serving trays from my collection. Friday morning, I only had the owl and the fish, but I was overly pleased with myself that afternoon at Goodwill to lay hands on the third, cardinal-embedded tray on the far left. Takin' it to the next level!

I've been having the lousiest luck even at my favorite thrift stores lately, so when I saw a small, dirty black tray peeking out from under a pair of those oversized "BIG GULP" mugs you see at gas stations, I actually groused to myself inside my head, "Yeah, would be nice if that was Couroc, but what are the chances of...((picks up tray)) omfg, it is a Couroc...!!" The square tray has very little surface damage, in spite of the honest to God dirt, and the winsome little cardinal sitting on a branch became much sharper after a quick soap and water run when I got it home. To top it off? The ninety-nine cent green tag on Friday meant the tray only set me back forty-nine cents. Glorious! I take back all those nasty things I said in my head BEFORE finding this tray.

Couroc trays were manufactured by the Couroc company of Monterey, California from 1948 into the early nineties'. The company was created by a husband and wife team, the improbably named Guthrie Courvoisier and Marie Wallace. Courvoisier and Wallace's staff of artisan designers created the iconic, sunk-in-phenolinic trays by inlaying, as you see on the sticker from the back of the owl tray above, "shells, coins, woods, and metals". According to this ebay history of the company, the trays were very expensive gift items when new. 

The three that I have were all snatched up from different Goodwills-- the oldest being the large owl tray in the background. I found it in late high school at the old Goodwill outlet near the Bicentennial mall (miss ya 'til I join ya, old Goodwill outlet-- the new one has never been the same!). I saw the tray in the glass case up front near the checkout, but unlike retail Goodwills, this is not necessarily a warning sign for price gouging on the used goods, but rather, a protective measure against the regular stuff-slingin' that goes on in the bins there. That outlet did everything, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g by a single by-the-pound pricing, so I doubt the tray cost more than $2. The green guy is from the Hermitage Goodwill-- I very rarely find stuff at that location, but this was back in housewares for ninety-nine cents, and made my whole trip that day worthwhile. So now I have a triad of trays to break out with canapes and the like, next time guests come knockin!

The problem with the success story of having scored these three little guys for so little, and out in the wilds of a thrift environment, is the sticker shock one experiences when trying to find similar items online. I go home, happily clacking out the search parameters "Vintage Couroc" on Etsy and Ebay, and bo-o-o-oy does a reality check come into play. Now, I would love to have ANY of the trays you see below, but with price tags ranging from $12 (plus shippping and handling, making it closer to $22) to $399 (I DON'T EVEN CARE, THAT CAPITOL RECORDS TRAY WOULD BE WORTH EVERY PENNY), the prohibitive cost will keep my pocketbook in check but my eyes peeled for the next Couroc. Maybe Goodwill will be good to me again! Just gotta keep lookin'.

The whimsical nature of the patterns! The science-ish thrill of the pieces being inlaid, in 2D fashion, in a smooth sea of jet-black plastic!

Some of the things I hope I spot in my own hometown, keep your fingers crossed for my next yard sale haul:

Vintage Large Mid-Century Couroc THE OWL & THE PUSSYCAT Inlaid Tray

Couroc Hand Inlaid Unicorn Serving Tray 18"x12"

Vintage "Three Partridges" Tray by Couroc of Montery Bay

Couroc Hopi Kachina Hummingbird Inlay Large Tray

vintage 1950s TRAY Presidential Coins Couroc of California

Vintage Couroc Southern California Serving Tray

SALE Vintage "Couroc" Small Roadrunner Trays

COUROC Capital Records Albums Promotional 60s Mad Men Era Drink Serving Tray

Do you have any of these adorable trays in your collection? Which one of the ones above would you most like to have? Do you have a certain thing that you started collecting in physical stores, and now have to hunt down online out of vintage product sparsity? Let's talk!

That's all for today-- I'll be back here tomorrow with more vintage tips and quips. Have a fabulous Monday and I'll see you then!

Photo Friday: Can I PLEASE Come Live at Your House Edition

Good morning!

I forgot my USB drive with my family photos on it when I came to work this morning (I got Fridayitis, obviously), so I'm afraid I'm back to my thief-in-the-night tactics of borrowing some of the most knocked out, cuckoo, crazy awesome photos Flickr has to offer. I'm sorry, internet! I'm sorry, Flickr users! Please see it as an act of the sincerest flattery that I borrowed your family photos to share here on my little corner of the blogosphere.

This week's entry comes from a late midcentury family as portrayed on this user's Flickr stream, mainly composed of his grandfather's photos, year of our Lord1968. I love the sharp clothes and glamorous looks of the ladies and gents in these photos, but MOST OF ALL, oh my God, their uninhibited flair for gorgeous late sixties' interiors.

I mean, really, how was I supposed to resist this?

See the enormous lamps to either side of a couch I could only dream about at night? Look at it! Look at how insistently awesome the color pattern is it. Judging from the wall paneling, I think this couch is actually in the same house as the prior couch, which should be against the law. It should be illegal to inspire this level of couch jealousy in my heart. How can you have two couches this awe-inspiring in the same house? Ugh! I die! I don't know if I'd be brave enough to pair them together, but either one is freakin' amazing. The user's grandmother, who must be in her forties' or fifties' but doesn't look a day older than her newly adult children, is in the checked skirt, and the user's father is the tv-actor looking guys in the turtleneck on the aqua colored couch. I really can't get over how amazing either one of these couches is. And LOUD, Lord, loud!

I know these are the kind of decorating choices made in the sixties' that older people tend to look back at and go "Oh, what were we thinking? That x clashes with that y. I hate to think of the colors!" My own mom, which I mentioned the other day when extolling the virtues of maxi dresses and insane seventies' prints, h-a-t-e-d me wearing the same clothes she'd worn in high school, circa 1972-1976, to my own high school, circa 1999-2003. "I can't believe we wore stuff like this back then!" she would groan as I buttoned and zipped myself into a full length, Foxy Brown-esque trench coat in a light brown naugahyde-like material. But how wrong she was! Stuff like that coat, or these couches, are SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than the boring basic primary color things you could grab at Sprintz today. Where the chutzpah? Where's the individuality!

I think the living room above must be an aunt or an uncle's house, but I found similarly jealousy-inducing (but much more sedate) furniture choices in the aforementioned grandparents' house. Just peer into the backgrounds of these photos. Can you even handle:

The pinch pleat wall of ivory drapes and the awesome tension pole lamp in this photo?

The mantle piece and like-something-out-of-a-movie Art Deco meets late sixties' French provincial meets atomic age clock above it in this photo?

The gold glittering wonder of the sectional in this photo? [Side note: I swear, this user's parents always look like they just stepped off a guest appearance on a late night talk show or a club date...how about the dad's blue pants and black cardigan? The (at left) mom's keyhole black shift? Razor sharp dress sense!)

While this (I think aunt's) ensemble of red and gold brocade dress suit and pearls is elegance itself, I have to admit to crushing on those dining room table chairs and the built in wall planter with most of my human heart. It's not fair to look so swank in such swank surroundings!

Have you seen any photos of interiors lately that just knocked your socks right off? Do you parents or grandparents register deep chagrin at old photos of their houses, when you're busy trying to figure out if any of the furniture of the same photo are still in the family somewhere? What vintage design are you still waiting on to fill out an otherwise sedate decorating scheme? Let's talk!

Check out the rest of the user's stream here, including photos of MUHAMMAD ALI in candid pose with his grandfather among others (I am not even kidding! It's amazing!).

That's all for this week, kiddos! Have a fabulous weekend, and I'll see you back here next week. Til then!

Queer Eye For the Straight Guy (2003-2007)

Good morning!

I told you on Monday that I had a new-old television obsession. Bet you would have NEVER guessed what it was, though. We picked up a Netflix streaming subscription at the end of last month so Matthew could see the much anticipated fourth season of Arrested Development. I had been one of the biggest proponents of Netflix's video services back around 2007, when everything you had ever dreamed of was available to watch on demand-- the classic section alone was like watching Turner Classic Movies, but being able to skip to whatever you hadn't seen! Documentaries, foreign films, rare horror movies...it sure was fun while it lasted. However, as you may have noticed, the quality of selection has taken a nose dive over the last five years, to the point that I jumped ship for Hulu streaming in about 2011. There was nothing to watch on Netflix!

Coming back this last month, I noticed a similar lack of non-public-domain options, but for one, shining series:

(source)

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I never knew how much I would love this show!

During the initial run (2003-2007), I was in college and most of my dorm-based television watching habits involved catching old Match Game and Love Connection episodes on Games Show Network before lunch but after French class with my roommate Torey (the. BEST. times). I remember reading articles in magazines around the beginning of this show about how "metrosexual" grooming habits were eroding the visual difference between heterosexual and homosexual men. All this was much to the chagrin of heterosexual women, who suddenly found themselves in competition with their live-in boyfriends or husbands over valuable real estate in the medicine cabinet. Hair products and facial cleansers for men (gasp!) flooded the market. How were we going to be able to tell straight men from gay men if they all had the same beautiful clothes and muscle tone! Straight-world crisis, no question about it.

If looking like David Beckham is wrong, you don't want to be right.

Even having this conversation in 2013 seems absurd, but ten years ago, there was a real concern that getting a male pedicure or knowing what kind of wine to pair with fish was going to "turn you" into a gay man. I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now-- since when would you rather look like George Constanza than David Beckham, in the interest of proving your hetero-normative behavior status? Watching the wary interactions between straight and gay culture on the show, through the lens of a decade's distance, is REALLY interesting. But that's not what pins my heart to the show.

Looking good, boys.

Do you remember the set up? The Fab Five open every episode inside a SUV, as one team member describes the current status and state of the man ready for their makeover. One guy has a fiancée, but still lives in a pig sty of an apartment. Another is 26 years old, but he hasn't really gotten past dorm-room style home organization. One hasn't been on a date in five years. On and on, the problems of the straight male at the beginning of the 21st century. Each case has a protagonist, and usually a significant other, and a culminating event to showcase the success or failure of the makeover. This could be a dinner party with family to demonstrate the guy's turning over a new leaf, a poker game with the boys elevated to a Sands Casino level of old school elegance, or a romantic date out on the town with a spouse. The men pull up to the sidewalk in front of the house, clamber out of the car, and come down on the suspecting or unsuspecting straight man in his house with the gale force of an incoming tropical storm. Ugly mini blinds are ripped from windows, mattresses on the floor are jumped on, poorly thought out wardrobe selections are brought to light for all to see. Carson Kressley usually makes some obscure but hilarious reference to Sissy Spacek in Carrie or a Helen Redding song lyric in reference to the domestic atrocities on display, and I crack up. At the end of this march of terror, Thom Filcia is left at the house to make decorating sense of horrible, horrible interiors while the rest of the team takes the guy on a whirlwind tour of the city to fix some major, pre-existing grown-up issues in the guys life. By the end of the forty five minute show, new furniture, new clothes, new life habits, new life skills, and blammo! New guy!

Spoiler alert: If they're at your house, you're already deep in dutch, kid.

The opening part of the show usually either finds the subject bemused, embarrassed, or even slightly angry. What touches my heart, though, is by the end of every episode, the straight guy is almost in tears (and frequently in tears!) at how much better his house, his personal appearance, and his life is as a result of the Fab Five's magic. The idea is not to make the man someone else, but to make him a better version of himself. Cue the waterworks on my part! I love the positive vibes of the show-- unlike Hoarders, which is awkward to the point of embarrassing to watch sometimes, these aren't people who are clinically ill and whose exposure on reality television is bordering on macabre voyeurism on the part of the viewer (I'm guilty, but at least I admit it!). This show is about taking things you took for granted, and not taking them for granted anymore!

Don't fight them! They're here to help!

I feel like so much of other people's (and my own at times) time in this day and age is consumed by saying "Oh, everything's terrible. Oh, I hate everything." If I could only lose twenty pounds. If I could only have a cute significant other. If I could only do better at my job. And so little of the underpinnings that keep us from the things we want are examined. So few people anymore have that Horatio Alger sense of "What do I want? How can I achieve what I want? What can I eliminate that keeps me from what I want?". Just by showing the men in the series that what you want isn't impossible and you can make little, totally feasible and do-able changes in your life to make yourself happier, the Queer Eye crew makes a difference. Besides all the new stuff and the new duds, I think that message of YES YOU CAN is more powerful than anything else the series has to offer. The people on the show are genuinely grateful for having been shown a better, more elegant, more stylish, more productive way of life that is completely attainable for them.

I only have I think eight more days in this billing cycle before the lights are turned out on our Netflix subscription again, but I'm going to try and fit as many episodes of Queer Eye into that time frame as possible! Watching it, and taking to heart the lessons the show has to teach along with the entertainment value, has really made a difference to me. I felt so empowered last weekend that I tackled that living room project that has been bugging me for y-e-e-e-ears. Who knows where the message of this show will take me next?

Do you have a show that unexpectedly adds value to your day-to-day life? Remember Queer Eye? What guilty or not-so-guilty tv pleasures do you have lately? Have you noticed any show from the early 2000's that seems very different now that ten years have passed since it originally aired? Let's talk!

I have to get back to work, but I'll see you guys back here tomorrow for Photo Friday (oh my God it's almost Friday). Til then!

PS: There are some Japanese-language subtitled episodes of the show up on Youtube, in case you don't have Netflix at the moment. Take a sec to check out what I'm talking about, and see if you don't feel like redoing your entire house and closet by the end of the episode:

Maxi-Dress Season Has Begun! (Where Do You Stand on Wild Prints?)

Good morning!

Well, it may be ominous weather outside here in Nashville, but by Godfrey, I'm dressing for Palm Beach circa 1968 for my inside job at the bibliothèque. Here's this morning's outfit, complete with loose and long hair, the likes of which you blog readers (and heck, friends and coworkers) probably haven't seen in a long time!

I don't remember if I mentioned this op art print dress on the blog when I originally got it, but it was laying on the floor, upstairs at an estate sale near Hillsboro village, and was priced at $2 upon checkout (yes!). The sale had THE MOST amazing 1960's, real-Adrian Pearsall-and-similar-designers mid century furniture, but it was priced astronomically out of my budget. Some day! Some day I will have the kind of furniture I desire! In the meantime, I like to think about whoever lived in the house wearing this eye-knocker of an outfit while draped lazily across the Mad Men appropriate eight foot couch, maybe reading the latest issue of Life and smoking Pall Mall talls. I've recently learned the term horror vacui or cenophobia to describe the fear of empty space, a term used to describe art where every space is filled. These patterns sure seem to live up to that ideal of no-blank-space! And that's how I like 'em.

50% OFF Moving Sale Vintage 1960 Maxi Dress // Purple Maxi Dress // Vintage Hawaiian Halter Dress

My thoughts today run along the line of columnar, bold print maxi-dresses. I have a pretty substantial collection of these statement-making articles in my wardrobe, because look at them! How could you pass on some of these? As soon as summer strikes every year, I feel the nagging need to pull them off the racks and take 'em out on the town! This is a whole-lotta-look for even the vintage wearer, however. While fifties', nipped waist, solid color dresses are always appropriate because of their basic conservativeness, sometimes I struggle with "Ugh, am I going to get weird catcalls at work over this?" as I slip into a full-length, print dress. If you often wear vintage clothes (or you have opinions of those who do), do you experience this hesitancy sometimes as you dress for your day? "Is this too much?" is a question I ask a lot more in my late twenties' than I did in my early twenties', and while I usually throw clothes-caution to the wind in favor of what-I-like (unless it's a job interview or some similarly staid situation I know I'm going into), it's a unique problem, I think!

Vintage 1970s Maxi Dress / 70s Long Ethnic Paisley Dress Bright Colors Pink Orange Blue Green

It's always strange for me to think about a world, in the 1960's and 70's, where not-necessarily-everyone but a LARGE majority of people were wearing psychedelic print or wild patterned ensembles like this. If you watched last week's Mad Men (no spoilers here), I got a little irked when Don and Roger went to a party in the Hollywood Hills and EVERYONE. THERE. was wearing central casting "hippie clothes" from a regional theater production of Hair. Yes, I understand it was supposed to highlight the difference between the emergent youth culture in California and these old-school, NYC guys' reaction to that shift, but ye gods. The guy on the couch who looked like Jimi Hendrix? Cut me a break. There was a lot of "look at how late sixties' this is" going on with the costume choices, a criticism I almost NEVER levy at a show which seems to usually take great care at making sets and costumes period-appropriate while not caricaturing what people looked like and where they lived in that era...which in turn made me think about what people at a party, just a wide swath of clothing decisions dependent on the individual, would ACTUALLY look like in 1968, versus how it was portrayed in this scene. If that's not right (and I feel like it wasn't), what would have been right, in terms of clothing choices?

Blue Hawaii, vintage 1960s Maxi Dress - Blue, Green, and Purple Tropical Print - size large

I digress. What I was getting at is, it always surprises me to think about how the base-clothing options for people in 1968 would tend WAY more toward the florid than the conservative. My mom, for example, who is so not into clothes or wearing crazy outfits or bucking any kind of societal norms, had some clothes in the attic that I discovered in early high school that made my pulse race with pure vintage-adrenaline. So many wacked out patterns! The colors! The bizarre figural prints! And yet this was what an average, middle-class American teenage girl was wearing in 1970. Neon checks and playful, op-art combinations of stripe and zig-zag. It feels like if you wear that today, you are choosing to make a statement, whereas if you didn't wear something like that in the past, you were making a statement. What did underground, counter-culture type people wear to subvert the insanity being sold at JC Penney's? All black? Solid colors rather than print? Conservative, business man like attire? I wonder about this every year as don-we-now-our-gay-apparel for summer.

VINTage 70s cool summer mod maxi dress

25% OFF SALE -- Vintage Maxi Dress / 70s Rainbow Sundress / Psychedelic Print / Sleeveless / Medium

So! What is your take on the over-the-top art print on both the 1968-model average gal, and the 2013 vintage wearin' one? Do you have any go-for-broke style maxi dresses in your collection, or are you more of a solid color, non-polyester based dress collector. What's the wackiest vintage item in your clothes closet? Let's talk!

That's all for today, I have to get back to slinging books. See you back here tomorrow! Til then.

Real Talk: Estate Sale Rip-Off Edition

Good morning!

Thanks for all the helpful comments and encouragement, both here and on the Facebook page, about what to do with my new living room! I'm excited (and a little bit overwhelmed) by the possibilities for pulling the room together. I'll let you know how it turns out, for sure!

Today, I'm afraid the usually unflaggingly flattering tone of this blog will have to be tamped down to a minimum, because I need to tell you a sad, sad tale. I state as a disclaimer that I have never been in the retail side of estate sales, I've never done any vintage selling except for the most brief and cursory Craigslist listings, and this is purely a consumer-side-of-the-situation rant. Ok. Let's start at the beginning. 

Picture your humble narrator as she was last Wednesday, sitting at work, combing through the listings on EstateSales.net for the purpose of planning a Friday estate sale run. The headline "Civil War Era Home on the National Registry of Historic Places Moving Sale" immediately catches the eye, and I click forward to read this:

Don't miss this sale! The house we are liquidating is an historic home in Lebanon that has been in the same family for 5 generations. Lots of treasures from this 6,000 square foot home will be sold. They include Civil War Items, Vintage clothing, table and 6 chairs, paintings, pictures, decor, antique twin bed , other furniture, bedding, rocking chairs, Kimball piano, mirrors, lots of vintage books, costume jewelry, linens, dishes, lots of cast iron, andirons, advertising, antique tools, crocks and churns, trunk, fruit jars, oil lamps, old radios, old fans, lights, vintage frames, trays, postage stamp jewelry, spinning wheel, old postcards, quilts, electronics, and many more items. 5/28 Added Victorian couch, platform rocker, school desk, piano stool, chair, child's chair, Magnavox stereo and cabinet, double stack round table, telephone table, 3' by 4' mirror, 12 pound cannon ball, mini balls,    New Old Stock 1940's postcards (300 +), lots of vintage frames. 

If that wasn't enough to pique your interest, please examine the following photos:

Can you actually hear my tiny heart beating like a bird's wings against my chest? We were just talking the other day about how I'm a little on the crazy side about antique clothing, and look at this! WE ARE TALKING SOME STRAIGHT UP ZELDA FITZGERALD STUFF HERE.

The bylines warned people that some of the dresses were in fragile condition, but that the red beauty in the upper left hand corner, and the black piece at the bottom right were both wearable. Since the sale started on Thursday at 7 am (??), I made plans to get down to Lebanon (which is about 30 minutes outside of Nashville) with a goodly amount of folding money in case either of these could be had for under a hundred dollars. It's an estate sale, I figured. Under a hundred dollars might be possible IF someone else in the area hadn't beat me to it on Thursday morning, but odds were with me that maybe ONE of the dresses would be left on the second day of the sale. Besides, look at all the other stuff, using this photo as a reference. Six thousand square feet sale? Inside a historic house? I figure if worse came to worse, it would be neat just to see the interior.

Can you see the wallpaper? Vintage circus animals. *dies*

Again, a conversation with Kelsey, as adapted from Gmail, that I had upon returning home

"My dad and I ran out to lebanon this morning, drive 31.2 miles or whatever out to this "historical register home".... Remember, I sent you the photo of the 1920's dresses? So I get there, and go wtfh--it's in the driveway and 90% of the things in the photo are not there (100% of the cool things). I ask about the dresses

the woman's like "Oh, we sold those this morning to a woman in Georgia. She called yesterday and since they didn't sell yesterday, we called her this morning and said we'd ship them to her."

............

.........................

...............................

it's 9 am on the second day of a 3 day sale, which started on a m'f'n thursday. I mean, am I just being a whiny baby about that? I think that's a bait and switch. You shouldn't be able to buy items OVER THE PHONE when you're having an in person sale. And if you do, do that on the third day! Or at the end of the second day! Not at the BEGINNING of the second day."

So, item A: of the many, many preview photos, almost nothing remained. A table full of empty picture frames, a good deal of postcards, and one hanging rack of all seventies' vintage clothes, priced from eight to thirty dollars. And my dresses were gone with the wind....NOT BECAUSE SOMEONE HAD SHARKED ME IN PERSON, BUT OVER THE PHONE. Why wouldn't you just sell on ebay? Why wouldn't you wait until POSSIBLY THE AFTERNOON of the SECOND day? I am grievously wounded by the idea that I drove all the way down to Lebanon, banking on the at least plausible possibility that ONE of those dresses were there, only to be told that ALL of them had been sold OVER THE PHONE before I got there. And again, I was there at 9 AM. If any of you are sellers out there, can you see how that might be an unfair way to get people to come to your sale, but not actually have the items advertised? I felt like the person who camped out  at the car lot to get the $250 brand new car as advertised in the paper, only to have the dealer be like, "Oh, we sold those this morning." I felt hornswoggled, folks!

Fare thee well, 1920's dancing shoes. Sonofagun, I was heartbroken.

So, ok, let's cut our losses on not being able to see the interior of the house, and having maybe 30 seconds worth of stuff to even look at in the course of this sale. And the fact that I was cheated out of even the opportunity to SEE these dresses. It gets better. Again, as adapted from Gmail as I told my woeful tale to Kelsey:

"The following conversation ensues, after I bite my tongue about being upset re: dresses sold over phone:

Sales lady: If you're interested in vintage clothing, my business partner's coming with some clothes in a minute, if you want to wait and you like vintage clothes

Me: Oh, ok!

(waits 15 minutes, woman arrives with at least 5 armloads of clothes, she has to go back and forth to the car five times)

2nd woman: Hi, were you the girl here who wanted to see the clothes?

Me ((brightly)) Yeah!

2nd woman: Now, some of these I've already promised to another dealer, so give me a minute and I'll sort them out.

Me: Ok!

(15 more minutes, as I watch her taking all the actually vintage clothes in one pile, and putting a bunch of goodwill style 1980's-90's dresses in another pile)

2nd woman: Ok, you can look at some of these now. Isn't this cute? (picks up not-particularly-cute modern dress)

You can GUESS which pile she was saving for this mysterious "other person"

(One falls in the wrong pile, it's obviously out of place due to the fact that it looks like something a vintage collector would be even vaguely interested in)

Me: What about this one?

2nd woman: Well, that was one i was saving for the other person, but i guess it's fair game.

Me: How much did you want on it? (50's black eyelet sun dress, with matching little cape, but a lot of sun damage)

She: ((without looking up from sorting her "good pile")) Thirty dollars.

Fair value on this dress is between I'd say $8-$30

with eight being, well it's retail, so I guess I can't expect everything to be a dollar

and thirty being "OH MY GOD YOU MEAN THEY STILL HAVE CLOTHES FROM THE FIFTIES' THAT YOU CAN BUY?" naivete.

So I spent thirty minutes being treated like poor relations at this sale, in LEBANON. What's the point in even having a sale if you're going to ship everything to a mystery buyer out of state? And i've been to sales before where there's a guy going "Where are the tools you advertised?" And the people are like "Oh, an uncle of mine decided to keep all of those"

That I can ALMOST understand, but you'd better be SUPER apologetic when i drive out of COUNTY to see something you lied about being available (even in that case, through no fault of your own)"

Why did she even bring the clothes to the sale if she wasn't going to sell them? It wasn't like I was looking over her shoulder at home as she went through her closet and greedily snatching at things. These, in a normal setting, all would have been fair game. Why did her partner tell me to wait if all I was going to get were scraps off the table from this person to whom she'd "promised" every single good dress in the batch?

Now, any of this behavior would have maybe been less offensive or less outright heart-rending if it had been in an antique-dealer setting. If those items were in an antique booth, or an Ebay store, or any other non-estate sale place of business, I can almost understand what went down as simply good business on the part of the dealer. However, as the fact of the matter was that I was going to AN ESTATE SALE, it seems like they played this really, really poorly. Estate sales are supposed to be egalitarian! You can't be setting aside stuff or putting stuff for friends or yourself or anybody else! As a customer, I had a terrible experience and they could have a freaking Debbie Reynolds's MGM archive auction like bounty of vintage clothes at their next sale and I wouldn't look at the listing twice. Or I might, but I would be cussing the entire time. And I wouldn't go to the sale itself if it was across the street from my own house. What was with this!

I felt like a Keane painting by the end of this exchange (source)

What do you think, was this an inappropriate response based on my own personal emotional investment in the dresses? Imagine that none of the tone of any of this was rude, the women were as nice as they could be, but what they were saying was just rank and wrong. I felt gypped to have come all the way down from Nashville. And though I bought a seventies' dress and a large photo (this was before I was told about the 20's dresses OR totally shut-out on the vintage dresses that were to come), I was so mad by the time I left that I almost wanted to ask for my money back on those! 

Have you had any horrible customer service moments lately? Had glory snatched right out of your hands by unfair dealer tactics? Am I the whiniest person in creation or do you agree with me that the whole setup was wrong at this sale?

That's all the bellyaching for today-- I promise to tell you something positive tomorrow! See you back here then.

Living Room Update

Good morning!

And whoooo, LAWD, what a weekend it was. I need to report back to you about my new/old television  show addiction, the worst estate sale I've been to in a lo-o-o-ong time, and some other various and sundry things that happened since you and I last spoke, but let's break out the big guns in conversational updates this morning and talk about the living room. It's foremost on my mind!

Behold! ORDER!

This simple domestic tableau is the result of hours, upon hours, UPON HOURS of hauling furniture and books. Don't believe me? Look at this photo from New Year's of this year, where you can get a better idea of a) how much I love to wear festive hats and b) the sheer volume of STUFF in the living room:

Imagining a new year with less stuff! Obviously! Well, probably not, but should be!

Those shelves came with me from my high school bedroom and they were just as filled with books then as they are now. Classic Hollywood biographies of movie stars, mainly,  mixed in with recipe and interior design books from the fifties' and sixties', mixed in with reprints of old horror comic books, the complete works of F Scott Fitzgerald, and anthologies of ghost stories. I've pretty much covered all these items in previous blogs, so you have a good idea of the cross-section of interests here in print form, in my living room. Problem is, I also LIKE TO HAVE A LIVING ROOM. I've come lightyears from my actually-bordering-on-Hoarders past as a human magpie who would sooner actually die than part with some dearer items from her collection, but these books have stayed put pretty much since I moved into the house, in one room formation or the other, glaring down from the shelves in chronic, constant disorder.

Last week, doing pilates on a mat in the floor of this room along with Mari Windsor on the television, I was crunching my poor, weak little body into various unnatural poses when the solution to my living room quandary presented itself-- storing hundreds of volumes of books in a limited amount of space would cease to be a problem if you stopped having hundreds of volumes of books. "But! What do you mean?" my tiny id cried out, "I happen to LIKE all those books!" I grappled with the concept of no longer having 24/7 access to Barbara Leaming's respective biographies of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth (who were married, you know), or a lexicongraphic study of  20th century slang aptly named Flappers 2 Rappers. Suddenly, however, the idea of having access instead to a little breathing room appealed to me way more than having physical representations of the things that I like clogging up my sense of space.

How I felt after having moved out all four bookcases and their respective contents #bestmovieofalltime  (source)

So, long story short, we moved books, and books, and BOOKS to McKays. I probably kept one or two shelves worth of items--Diana Barrymore's All My Sins Remembered and a pair of Goosebumps books in French (!!) were on the top of the stack in the green room office that I have yet to assimilate into the bookshelf in that room, but I traded something like 10 boxes worth of stuff for $70 in cash (no trade credit! I'm just going to get in worse trouble!). I'm frrrrreeeee!!

I called my mom and managed to finagle my grandma's early 70's Trutone Western Electric console radio out of her, which, in truth, she has been trying to get me to take for most of the 2000's. I can remember years as a little kid of running into this solid sucker's sharp base corners on a tricycle or with bare feet, and pulling on the false-front cabinet doors with a wondering tenacity as to why the darn thing wouldn't open. The top on this console is a giant lid, essentially, for the workings within, which include a turntable, an 8-track cassette deck, and an AM/FM radio. I was surprised when I plugged it in that the radio and left speaker still work! While my heart's still ultra mid-century, I have to admit that the seventies' heaviness of the design on this piece really matches better with my crazy delicious Broyhill sofa set and the Spanish-influenced wrought iron dining table and chairs. This painting (below) is from the same estate sale as the coyote fur coat and the chair I couldn't keep. It's enormous, but I think that makes it perfect for the ONE piece on that wall.

Two remaining reservations in terms of the living room: tv presentation, and color. In terms of the tv, I just don't know what else to do with it! You know? Unless I drop some serious money on a vintage repro, or figure out some way to integrate it into an existing vintage tv-shell (seems like a lot of trouble for someone who doesn't know much about carpentry to begin with), it looks like this is my best possible option for displaying a flat screen in this room, with what I have. As far as the color, while the wild, Miami turquoise of the current wall paint was specifically matched to this photo of David Bowie from the "Life on Mars" video (would I lie to you?), it matched WAAAY better with the all-gold couches and doesn't let the Broyhill pattern pop the way I think it deserves to.

As much as it grieves me to say it, I think I might paint the room an off-white. Something SUPER clean and standard, so that all the golds and turquoises and wood-tones of the room are jetfueled into the foreground in terms of what catches ones' eye, and my house looks like something out of Apartment Therapy. Thoughts? Am I going to regret it the moment I put brush to wall surface? I need your advice!!

A closeup of the couch:

And a (dismal looking in this light, it's really quite pretty in real life!) side chair near the door:

Have you had any life changing epiphanies about the set up of your living space lately? Made a big change in arrangement or color? Just got sick to death at the sight of something in your house? What color would YOU paint the living room? Let's talk!

That's all for today, more tomorrow. See you then!