Jack Potter Illustrations (Coca-Cola, 1957)

Good morning!

I was doing my morning internet stroll through Google books and ladies and gents, I was just bowled over by these illustrations by Jack Potter for Coca-Cola. Because it's almost summer! Because living in a cubicle farm makes me yearn for sunny, exotic locales! Because look at how breezy and beautiful 1957 looks from through the mind's eye of this extremely talented commercial artist!

The theme of the ad campaign has to do with "the social custom of Coke" being well regarded across the world, in all manner of far-flung points on the globe. "So good in taste, in such good taste" reads the cloying copy under the illustrations...but we didn't come for the copy, we came for the gorgeous, gorgeous pictures Mr. Potter paints of mid century international travel.

Here, for example, is Paris, where a fluffy white dog rates his own seat and special glass of spirits. Note the squareness of the gentleman's skinny tie, and the woman's white gloves. I wish someone would write a tutorial for vintage fashion enthusiasts about when it's appropriate to wear gloves. I can't tell you how many times I've been buying or looking at or trying on old gloves at estate sales or antique malls and someone a little older has come over to wring their own (gloveless) hands about how no nicely brought up woman would leave the house without gloves when they were a girl, or how "Mother always wore blue gloves with her Sunday suit", etc, etc. But when do you take them off? Do you reach for a watercress sandwich at Sunday tea in your gloves, or do you remove them? If you're over to the neighbors to play bridge, gloves or no gloves? The movies are unreliable because they'd have me believe Irene Dunne waking up from a coma in full-false-lashes was just her own fresh scrubbed face (this actually happened in the original version of Magnificent Obsession, with Robert Taylor, which I watched this weekend), so who do I turn to for advice on this?

This is honestly one of the best ones, in my opinion. See how Potter's cleaned up the coloring of this illustration a bit to have a less pointillist view of the canals of Venice. I love thinking of how formal even tourist wear would be back in the fifties'. Notice you don't see anyone with fanny packs or comfortable jeans, but a mother in pearls and a hat, and a father in full-on, Tom Wolfe white suit. I worry each and every time I wear something completely white that I'll be forced into some kind of social setting where I'm obliged to eat spaghetti, or sit on a park bench, or any number of things that spell doom for a light, monochromatic piece of clothing, but I need to be more brave! How summery this whole look comes off!

 Hawaii....oh, Hawaii. Look at that gorgeous dress! I have a horrible, horrible addiction to Hawaiian maxidresses and one-size-fits-all tourist pieces from the sixties' and seventies'... when it finally gets to a stable summer temperature, you'd better believe I'm going to be belting those bad boys and sauntering around the library like I just got off a plane from Honolulu, circa 1968. I was so pleased when the season opener of this year's Mad Men was set in Hawaii, because seriously, what could have been a cooler tourist destination at the time. And the CLOTHES, the clothes, the clothes.

More summer inspiration in the following panels:

The straw hat, the parasol, the man's one piece maillot, and the Kodak land camera on the beach blanket. Yes! A thousand times, yes!

I secretly (not so secretly?) wish I knew one person, just ONE person with a boat. It seems so Burton/Taylor to be able to hop on a skiff and pilot it out to the middle of the bay. I think that guy in the middle borrowed his outfit wholesale from the man in the last panel. Nice sneakers!

And last but not least, a self portrait? I do love this picture of one artist painting the beauty of the lake, and one artist sketching his female companion across the table from an ice cold Coca-Cola and half an apple (respectively). How about that guy on the left's charcoal knee socks and matching oxfords? I inexplicably love this. Maybe it reminds me of 1920's directors in knickerbockers, somehow still looking manly as can be with a bullhorn in one fist and the other planted defiantly on a hip, ready to whip some extras into shape for the next big crowd scene.

Which of these do you like best? Do you have any favorite midcentury summer-inspiration movies? I was just thinking of sweet Katharine Hepburn in Summertime in Italy, or The Talented Mr. Ripley for what I truly wish my midcentury vacation looked like. What are some of your favorite summer-weather-appropriate vintage get ups? Do tell!!

You can read more about illustrator Jack Potter and his work here. I gotta get back to work, but you guys have a great Tuesday, and I'll see you tomorrow!! Til then.

The Real Jay Gatsby (Young F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 1918-1920)

Good  morning!

How was your weekend? I've recently been giving great and deep consideration to a topic near and dear to my heart, and thought I might spill it all out for you kids-- guys, the Fitzgeralds. No, seriously, the Fitzgeralds. Let's talk.

In spite of deep and abiding distaste for the film career of Baz Luhrman, I'm glad he's re-made The Great Gatsby for a modern audience for one very important reason. All the hubbub surrounding a 3D, twenty-first century version of THE great American novel means a resurgence in interest in one of my own biggest interests-- the lives and love of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

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I may be misjudging Luhrman right-out-of-the-gate without having seen the movie yet. As a biography-thumping Bowie fan, I was deeply disappointed in the movie Velvet Goldmine, and held a grudge against writer/director Todd Haynes for something like ten years. How could he get glam rock so wrong? Who did he think he was to misinterpret something that was fun and edgy and camp and silly and provocative as something gothic and tortured and b-o-r-i-n-g? Had he done any research beyond flipping through the album sleeves in his local record shop? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I was mad, folks. So a few years back, when I heard he was remaking James M. Cain's pulp noir masterpiece Mildred Pierce for HBO, I was all ready to put on my comfortable shoes and my good lipstick to get in the picket line against his performing another travesty upon the hallowed halls of "Things I Love". Oops, though. My bad. With the exception of not-having-Joan-Crawford in it, the 2011 mini series was engrossing, beautifully adapted and shot, and actual better-in-some-ways than the 1945 Curtiz production. Act like that does not actually burn my tongue to say it, but it's true.

Yes, and no, respectively. That's all we need to say about that.

So, for all I know, this movie could be another judge-not parable for me to ad to my scrapbook of times I was wrong (a slim volume, or wouldn't I like to think it was, haha). Keep in mind, however, that the only thing I loved in my formative years more than David Bowie circa 1972 was the fair-haired young man of letters Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald circa 1918. You can see where my heart might beat with a tiny tremolo of fear at thinking of Fitzgerald's delicate, sensitive storytelling in the hands of such a bombastic, overwrought director. Moulin Rouge is one of the only movies I've ever walked out of in the theater. I had that same dreadful feeling I did when I accidentally went into a toy store in a mall on vacation, thinking maybe I could score some out of print 3D puzzle of the Biltmore, or whatever, only to realize it was a store specifically dedicated to selling wind-up toys. Everything in the entire freaking room hissed and popped and writhed and swizzled at me until I ended up just walking back out directly. I didn't care much more for Romeo + Juliet. The soundtrack to that movie was in the floorboard of probably every friend's car I ever rode in my high school years, but the sis! boom! BANG! of the directing style leaves me cold, cold, cold.

Would it be too much to ask that Gatsby be sold to the Downtown Abbey crowd? Or the Mad Men crowd? Or even the Boardwalk Empire crowd. People who are truly interested in a historically and emotionally accurate rendering of a time period that's complicated and exciting and by virtue of the passing of time, getting to be almost unfathomably remote? Wouldn't I like to understand the time period and the motivations of the people therein from the context of that time period, without any gimmicks or fancy plaster underpinnings to make it more palatable to everyone?

My interest in the Fitzgeralds was sparked by a chance reading of Zelda by Nancy Mitford maybe around 10th grade. The Mitford book itself is dry as toast but the STORY, folks, the STORY! Was it not the most thrilling discovery of my young life up until that moment to find that the romance of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby was biographically moored to FSF's own experiences in meeting, wooing, losing, and then triumphantly marrying a wild and beautiful Southern girl, the former Zelda Sayre? Trying to imagine a dashing but disadvantaged Fitzgerald in his Brooks Brothers army uniform (see above-- he'd specially ordered it) going after the most vivacious girl in Montgomery, Alabama, year of our Lord 1918, put stars in my eyes. The chance of it all... that he happened to be stationed there, that she allowed herself to be wrested from the many local beaux she held favor with by an essentially prospect-less writer who'd flunked out Princeton... all the little quirks of fate that put the two of them together. If the book on their lives ended in 1920, with the publication of This Side of Paradise, you'd have thought every dream had come true. Fitzgerald got the girl, became an important name in literary circles, sold a blue million copies of the first book of the "Jazz Age", and was practically bathing in champagne down at the Ritz, spending his new money on cars, clothes, and good times. 

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The Capote quote, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones" seems to be a fitting epitaph to the Fitzgerald marriage, however. Their very glamorous early 1920's lives fizzled out like a Roman candle in a ten year cascade of mutual recriminations, lost hopes, hangovers. While This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned were wildly successful, as were some collections of his short stories, more mature works such as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night did not receive the critical or popular acceptance they may have deserved. Fitzgerald found himself cranking out short romances and comic sketches for the Saturday Evening Post and other popular periodicals to pay their ever-mounting bills. In Cap d'Antibes, as they spent the summer with the famous Sara and Gerald Murphy, Zelda fell into an infatuation with a Spanish aviator, and Scott spend a lot of time trailing a teenage silent film star, both viciously jealous of the other's flirtations. Back in America, Zelda was institutionalized in 1932 and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals on the east coast, while a broken FSF headed west in a mostly unsuccessful bid to write for the movies. The momentum with which "things went bad" at the end of their relationship is just heart-rending.

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In spite of how things resolved themselves, I love the idea of, again and again, Fitzgerald writing and re-writing their lives. Every face in every one of his books would have been familiar to him, as they were almost all based on real life people and events, artfully rearranged to suit a narrative plot. There was a lot of scholarly ink put to paper in the seventies' about whether or not Zelda was the "true" writer in the couple, as her  now-lost diaries were incorporated into many of her husband's books and her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, showed a real gift for imagery. I'm not sure how much I can invest into a conspiracy theory of what one might have done, in different circumstances, versus what FSF actually did, but reading their love affair continually unfolding and going to cinders throughout the course of Fitzgerald's novels is one of the most compelling text-to-biography comparisons in all of twentieth century American literature.

So! Wouldn't that make a fascinating movie/mini-series/something? Wouldn't that, in your mind, hold the interest of the movie-going public without adding baroque visuals and extra-noise? Why can't they make one movie that is just pitch-perfectly what-it-was? I've lived through the TNT teledrama Zelda, in which Natasha Richardson and Timothy Hutton speed through a soft-focus-lens Cliff Notes of the Fitzgerald's lives...through Mira Sorvino (?!?) as Daisy in a USA network adaptation of Gatsby... but my dearest hope is that with renewed interest in the Jazz Age, someone at HBO will plunk down some real Hollywood money on a real version of a compelling, true story of these tragic figures. Is that so much to ask?

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What are your impressions of the Fitzgeralds? Did you snooze through Gatsby in high school, or did the lure of the green light at the end of the Buchanan's pier mesmerize you as much as it did me? Read anything on the Fitzs outside of an American Lit class? Did you see the new movie yet? What did you think? Let's talk!Oh, and if you're interested in more biographical information on the Fitzgeralds, there's an AMAZING resource in scans of (and get your hands on a copy of it if you can, it's marvelous) the book The Romantic Egoists here. Enjoy!

Ah, that's all the self-righteous indignation/rambling I can do for one day. More tomorrow! Til then.

Photo Friday: School Photos Edition

Good morning!

Today's photos are more from my mom's side of the family. Remember the willowly blonde from Cape Cod, my grandmother Hazel? Here are some of her school photos, which are about as Orphan Annie, Sunday comics adorable as any I've seen from the time period:

Look at those sparkling eyes and that little grin! The doubled Peter Pan collar! A stone cold cutie if there ever was one.

Do you recall much about taking school photos as a kid? I remember being herded in my elementary school classroom once a year, into the cafetorium that had been set up as a makeshift photography studio, and lining up in alphabetical order. There always seemed to be a million people in the front half of the alphabet, so I would be usually second to last, trying to visually trace which cord went to which huge light fixture and watching my classmates grimace and grin in front of the guy from Jostens (he had some weird name, I really think it might have been Mr. Smiley or Mr. Happy, like something out of a serial killer movie) with his enormous, pre-digital camera.

Which, in turn, made me wonder about what taking these photos in 1920's Cambridge, Massachusetts must have been like. My grandmother, who had a story she wrote about a temptress with "large, violet eyes"  printed in the high school corner section of the local newspaper, was an extremely bookish little girl, who loved rollerskating and reading in the attic of her grandparents house on a hill overlooking the Cape. Her mother had died of pneumonia when she was nine, and she and her younger brother Charles went to live with her mother's people, while her fisherman father was out on his boat. When I was little, she would tell me about living in an old, shingled, three story house with her Grandma and Grandpa Hill, her beloved Uncle Ted, her Aunt Pinky, and their several other grown-but-still-living-at-home children. Isn't it weird, how even in a recession you don't hear much about grown children, married or not, moving back in with their parents? It's common practice in Europe for kids to end up staying in the family home and contributing to the household well into adulthood, and this arrangement seemed extremely ordinary to my grandma both then and at the time. Naming off her relatives was another time that her Yankee accent seemed to creep into her voice, so it was always interesting to hear her tell stories about Massachusetts cousins and kin.

I read several biographies of Bette Davis, in which she mentioned that her divorced mother Ruth supported the family by opening up a photography business, in which she took, among many others, all the photos for Bette's senior class. Two hours south, at much the same time period, my own grandmother would have been sitting in front of  a photographer's lens, maybe in a set up like this one, smiling that close-mouthed, winning smile she features in these photos. A little gal, mostly legs and knees and tow-headed page boy hair cut at that point, never having been to Tennessee, never having dreamed she would spend most of her life a thousand miles away from the same sea she could probably hear outside the studio.

This is the most recent and close-up photo of my grandma, Hazel, in the lot of them, maybe in early high school? See how her hair's darkened a bit, and what a PRINT on that blouse! It always weirds me out to think of moments in time when anything could have happened, in the seconds and minutes and hours after a photo was taken. She might have walked out of the frame of this photo, out onto the street, and been recruited by a local department store as a clothes model, for her irregular height and good posture. Maybe she would have met a local boy that afternoon in town, and started going steady, never dating Jimmy, so never working at the bus station, and in turn never meeting my Tennessee grandad. Anything! I'm glad it turned out the way it did, so I could be here today, but sometimes I get the kind of mesmerized you do from staring too long at your own pupils in a bathroom mirror as a kid from thinking about the past as a solid, non-static point, and not as a general, vague thing that's already happened. Photography! It's like witchcraft, folks.

So! Do you have any photos in your family collection that make you think about the time and place and circumstances in which they were taken? Any great school pictures of your parents or grandparents either looking their best or worst? Let's talk!

That's all for this week, kiddos. I'll see you right back here next week for more vintage ramblings! Til then.

Hemingway and Gellhorn (HBO, 2012)

Good morning!

Well, I've been through another movie watching binge this week. Lately, it has occurred to me that though I work in a public library with thousands, upon thousands, of free movies at my command, I have been frittering my hard earned money away on Amazon Instant Rentals and a Hulu plus subscription! As much as I love the convenience of just clicking a button and having the latest Ethan Hawke horror movie right there at my fingertips, I'm endeavoring to do better and am checking out DVDs I've meant to watch from the (free! free! free!) NPL system. Monday, I watched the HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman as the titular characters.

I love these expressions like "She said WHAT? ABOUT WHO?" (source)

It's funny because I waited something like a month to get this popular title to show up on the hold shelf, and then once it had arrived, had lost all interest in actually watching it. I AM SO BAD ABOUT THIS, and I think it's a uniquely modern problem. Do you know what I mean? Ten years ago, pre-Youtube, pre-Netflix, pre-Hulu, I would have been so grateful to have the physical media in my hands and at my disposal that I would have cancelled plans in order to have free time to watch it! Call people up and have them over, "Hey! I've got that new Hemingway movie on DVD, get over here!" Now, nine times out of ten, unless it's something extraordinary, I've usually lost interest between ordering a movie and a week plus's worth of waiting for it. However, as I said, I'm turning over a new leaf, and I popped the movie in on Monday to watch it in its entirety.

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The story centers around the romance of machismo-on-legs, Great American Writer Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, war correspondent  Martha Gellhorn. It's a real life love story that must have as complicated and torturous as anything Hemingway wrote, but the movie knocks it down into a few key thematic elements and a 154 minute run time. They drink in sweaty Cuban bars. They trade quips over the Spanish Civil War. They have moments of life-changing revelations about the hell of war. They have LOTS of almost late-night Cinemax caliber sex. Hemingway gets drunk a lot, Gellhorn gets wanderlust a lot. I initially thought British Clive Owen was struggling with Hemingway's American accent, but apparently, in light of this clip of the great author recorded in the 1950's, that's just how Papa talked!!

It's always interesting to me to watch biopics of famous people because even when they're bad (cough: Elvis and Me, cough), they're kind of good. Kind of good in the sense that I will watch them and enjoy them regardless of the quality, as long as it's just above godawful. In this one, Hemingway landing a marlin the size of Texas on his fishing boat in the first fifteen minutes of screentime, and Gellhorn parading around both Havana and war torn Spain in iconically derriere-clinging slacks, kind of sets the quasi-serious, quasi-shorthand tone of the movie, and I can't say I wasn't happy to watch the whole thing.

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I was ready to just hate-hate it, as there's a lot of dialogue stripped straight from Hemingway books, which stands naked and awkward as words actually coming out of people's mouths in the movie, and there's a lot of really bad "What do you think about that, Hemingway?" "Well, I don't know, Gellhorn" last-name-calling banter that makes my skin crawl. However! Reading this FABULOUS review in Vulture about the movie, made me think twice or three times over what I had seen. It's not fabulous in that the reviewer loves, loves the movie (he doesn't), but in how nuanced a look he takes at elements of what seems offhandedly to be a pretty terrible movie. I might actually go back and watch it again to hear director Phillip Kaufman (who is certainly no slouch; he made one of my favorite horror movies of all time, the only decent film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in 1978) audio commentary and rethink some of the points Seitz brought up in his review.

For an example of "what they got right", one of the neatest parts of the movie is Kaufman's choice to blend made-to-match new footage with of-the-time newsreel footage of the wars Hemingway and Gellhorn saw first hand, to embed the characters in pre-existing archival footage. I know it could have been a goofy, Forrest Gump-esque special effect, but it really works. I'd never noticed how static and impersonal historical newsreel footage looked to me until you're watching, say, this bombed out building and all these people milling around in the aftermath, and you see Nicole Kidman walking through it. You recognize her as being an actual person who you are personally invested in, and that makes the whole scene more meaningful. Isn't that weird? You can read more about how they accomplished these effects here (PS can I please be green screened into some movie premiere on the arm of Dana Andrews or Cary Grant? Ok, thanks).

Real footage all around her, and Kidman in the center. Isn't that kind of magical? (source)

Another high point was definitely the costumes. Ruth Meyers was nominated for an Emmy for the production, and I think she should have won-- it's hard to make war correspondents look both natural and glamorous, but there was an effortless dazzle to the clothes in every single scene of the movie. Clive Owen is wearing a beret AND a cape for a goodly part of his Spanish screen time, and he looks like a million dollars! Also, who knew I wanted a fur coat like that until now? I WANT A COAT LIKE THAT SO BADLY.

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Are you a Hemingway fan? Do you watch a lot of Hollywood biopics? If you saw the movie, what did you think about Owen and Kidman's performances? Seen any good recent releases lately? Am I dumb enough to watch a two and a half movie I didn't like much in the first place a SECOND time? Let's talk!

That's all for today kids! Get a gander at the trailer for this movie if you haven't seen it yet below. I'll see you all tomorrow!

Google + Is Not Dead (It's Hilarious)

Good morning!

I'm going to let you in on a secret about government work, people...there's occasionally a LOT of free time involved in manning a service desk as an adult professional working with the public. Some days, I feel like my feet don't touch the ground for eight hours as I'm hunting down rogue books-on-hold, looking up obscure reference questions, troubleshooting eighty year olds over the phone in the use of library e-books on Kindle e-readers, or helping people upload their resumes to COMPLETELY counter-intuitive job application sites. This is real library work, folks.

A photo of lipstickless me in 2011 at the YA desk at the library; a picture of my role model librarian at a desk in the sixties'.
I wish we still had those card catalogs; they'd be easier than the Millennium catalog online!

However! Some days, I've managed to catch up to all my little paging slips, all my tech questions, all my mended books...or at least as much as I'm able to in that capacity, that day. When this happens, maybe I'm stuck in the reference floor phone room for a six hour shift, on call but not really tasked with anything. Maybe I'm bored. B-O-R-E-D, killmebored. It is then, that I discover comic gems like Google + Reviews. Hallelu!

I'ma tell you now... there are not a lot of good things said about either one of these establishments on Trinity Lane

Did you even know such a thing existed? I remember a year or two ago, everyone getting excited about a new social media network that would include the amazing, almost limitless power of Google, into one service called Google +. While I use Gmail chat to talk to Sus, Matthew, and Kelsey pretty much all ding dang day, I don't think I've hardly looked at my Google + profile. The whole thing seems to have popped and fizzled, and Facebook, riddled with advertisements as it is now, still holds its head high as king of social media. I even read an article on the Yahoo news page (because I am apparently 85 years old) about how pizza giants Domino's had last updated its Facebook presence THAT DAY, but last updated Google + in November of the previous year. What does that mean for Facebook as a business tool, blah, blah, blah. But that's obviously not what cattle prodded me out of my doldrums in the phone room.

What I found? If you map search any location, say, "Dickerson Pike", then click "search nearby" by category, say "motel", you'll not only have a list of motels on Dickerson Pike in Nashville, but also some very florid opinions on the state of cleanliness and relative value of these establishments. Something about really bad hotel rooms brings out the poetic in people. For your entertainment, a selection from these reviews:

• This is horrible!!! Never ever go there world. Im serious!
• This hotel isn't a good hotel and I wish I nevered went there.

•  I feel like I'm sleeping in a very poor gas station bathroom, please don't let me even have 2 think about that bathroom w/ the hairs in tub & vilely obscene & utterly filthy shower curtain.

• Roaches run! I asked for my money back and was given a bunch of attitude ...

• "This nasty place was the dirtiest, most nasty motel we have ever seen anywhere on earth! Carpets, sheets, and everything else was scary nasty. it should be condemmed as a health hazard. The bed had enough loose hair in it to weave an Indian blanket!"

• Scary. Almost had my manhood stolen. Parking lot designed very poorly.

• This trashy hotel when we came Da bed was unmade mc donlad bag on the floor n they charged 10 dollars to get a remote i payed by the week n we didn't get a microwave or refridge its bs

• WOW! My boyfriend and I were moving across the country, and we tried to find reasonably priced rooms in every city along the way. I guess it's partially my fault that I didn't do more research on the area of town since my GPS does not offer "ghetto" as an avoidance. However, my 5 minute experience at the Hallmark Inn was definitely one I will not be forgetting. I checked in around 8pm with a seemingly nice woman at the front desk. Within 30 seconds of paying for my room, a man walked in to the lobby and the following conversation, which I have censored as it was strewn with obscenities, occurred: 
•  Man: Did a package come for me today? 
• Front Desk Clerk: No. 
• Man: Well that's weird. I was expecting some money for my rent. 
• Front Desk Clerk: Where have you been today? Man: I was just at the hospital. John is in there. I stabbed him in the eye and broke both of his arms, so I am very surprised he hasn't sent over the money yet. 
• Front Desk Clerk: You didn't get in trouble for that?
•  Man: Nope. I ran from the police. He deserved it. 
• Front Desk Clerk: Well I am very glad you were able to get away. Talk to you later. 
•  I was VERY shocked by this conversation, but it was almost funny so I ran outside to tell the two guys I was traveling with about it. We proceeded to walk to our room which was right next to the abandoned pool half filled with mud.The room smelled very strongly like cigarette smoke and the carpet, beds, and bathroom were so dirty that I was affraid to walk around without socks on. The sheets had holes in them and the shower curtain, which was supposed to be white, was somewhere between yellow and brown. Within 5 minutes of entering the room, we walked back to the front desk to ask for a refund and found 4 or 5 african american men wearing all red circling our Uhaul and trying to get in it. I explainted to the lady at the front desk that the place was not safe and I could guarantee my Uhaul would be broken into, but she adamently demanded that there were no refunds, under ANY circumstances, and that since the cops get called a few times a night by various people staying in the motel, my Uhaul would "most likely be safe." Given the situation I decided that it was probably best to just say goodbye to the $30, take a lot of funny pictures, and move on to a safer establishment. In the end I was able to successfully dispute the charge on my credit card, but although my 5 minutes on Trinity Lane were mildly entertaining, it was definitely NOT a Hallmark moment.

THEY'RE SO FUNNY. WHY ARE THEY SO FUNNY. While I enjoy the occasional Yelp recommendation or review, I love the mix of high and low literacy, the true-to-life quality, and the jaw dropping frankness of some of these "reviews". Am I horrible? Do you not secretly get a kick out of hearing how awfully, terribly bad the customer service or product someone received was, so you feel like you're not the only rube in the world getting occasionally ripped off by the cruel, cold world outside our doorsteps?

I spent most of my lunch hour trying to think of places on my side of town that might rate the kind of hilariously angry comments I'd enjoyed in the Dickerson Rd/Trinity Lane motel descriptions. I was not disappointed by some of the descriptions of food places:

• Those cash register girls have very very bad attitudes. If the service wasnt such a turnoff it would be fine. They should hire younger people thats bereley ever worked. At chik fil a all the workers are great and like 15 or 16 years young. All they want to do is do a good job. Nasty attitudes will keep me away for good

• The service at the Nashville location was very BAD and embarrassing. Please do not support this restaurant chain. My boyfriend checked the to go order before leaving the facility and notice that the order was not correct. He took the order back and got nothing but negative feedback from the staff. They were so rude and nasty so my boyfriend asked for the money back for the order. There was a very young female who claim she was the manager agreed to give him his money back but consistently used profanity during the conversation with boyfriend. I began to get upset and told her that she doesn't have to be so nasty and rude. She responded and said "its...people like you that I don't like dealing with". I said excuse me. She then proceeded to threaten to come over the counter and said she don't have a problem hurting me. I told her that she does not know who she is talking too. I tried to get her name but she was not willing to give her name but said that "[name redacted]" was her boss. I told her I definitely would be sure that knew what took place here and her actions. She said that nothing would happen to her and that I could call [the boss] all I wanted too. 

• I don't understand for the life of me why any sober person would find this place good. I ate there today and it was the absolute worst lunch I have ate in my life. The silverware was filthy, the food was COLD and OMG how SLOW they are and not even with a full house!! The place itself is what you expect for that area of Dickerson road ,rundown and waaaaayyyyy dated. I paid without saying anything mostly because it was all they could do to count change. I figured if getting all your order (which I didn't ) was a apparent tough task getting my bill corrected or a refund would be impossible. Do yourself a favor eat ANYWHERE else!!!! ANYWHERE
• Manager is rude and a nazi
• Sometimes great, sometimes terrible. The new store smells much better than the old one.

Oh, I could go on and on. But you should check it out yourself, they're really too good to miss-- and with Google + flailing in the popularity race as it is, they may not be around for long!

Have you read any hilarious online reviews of local places lately? Ever been so incensed at an eatery or motel that you actually posted a fiery response online, for people to read, forever? What's a local place YOU like that everyone else seems to give a bad rap? Do you have any favorite mindless desk tasks to take up when nothing, say NOTHING, is going on at work? Let's talk!

 Have a good Wednesday! That's all for today, see you guys back here tomorrow! Til then.

Huey Mania (Huey Lewis at the Schermerhorn in August!)

Good morning!

I've held in the good news (news...oh, the many, many terrible news jokes to be made here) about this year's birthday surprise... MATTHEW GOT US FABULOUS, FABULOUS TICKETS TO SEE HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS IN AUGUST AT THE SCHERMERHORN! AAAAH, I'M GONNA SEE HUEY IN REAL-O-VISION! AAAAAAH!

Huey! I'm comin' for ya, Hugh!

No, seriously, these tickets are amazing. I have been checking the official Huey Lewis and the News website (which is some modified wiki-like page? It's the darnedest thing trying to get news from it) for about five years, patiently waiting for HLN to come anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Once, he played in the middle of Kentucky, but I heard about it the night after the concert. I'm sure it's a nostalgia-circuit thing, but you're mostly likely to see bookings in casinos in Utah or the upper Midwest, or state fairs in Ohio, than anything closer to home...the man tours something like eight months out of the year, but never within reasonable driving distance of me! Now, in support of the 30th anniversary of his seminal eighties'-pop album Sports, he's coming to NASHVILLE, TN, to play at THE SYMPHONY HOUSE. Could it be any more perfect? Check out how close we are:

Background of the true love tale of Huey and me---around 2008, I got r-e-e-e-eally into karaoke. I was teaching 10th grade French at a really rough and tumble high school in Metro, was about as miserable as a human could be at that task, and DEFINITELY needed the gettin'-away, gettin'-to-be-somebody aspect of Friday and Saturday night karaoke. We went EVERY. SINGLE. WEEKEND. Matthew and our pals met up at a local bar and just ran amok for two nights a week-- who knew how into singing and being up on stage I was before this life-changing experience of bringing down the house on "Edge of Seventeen"? It was really kind of personality-defining for me. Huey is a big part of this period, the good parts anyway, as I was trying to brainstorm crowd pleasing songs for Matthew to sing and found that eighties' pop is pretty much his forte (if you've met him, I mean, this was kind of a "duh", but it's fun to see a theory work out in practice!). "If This is It" became one of his barnstorming songs, and we delved deep into the News musical catalog. Everybody knows the highlights, but I'm telling you, pretty much 90% of the HLN output circa 1978-1990 is FANTASTIC. "Trouble in Paradise"? "Perfect World"? This greatest hits CD, pulled out of a $5 bin at Walmart, included a DVD of all the videos for the hits to boot! EVERY. SINGLE. VIDEO. IS GOOFY. G-O-O-F-Y. And so eighties'. I loved the silly spirit and real musical chops of this band, but HARD.

Here is a really cool picture of Matthew from March of 2011, when he sat in as lead singer and key-tarist in Jerry Pentecost's group MAYHEM's full album cover of Sports at the Five Spot. To say this was really cool for me...well, quite the understatement. We spent all day at different Goodwills looking for the perfect primary color blazer, and finally found this electric blue one at Music City Thrift. Sadly, the best photo of him from the event is in black and white. Use your imagination!

ATTA BAB!

Fun fact: I was once the only person in the entire Flying Saucer trivia night, in a room of maybe 200 competing people, to correctly match the lost lyrics "At two o'clock this morning, if she should come a-callin', I wouldn't dream of turnin' her away" to my very favorite HLN song, "Heart and Soul" (it's a competitive category, and there are some close seconds, but oh my God I love that song). He read the question and I was like, "Girl, please." One of my proudest trivia moments.

Anyway, if you yourself are a Huey fan, or just interested in what kind of memorabilia is out there, I managed to round up a couple things I like from Ebay and Etsy, to celebrate my eternal devotion to this blue eyed soul practitioner.

1) ZOMBIE HUEY T-SHIRT-- I don't think that was the shirtmaker's intention, but what is going on with his eyes here?!

Vintage 1980s Huey Lewis And The News Popular Prep Rock Concert Tour Mall T-Shirt

Huey Lewis + The News T-Shirt from the 80's. Be the man AND beat the man. There are two minor holes back collar that are barely noticeable. Especially with one arm draped around the head cheerleader and your other shoulder adorned by your ill varsity jacket.

2) BUSINESS HUEY T-SHIRT: As in, I may or may not have bought this moments after finding it yesterday in preparation for today's post. I'm only human! LOOK AT THAT HAIR!

Vintage Huey Lewis and the News T-Shirt Tee

3) HUEY AND THE NEWS BUTTONS: What better expression of your vintage love than through the outdated format of buttons! In high school, I remember Great Escape got a huge shipment of deadstock eighties' buttons and I TOOK. ADVANTAGE. OF THAT, SON. I have buttons and keychains for the Eurthymics, Pet Shop Boys, Bowie, Thompson Twins, Michael Jackson, Madness... there's a small box of swag in my closet that looks a little like an MTV promoter threw up in it. But no NEWS buttons! Some shipping clerk in 1983 dropped the ball on that one!

1980s Huey Lewis and the New Buttons Pins - Set of 3

4) HUEY AND THE BAND T-SHIRT: One of the funniest things about their videos to me is the rampant usage of the ENTIRE band in the plot/execution of the clip. While Huey's "the star", the rest of the band gets more than enough air time to show their mothers or girlfriends or wives that they are actually in a commercially successful band. And that's nice!

Original HUEY LEWIS vintage 1985 Europe tour T SHIRT

5) NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL A HUEY SHIRT: In which the man shows off all his best attributes-- hair, eyes, eyebrows, tight black t-shirt, SUIT. Look at the wild eighties' graphic in the background too! I wish this one wasn't $100.

VINTAGE 80S 1984 HUEY LEWIS & THE NEWS HEART OF ROCK & ROLL CONCERT TOUR T SHIRT

6) HUEY ROLLING STONE COVER: I have this in a frame in my house somewhere. Who can resist that little face!

Rolling Stone Magazine Huey Lewis and the News No Labels Exc Cond 1984

Anyway, I am super, all the way, almost too excited about getting to see the man himself just a week and a half after my birthday in August. Some of those "Before I Turn Thirty" goals are coming along nicely! Plus I still have two full years to fit in the rest....David Bowie, I'mma need you tour, sir.

Do you have any not-even-that-guilty guilty listening pleasures? Did you have any crazy, all the way, seventies' or eighties' crushes on pop sensations? Are you a karaoke-ist? Let's talk!

That's all for today, see you kids back here tomorrow. Til then!

Weekend Finds (Warning: DRESSES LIKE WHOA)

I swear I tried to stay away from estate sales this weekend. I thought-- you know, kid, you deserve a break! Just one or two little days here where you don't have to be out of the house by 8 to hit the sales. Why not relax? Why not sleep in a little? So I did, but wouldn't you know...estate sales found me anyway!

Probably my favorite dress. There's something so thirties'/Jean Harlow as a secretary about it!

I went to over my mom's house on Saturday for an early mother's day celebration, and she mentioned that on her daily walk through the neighborhood that morning, she had seen a little cardboard sign for a yard sale. "When I went up the driveway," she continued, "It turns out it was the people's mother and grandmother had passed away, and it's a whole musty basement full of stuff. Nothing was priced but she was asking a dollar for kitchen pans without lids, and two dollars if they had the lids, and they were really nice." My dad was game to go, so Matthew and I hopped back in the Cube with Pappy in the back seat and headed down the road to give it a look while my mom finished cooking (she prefers to cook for herself and by herself, so this wasn't at all a mean thing on our parts). When we finally located the place, it was indeed a musty, dusty basement, with a middle aged woman, her husband, and her two teenage kids sitting around waiting for people to come in. "Everything's for sale down here...if you like sewing or canning, this is the sale for you!" the woman said. Gr-r-r-eat, I thought, and wandered through the large cement-blocked, low ceilinged basement without much hope of finding anything to write home about.

The color! The patterns!

On a hanging rack were a few pieces of clothes, and I saw some things that I could at least pick up if they were a dollar or two...a pretty blue coat with an ermine collar, and two sixties' shirtwaist dresses. As I walked past the rack, I noticed boxes...and boxes....AND BOXES of brightly colored material. "That must have been what she meant about the sewing," I said to myself, and then realized that they weren't just material...each of those bright patterns belonged to fully-finished garments! A cursory dig-through yielded up dress after dress after dress of fifties' and sixties' handmade, WELL MADE clothes! AAAAAAH! There were probably ten boxes of clothes ranging from the fifties' to the seventies'!

I actually started to get an anxious feeling as the "see how much they are" pile grew higher and higher... there were seventies' dresses, all tab collars and belt embellishments and wild colors. Sixties' shifts in pretty pinks and wild greens. Fifties' (!!) nipped waist dresses with big pockets for clothes pins and grocery lists. When all was said and done, I'd shoved way too many things into one box, and asked her what she wanted for them whole thing. "Well, the dresses were two apiece, but I've been doing $12 a box on the material....so maybe $25 for that box?" the woman from the beginning of the sale replied. OH MY FREAKIN' GOD, ARE YOU FOR REAL? I said in my head. "Ok, that sounds great," I said, trying to poker face but probably looking shady as all hell because my hands were shaking I was so excited as I passed over the bills.

I went home and tried on every...single....dress. 37 of them in all, and I only got the ones that looked like they would fit me! That comes out to sixty-seven cents a dress, people. Above and below are some of the humdingers that I've since laundered and fallen in love with an additional eight or nine times. A few of them were just too big in the bust and shoulders to be wearable at the moment, but I'm hoping I can do something with my limited sewing skills to make them more my speed.

This coat I almost didn't get because I was worried it would be too expensive, there were no mirrors, and I don't always look good in swing coats. Um, what a BIG MISTAKE that would have been. Glamour itself, this coat! It's missing one of the buttons, but I'll live with that small flaw:

One of the things that surprised me was how gorgeous all the this-length dresses were on me! Because they were a little bit bigger, I was able to belt them and not be crushed by the terminal disappointment of trying on an impossibly small vintage dress from that era and realizing there's no way to make it work. Most of these, with a cinched waist, became ready to wear!

Ditto on these drop waisted dresses, which I usually can't even wear because my shape is just not up-and-down enough to make them look good. These two are great!

So! That's seven of them plus the coat...there's another thirty neatly folded in a box in my laundry room right now. Could you die? Could you ACTUALLY die about what an amazing score this was. I had been to the Goodwills in Gallatin, Rivergate, and Hendersonville the weekend before and spent a good thirty minutes upon returning home, on the phone, BEMOANING the fact that I hadn't seen more than one or two things older than the late eighties', and what am I going to do about my clothes and woe-is-me... my luck turned around in a big way, peeps!

Have you ever had a score like this that just blew your expectations out of the water? Any good or bad luck at the sales this weekend? Which of the above dresses do you like the best? I am a happy little clam, that's for dang sure!

Expect to see more of these if you see me in person any time in the near future-- the hits keep coming! Have a good Monday, and I'll see you back here tomorrow!

Photo Friday: Well, I'll Be a Monkey's....Aunt? Edition

Good morning!

I have to hit a doctor's appointment in just a little bit, so this Photo Friday entry will be brief. I know how much you like me yammering on and on about photos whose provenance is a mystery to me, but time waits for no man (or girl...blogger...you get the idea)! Take a look at today's very special photo:

There you have it. A 1920's woman, possibly early thirties', dressed in all her finery....corsage, hat, some type of fur wrap on her arm....and cradling very precious cargo indeed. People...where on EARTH did she get that  baby chimpanzee?!

I've seen a lot of photos where people are posed astride taxidermied bucking broncos at a dude ranch, children are riding taxidermied alligators at an alligator farm, or vacationers are standing next to live bears and tigers and such in cages at gas stations on major tourist routes (I think Rae probably has one of each  of these in her marvelous photo collection!). What I haven't seen is an almost one hundred year old photo of one of my relatives standing in a lush, pastoral Tennessee setting, inexplicably holding a baby chimp! Something about the time, the setting, and the utter lack of context makes this a humdinger of a find if ever I've seen one!

You could imagine, curiosity peaked, that I went back to the source of these family photo scans. I asked my dad, who has asked his Uncle James when returning these photos from said scanning, who the woman was and what the circumstances were of this strange encounter. Know that my dad is GREAT storyteller from a long line of great storytellers, and the exchange went down like this:

Dad: So, I was looking through these old photos, and I happened across this one [profers photo]. Any idea about when or where the photo was taken, or who it is holding the chimpanzee?
James: ChimpanZEE? What chimpanzee? [takes photo, takes a long look at it] Well, you know, the thing about that picture is....[taking his sweet, slow Southern time about it] that there's a very interesting story  behind it. [Long pause, as he continues to study the image]. Only problem is I have NO idea what that story may be.
Dad: You don't know who the woman in the photo is?
James: Not a clue.

Anyone else in the human world would have just gone "Nope, don't know" right off the bat, but there's something about the beautiful framing of his lack of information on this photo that makes me treasure that dialogue as much as if he'd had a real yarnspin about what had happened before the shutter clicked.

What do you think? Have you seen any domestic photos of people holding monkeys in a non-zoo setting in your vintage travels and travails? Have any just UNEXPLAINED, unsolved mysteries of a photograph in your family scrapbook? Let's talk!

I gotta get going, but I'll see you guys on Monday! Have a great weekend, and meet right back here for more vintage mania next week. Til then.

Tramp (Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, 1967)

Good morning!

Matthew and I were sitting around last night after a fun dinner date at Las Maracas with the Huberts (alias, the best people to go get margaritas with), when the subject of Otis Redding came up. I had had "Just One More Day" inexplicably stuck in my head all day, and started running through a string of Youtube videos to illustrate to Matthew some of the finer points of the Stax recording artist's catalog. He is a good sport, and I am a complete nerd when it comes to music I like. Two things that go great together-- me, pontificating on sixties' soul and me, four frozen margaritas into a tequila buzz. At any rate, some of my favorite FAVORITE favorite Otis Redding songs come from this album, King and Queen, which the Big O cut in 1967 alongside fellow soul singer Carla Thomas:

A Youtube search brought up the expected list of videos with still photos of the singer, or a stationary still of the album cover, when what to my wondering eyes should appear....they did a promo video of the song "Tramp"?! Featuring Otis Redding interpreting the lyrics relatively literally? It was like Christmas came early, kids. Take a look:

OH. MY. GOD. Is that Otis in Liberty Overalls with a freakin' hoe in one hand and an expression like, "You got me all wrong?" on his open face? It is. The song, originally recorded by Lowell Fulson, is adapted for the  Otis/Carla duet as a rollicking back and forth insult slingin' session, in which Carla thinks Otis's backwoods ways are a detriment to the future of their relationship, and Otis, dissimilarly, thinks them a strength. 

Verse the first:

Carla: Tramp.

Otis: What you call me?

Carla: Tramp.

Otis: Oh you did?

Carla: You don´t wear continental clothes or stetson hats.

Otis: But I tell you one doggone thing.

It makes me feel good to know one thing.

I know I am a lover.

Carla: A matter of opinion, baby.

Otis: That´s all right. Mama was.

Carla: So?

Otis: Papa, too. And I know little child. Love is all I know to do.

I'm a big fan of the story song, or the spoken word song, or the "you're no good" song, so you can see where this marvelous track intersects on a few fault lines of "fabulous". The album itself is uneven, with "Lovey Dovey" and "Knock on Wood" being the other two standout tracks, but with those three? Heck, it was well worth the price of the record itself!

I almost die every time he hits this exchange, near the end:


Carla: You´re a rat and a tramp. You know what, Otis.
I don´t care what you say, you´re still a tramp.
Otis: What?
Carla: That´s right. You haven´t even got a fat bank roll in your pocket,
you probably haven´t even got twenty five cents.
Otis: I got six Cadillacs, five Lincolns, four Fords, six Mercurys,
three T-birds, Mustang - ooh I´m a lover.

And sure enough, in the video, Otis makes a pretty good case for the things he has, suddenly divested of his work clothes and clad in a slick green suit and tie. He points out the line of cars mentioned in the song, an airplane, and, possibly my favorite, his name on the office wall of Redwal Music, his music offices.

Could he be cuter? Could the idea for the video be more straightforward? In these pre-MTV days, a promotional video like this might play at the beginning of a movie reel in theaters, or feature prominently on a dance band show or variety show, to further sales of the recently released recording. Here's the Soul Brothers Top 20 from the June 22, 1967 issue of Jet magazine, showing the popular charting of "Tramp" at #12:

Things I would like to mention: this list would make a wonderful mix cd, completely intact, as is...and why is there band called "Dyke and the Blazers"? I'm going to have to look into this and get back to you. I know all about "Funky Kingston"...not sure about "Funky Broadway" (Side note: This title was apparently also recorded by the wicked Wilson Pickett...I'm still suspicious).

Anyway! It's a great video, and if you haven't seen it, you should watch the clip in its entirety on Youtube.


Fun facts about the album:

• Isaac Hayes, of "Shaft" and South Park fame, plays keyboards on the King and Queen record. Huh! I think I knew he played piano, but not on this record, so wow.
• Carla Thomas is the daughter of Rufus Thomas, Sun Records pioneer who originally cut the future Elvis hit "Hound Dog". My favorite song of his is "Tiger Man". Soul royalty!
• Future US ambassador to Japan and fellow Tennessean Sen. Howard Baker wrote the liner notes to their album. I can't, in spite of much googling, find out what those liner notes are nor why he wrote them, and my copy of the record's at home. Who knows!
• My beloved Salt n Pepa use the sample of Carla saying "Tramp" in their song of the same name. Get it, SnP! You go on and get it!

Are you a soul fan? What did you think of the "Tramp" video and the song itself? What Motown or Stax record music or recording artists really resonate with you?

IT'S THURSDAY, WE'RE ALMOST TO FRIDAY! I'll see you tomorrow with some more family snaps for Photo Friday. Til then!