Homeward Bound

Well, people, I lived! 

Thanks to the Blogger app for iPhone, Im currently hen pecking this post out from the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica! I managed to physically restrain myself from blowing money on Dior 999 lipstick in the duty free store (but BARELY) and am now elbow to elbow with the newly minted husband at the gate. We have a six hour layover in Miami (0_o) but after that, our bronzed little selves are on our way back to Music City, USA! We had a wonderful time but I can't say Im not looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight!!

Can't wait to tell you all about the wedding and the honeymoon, but for now, here's a little "proof of life" from the airport. :) Tune in soon for all the news that's fit to print! Til then.

Rerun Week: Photo Friday: Happy Birthday to Sonny Edition

Hey guys! I'm on vacation in Jamaica, but She Was a Bird never sleeps! I'll be rerunning some posts from months and years past that are just as fresh as when I wrote 'em! I hope you are entertained (possibly for the first, possibly for the second) time by these archived items! Next week I'll be back with news from the sunny Caribbean! Take care!

This post originally appeared on the blog August 10, 2012:

Good morning!! This post is going to have to do double duty as a Photo Friday and a Photo Monday...my birthday's right at the tip of next week, and I'm taking the day off from my hectic blogging schedule to laze around and watch Unsolved Mysteries/eat SweetTarts/have Bab indulge in my every whim/do the birthday thing. But before I leave you for the long weekend, here's a mid-century, birthday (!!) themed post from the Doris and Ray collection.

You guys met Sonny last week, right? Sonny is Doris's son from her first marriage. As I said previously, there are lo-o-o-ots of photos of Sonny. I found this when going through an album, and was just swept away on a tide of enthusiasm over all the little fifties' teenager things going on here, right out of American Bandstand! Take a look, and then we'll do some closeups. Click on the big photo for an even BIGGER photo and do your own i-spying!

Fourteen party guests is not a bad turnout for a fifteenth birthday party! I went to all the trouble of closing up on the cake to count the candles, and then realized, unlike his mother, who habitually leaves photos completely captionless, Sonny did a very good job of labeling not only who was in the picture but what the occasion was. Isn't it hard to believe a lot of these kids are in the fourteen-to-fifteen year old range? THE CLOTHES MAKE THEM LOOK SO GROWN UP. Also, look how cute their first names are: 

I also love the flourish under the event description, and the fact that Sonny has misspelled "occasion" as "occasition", which as far as I'm concerned, should be a word. Let's take some closeups of our Tiger Beat crowd here to look at details:

Here's the birthday guy with his best girlfriend, Lucille (right). Lucille would continue to figure large in group gatherings and formal occasions, but Sonny ended up marrying someone named Diane in the late sixties'. Too bad! What a cute couple! Dallene, the girl on his left, looks like an exact double for a young Betty Draper. Look at her charm bracelet! Her perfect hair! Her matching skirt-and-collar twinset! If I were Sonny's girlfriend, I might have told him not to invite her just on principle. Also, check out the carefree, laughing head floating between Dallene and Sonny. That's Richard, and I kind of love him already.

Here are two cases of fifties' ladies' eyewear. See the girl in the middle has someone's ring around her neck, just like the Elvis song? Looking at this picture and listening to that song is really fun, by the way. I'm doing it right now. The guy standing behind the two bespectacle junior misses has an embroidered chess pieces pattern on his shirt, a clothes choice I stand by 100%.

I love the incidence of felt circle skirts in this photo, as well! The girl on the right is cute with her de rigeur neckerchief (remind me to get into that fashion statement), wide white belt, and is that a brooch attached to the waist? Do you think it came with the belt? At any rate, it's super cute. I noticed that in spite of the girls' being dressed to the hilt, most boys are wearing jeans with their button-up shirts. Is this fifties' teenager casual? They still look more professional than a lot of people I've seen at work.

OH MAH GAWD, did you notice everyone's shoes? PENNY LOAFERS, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE. And bobby sox! There's one rebel wearing saddle shoes (next to Sonny on the right, check out the group picture in closeup to see), but everyone else is doing this, and doing this, and doing it well.

I thought this was the same photo, but it's actually a "for safety" second shot, I guess in case someone was blinking in the first one. Well, someone wasn't blinking, but someone was DEFINITELY doing something different. Can you tell what it is before I spill the beans?

IT'S STEVE! Steve, you goon! What are you doing in this picture?!

Look how cute and serious he looks in the first one, and how utterly deranged he looks in the second one. I love it! I love it to pieces! Way to liven up the party, Steve.

Anyway, I have to scat for the weekend festivities, but I will see you guys on Tuesday, when I'll be all of one year older!

Have a good long weekend, I'll catch you on the other side!

Rerun Week: Introducing Fabric Collage (1969)

Hey guys! I'm on vacation in Jamaica, but She Was a Bird never sleeps! I'll be rerunning some posts from months and years past that are just as fresh as when I wrote 'em! I hope you are entertained (possibly for the first, possibly for the second) time by these archived items! Next week I'll be back with news from the sunny Caribbean! Take care!

This post originally appeared on the blog August 10, 2012:

I was running paging slips yesterday for some rogue titles that had eluded the initial morning runs whennnnn... I came across a book that contains the above illustration. Wait a minute. Fabric collage? Check. Done by English schoolgirls? Check. Of Bonnie and Clyde? Oh, you'd better believe it! Note the waylaid officer of the law, sprawled to collage stage right. Note the featureless faces of the famed bandit couple, her cigar, his tommy gun. Really? We spent a lot of time doing still lives of sneakers in my middle school art class, but grisly tableaux of 30's gangsters in felt? Definitely a class on which I would have liked to have sat in.

The odds that two sixties' instructional manuals on non-paper-based collage work should catch my eye without any prior hunting and pecking for them seem small, but, as you'll see in this post, are not entirely unheard of. Introducing Fabric Collage, by Margaret Connor, was shelved two books down from a book I was actually looking for.

Inside, the book showcases the work Ms. Connor did with the "Needlecraft Department of a Leeds Secondary School". What a class! What a department! Ms. Connor's accomplishments include membership in the Embroider's Guild, several city exhibitions both with and without her pupils, and a collection of poetry (she is large, she contains multitudes). While the writing style can be saltine-cracker-dry, I have to give the lady her due in that she and these kids have created some ne-e-e-e-at fabric pictures.

First off, rock concerts. Popular subject for obvious reasons.

Probably the best illustration in the book. I mean, wait. These are monkeys...dressed as THE MONKEES. Doing some kind of deranged frug. Two pages of text are dedicated to describing the creative process involved in making this dream a reality. "An imaginative girl...suggested that a good picture might be made by portraying the Monkees (a pop group enjoying great publicity at that time), quite literally, as monkeys!" Ms. Connor goes on extol the virtues of this thirteen year old fabric maverick, slowly piecing together the components and making design decisions. "Contrary to the practice of the Monkees group who all dress the same in shows, these fabric monkeys were arrayed in different shirts." It's the little things that count.

In the same vein, this piece is called "Dance Hall". "Two girls, who were inseparable companions...wished to interpret a scene from the interior of the local dance hall...[The girls describe the outline of the piece, what's in it, etc] The writer secretly quailed at the thought of the girls trying to represent all this in fabrics, but respected their ability, and did not wish to dissuade them from the attempt." Yes, the whole book is written like this. I thought at first the authoress was "quailing" (a word I have GOT to use more often) at the rock-show setting, before realizing she was referring to the level of difficulty making all the separate components of the girls' vision come off. So maybe she hates the Merseybeat. Or maybe she's just into simple, straightforward design ethic. In either case, I think the girls in question acquitted themselves of their task admirably. The band looks great! The dance floor! What about the dance to the far right who appear to be wearing a bikini with a sheer net dress over it?! Daring, gals. Daring.

From the text: "An amusing picture called 'The Surprise Catch' [above] was created by two fourteen year old girls, and showed a surprised-looking mermaids with sequinned tail, being caught in a net by an equally surprised-looking fisherman!" True, true. I was surprised at the nearing PG-13 amount of nudity in this collage, but I so love the mermaid's Twiggy eyes and long hair that I'll put away my prudishness for now and enjoy her Dollybird looks.

Underwater scenes seem to be popular-- here's a pair of fish. Doesn't the pattern on the fabric for the lower one look kind of like scales?

What! What is happening here! Titled "Underwater Adventure", this piece has a skin diver stabbing what looks like a beluga whale/shark hybrid as his companion exits a sunken ship to the right. More like..."Underwater Horror Nightmare With Death". It took me a minute to realize that the item in his hand is indeed a knife, and he is doing violence upon the major marine life in front of him. Definitely one of the pages I wish was in color, this is what Ms. Connor would no doubt call an "imagination collage". Jeepers!

The comparatively safe subject matter of these pictures include a elven domestic scene and a trip to whatever the British equivalent of a state fair is. A carnival? A fete? I like that in the first picture, the elves keep an elf-sized snail as a pet. Nice to know the minute scale we're talking about here.

Ms. Connor's own work, seen here above and below, really does use incredible detail to get across the effect of the patterns in the design scheme. I love the city scape above and below, with is cooling towers and smoke stacks blowing breathy plumes of smoke into the skyline above the plaid accented buildings.

The picture below reminds me of William H. Johnson or other Harlem Renaissance painters' figural use of simple everyday life scenes of housework or play. The muslin background gives the picture an interesting texture, and can you see all the little labels piled up as the foundation? Killer.

I promise my next post will be less Girl Scout craft inspired...or will it? :)

Found a few trinkets this last weekend at estate sales and goodwills...will try after the weekend's haul to combine lots and share some pictures. Til then!

Postscript: The authoress of this book took a moment to comment on this post when it originally ran in 2010! You can see her comments here. Still one of the highlights of my career as a blogger. :)

Rerun Week: Homemaking for Teenagers (1958)

Hey guys! I'm on vacation in Jamaica, but She Was a Bird never sleeps! I'll be rerunning some posts from months and years past that are just as fresh as when I wrote 'em! I hope you are entertained (possibly for the first, possibly for the second) time by these archived items! Next week I'll be back with news from the sunny Caribbean! Take care!

This post originally appeared on the blog December 9, 2010

My regular bus driver and Lou Reed's drug dealer have more in common than you would initially think. At 7:50 this morning, the scheduled time for the rapid transit bus to be reaching my stop, I was thinking of the lyrics "He's never early, he's always late-- first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait" and stamping my poor little feet for warmth. Cursing the world. Nineteen degrees, Nashville? Seriously? When the bus did come, I hopped aboard in my twenty layer, Stay-Puft shaped winter clothes, found an unoccupied seat near the middle, and cracked open a delicious slice of 1958 homemaking for the ride into town.

The above copy of Homemaking for Teenagers (Book 2! Intermediate level!) was first spotted peeking out from a stack of 60's religious tracts at an estate sale off Gallatin Road two weeks ago. The man running the sale was trying to hard sell me a pair of ceramic cast Persian cats; I, not interested in said cats, was nevertheless more than happy to take this and a 20's Meal Planning for Families book off his hands (I think $1 for both of them?), and did.

One full, mostly color illustrated, chapter is devoted to the art of interior design. Be still my beating heart. Things of note-- the knobby texture of the goldenrod sectional and the tiny figural statuettes at the upper left, the faux Picasso blue period and the cobalt, plum, and yellow color scheme at the upper right, the decidedly un-Christmasy muted green and red combination to the lower left. I know these are showroom examples, and actual household snapshots may differ, but I'm always impressed with mid century design's spareness. Estate sales have spoiled me rotten, in the sense that I'm able to buy, even on my limited, mid-twenties single girl income, vast quantities of vintage knickknacks for a microscopic fraction of their original price. Thus, I am compelled to drag home backseats full of Avon bottles, ashtrays, and wall hangings in vast quantities, disregarding the "less is more" with gleeful abandon. Ah well. To each their own. It's nice to see, at least in photographs, that some can use even a modicum of nest-feathering restraint and only put into place a dozen decorative items, instead of a gross.

Speaking of decorative items, I am FASCINATED by the number of primitive art items in these examples. The term sometimes refers to weathered farmhouse kitchen tables; I'm talking about the cave drawings of Lascaux-esque wall art in the very top photo, next to the cover of the text, or the weird, semi-banjo looking musical instrument in the photo to the lower left. Could you just buy these items at Sears back in the day? The caption in the book refers to the aforementioned item as "the old musical instrument"...and this is in no way a singular, bizarre item to have in one's home, laying around? Sure, everybody has a couple of zithers and balalaikas lying around in the attic, why not put them to use? I do relish the idea of walking into the art department of Sears circa 1962, sidling past the "pricy" Vincent Price Collection, and ordering a knockoff cave painting in my choice of frames.

Additionally, to the right-- I love shuffleboards on rec room floors. It would be like having a crusie ship's deck in your own basement. Maybe someday I'll live in a house with a basement and make an attempt at one, they seem tops.

The last group of items from the textbook that I'd like to address is posted below from a section on "good taste in furniture".



And I quote: "Can you tell at a glance which of the two davenports shown above is in good taste?...If you are not sure, you might say to yourself, 'Which davenport would I rather see in my living room day after day?' Certainly you would tire of the one with the awkward shape and bulging curves...This type of design, which some would call 'cute' or 'different', should be avoided. It is neither beautiful nor truly useful."

OUCH, PEOPLE. The authoresses' scathing indictment of the second davenport's "stylelessness" (which goes on for several more sentences, which I have spared you) is wro-o-o-o-o-ong. Well, maybe not entirely wrong, but good night, which of these would people rather have in their homes today? The former, in a pretty, knobby textured turquoise, similar to the goldenrod colored one at the beginning of this post, might do all right at an estate sale. But the second one? In a nice cherry red? Shut the door, buddy. You are not getting any kind of deal on that guy, he's collectible. And you can see why! Where the women's complaint of design might have been valid to a contemporary audience, you won't see any vintage collectors levying similar criticisms to what seems like a fun, kitsch, NEW idea of a design. I can see where the course is trying to protect its student from being stuck with an ultra-50's couch that has to last one for more than the three or four years in the 50's in which that style is ACTUALLY the living edge of home furnishings, but honestly, I think it the design far outpaces its contemporaries or successors. If you love a style, you should ride it out.



Ditto on the chairs above. The text stresses "usefulness" and "classic lines"... but when a woman buys shoes, are they always oxford laceups? Or do you need a few pairs ankle straps wedges that make no sense on a practicality level, but gee they're knockouts. I think the same should apply to furniture choice. Otherwise, we would all have office furniture for our homes.



I'm not even going to tell you which of the above lamps is my favorite. Is that a man painted on the side of the lamp? IS THAT A MAN...? I love to think about what colors each of these will be.

Anyway, that's all I took away from the book in a lunch hour and a bus ride here... I'll update you on more ways to make your 1958 household the most efficient and harmonious household it can be, as I delve further into the chapters. Go ahead, click on any of the pictures above for a larger, more generous view of these rooms and schemes.

Rerun Week: Jinx Falkenberg (1940's)

Hey guys! I'm on vacation in Jamaica, but She Was a Bird never sleeps! I'll be rerunning some posts from months and years past that are just as fresh as when I wrote 'em! I hope you are entertained (possibly for the first, possibly for the second) time by these archived items! Next week I'll be back with news from the sunny Caribbean! Take care!

This post originally appeared on the blog June 19, 2012

Good morning! I think I've told you on several occasions about the wild abandon with which I gorge myself on library materials. It's not my fault! Working in a library for me is a little like a chocoholic getting a gig at Godiva, but I do have my moments of responsible book-loan-ership from time to time. Case in point, yesterday, returning to work after my first day back from vacation, I realized I had not one, not two, but THREE books due back to Interlibrary Loan! Sadly, I never got a chance to read Harper's Bazaar Beauty Book (1959) or Here's to You, Miss Teen (1960), but I was bound and determined to read the third of the three right then, right there,  to justify all the trouble the good people in the ILL department spent on my behalf, borrowing the book from the University of Georgia's library collection. And thanks to a slo-o-o-o-ow shift at the telephone reference desk, I was able to start and finish Jinx, by Jinx Falkenburg, all at one go!

Could she be cuter?

Jinx Falkenburg was a cover girl and USO tour favorite from the late thirties' through the end of WWII. Born in Barcelona in 1919 to a pair of American expats, Eugenia "Jinx" Lincoln Falkenburg spent a peripatetic youth in several Spanish speaking countries, winning championship level titles in youth swimming and tennis in Chile, before her family set down roots in Southern California in the early 1930's. Through her continued interest in tennis, she and her family became friends with the movie star likes of a recently-arrived and completely-unknown Errol Flynn and Paulette Goddard (of Chaplin movie fame). With her athletic, 5'8'' figure and flashing blue eyes, it wasn't long before she was discovered by photographer Paul Hesse while lunching with a friend at the MGM commissary. Almost accidentally, by her own account, Jinx became a top cover girl overnight (you can see an example of the forties' magazine cover style I'm talking, complete with Jinx and a red white and blue color scheme, here). She was named the first "Miss Rheingold" for the brewery company in 1940 and appeared on billboards all over America. But don't think it was all champagne and caviar...on one of her first big modeling shoots, she fell thirty-two feet through a roof and landed in the hospital for a month! Good Lord! The whole of this is told in such a whirlwind of conversational prose that I'm still not sure of the chronology, but you get the idea. All this happens in the period in the book you could call "B.T.": "before Tex".

(Source)

Just as she was starting work in her first Broadway play, an Al Jolson production in which she had a few walk-on lines as a cowgirl, Jinx met newspaperman Tex McCrary, and against alllllll the advice of friends, fell head over heels in love. And Lord can you tell it by the way she writes it! For fifty pages, there's little mention of anything besides the back and forth struggle of love's labour lost. They spent the next year or so trying to decide whether or not they would get married before McCrary joined the service. Still noncommital, Tex went off to fight in the war and insisted they should see other people. Jinx pulled her pretty hair and despaired for two years, had a part in the Rita Hayworth movie Cover Girl, then decided to support the troops in a USO tour that included actor Pat O'Brien.

Jinx getting off the plane in the Chinese leg of the journey. LOOK. AT. HER NAME. ON THE DRESS.

Jinx and Tex eventually met up in Cairo in the last year of the war ("The sequined dress, ermine coat, and embroidered Indian mules were absolutely the best I coudl salvage from my war-torn CBI wardrobe. For every sequin there was supposed to be on the dress, three were missing," she begins the chapter) The newly rekindled couple decided "the very next day we see each other, we'll be married", and six months later to the day, Jinx became Mrs. John Reagan McCrary. How sweet! The moon over Cairo! The sequined dress! The romantic semi-engagement!

Tex and the airplane from which he did all kind of crazy parachute missions (Source)

Jinx, in one of her habitual crop-top and skirt ensembles, re-enacts the moment Tex called to tell her he was home and they were getting married for Life magazine.

The happy couple-- she's got flowers in her hair, he's got an eyepatch. From Life magazine.

Tex and Jinx went on to a civilian life that included pioneering work in helping create the talk-show-with-interviews genre. In 1946, they started on radio with the waggishly titled "Hi, Jinx!". By the early fifties', their husband-and-wife team could be heard on two radio shows, a television show, and a weekly newspaper column. Ain't that success? Here's an ad featuring the first of their two sons (Paddy is pictured below, while Kevin would come along a year or two later) and a wide array of gorgeous early 1950's ties. Can you see the print on Jinx's dress is made up of tiny sailing flags? She always dresses LOUD but it's adorable on her:

 

The autobiography stops in 1951 with the line "To be Continued (that's how we feel about everything we do" and information I could find online about the McCrarys later lives was sparse. They seem to have separated sometime in the 80's but did not divorce, passing away almost exactly a month apart from each other in 2003. All in all, I can't say I was disappointed with the book, but I sure wish there was a companion volume so I could see what happened in the next couple decades of their lives. Jinx herself is just too magnetic of a personality to have faded into the kind of obscurity. I'll have to do some magazine digging here in the Periodicals department and tell you what I can dig up.

A brooch Jinx wore for her 1941 Life cover story

Do you have any way-too-unfairly-obscure forties' celebrities you wish were more well known? You know I do!! See you tomorrow.

PS: Man alive! After writing two thirds of this post, I found out that the youngest McCrary son, Kevin, was recently featured on an episode of Hoarders! As in last year! How sad. Has anybody seen this episode? Some screen captures here.

Further reading:
See an exhaustive timeline of events in Jinx's life here
See a Miss Rheingold ad featuring Jinx here
See a joint obit written by their old "fact checker" who now works for Time magazine here

Rerun Week: Weekly World News (1981)

Hey guys! I'm on vacation in Jamaica, but She Was a Bird never sleeps! I'll be rerunning some posts from months and years past that are just as fresh as when I wrote 'em! I hope you are entertained (possibly for the first, possibly for the second) time by these archived items! Next week I'll be back with news from the sunny Caribbean! Take care!

This post originally appeared on the blog Thursday, November 15, 2012.

Good morning!

Well, the Roky show last night was just extraordinary-- he even played "Two Headed Dog" as an encore! Standing in the crow's nest style balcony area of Exit/In, the sound of his backup band was thundering and his changed-but-still-magnetic voice was the very focus of the whole show.Between the weirdo strange-o imagery in his song lyrics and the utter, devastating lack of sleep I've had as a result of the show getting out around midnight, I think it's possible that I'm in exactly the right frame of mind to be just plain delighted that I found out Weekly World News is available in Google Books from 1981- 2005. It's just what I needed to get myself through this coffee-IV-drip of a morning shift.

Behold! The TRUE news:

From the opening line of this article: "Only a miraculous twist of fate prevented nature from creating humans in the form of hideous green lizardmen uglier than any space alien, a famous scientist believes." I love that they used his own picture, the scientist's, to compare with the model of a hideous lizard he's concocted. PLEASE, TELL ME MORE, WWN.

I remember when I was a kid, Weekly World News was about the closest the inquiring young mind of a child eccentric still had to Creepy or Weird Tales, just in People magazine rather than comic book format. Much like comic books, I fostered no dim hope that my parents would ever give me money to buy the trash lit glaring at me in newsprint from the magazine stand near the checkout at Kroger's, but by golly, it couldn't keep me from speed reading the best of it when we were trapped in line behind someone with forty two items in the fifteen or less aisle (what was life like before self-checkouts? Do I even remember?).

Looking back on these snippets from 1981 (about a decade before my peak curiosity in news of the bizarre), they are much unchanged from what I remember! The kind of articles a precocious nine year old would know had no basis in reality, but couched in just enough faux science to plant a tiny seed of doubt. "Why DON'T we look like horrible lizards? What do you think a man-sized big bird would eat?"

UFO's seem an almost quaint concern in 2012 but for the very most conspiracy theory minded of us-- I'm much more worried about global warming causing catastrophic weather events that will destroy the planet than extraterrestrials using humans for food. And yet! UFO's were a real concern to the 1981 readership of this publication. Look at the absolutely awful "artist's impression of the incident" above, and the image of an alien from a "suppressed C.IA. document" below, and tell me this is not entertainment at its finest:

I included this clipping just because I love that the advice columnist is called "Babs" (so close to Bab! Or Barbra Streisand!) and has hair that I love. But while we're at it, why are you sixteen years old dating a guy in the Navy? Don't you have to be ((looks it up))...ok, the minimum age to join the Navy is 17, but there's no way I'm making a three and a half year commitment to my teenage sweetheart when he's going to be sailing all over the world, to exotic isles, on a boat with a bunch of other dudes who will probably be daring him to French kiss Tahitian women (I think all of my knowledge of the Navy could be expressed in one short montage of my memories of From Here to Eternity, which is set in Hawaii but I don't think even involves the Navy...so my apologies to any service men who are reading).

This clipping reminds me of all the times my grandma would be like, "No, it's TRUE! I read it in a magazine! They have glasses for blind people to be able to see! So there's no reason anyone should be blind anymore. I guess unless they just don't know about the glasses...but someone should tell them!" And my mom would rejoin, "I don't think you read that in a news magazine. What kind of magazine did you read that in? Are you even sure you read it?" Cue my grandmother reaching for a Rubbermaid tote in which she kept newspaper clippings she wanted to read at a future date (there's a touch of hoarding in every branch of my family tree... I was obviously doomed).

Look. At the guy. In the background. I think he's supposed to be her also-slimming-boyfriend, but he just looks like someone from Dateline Investigates to me. And NOT the anchor reporting the story.

The kind of story I live for. Gimme the words "death-like coma" and "screaming in stark terror" and I'm in.

A montage of pieces from the rest of the issue, including a man with a robot dog, and not one but TWO stories about ghosts:

I think the guy in the lower right hand corner was selling horoscopes by mail. I want you to look deeply into his haircut, beard, glasses, and MONDO OVERSIZED BOW TIE before you pass judgement.

Do you love trashy news? Do you secretly or unsecretly miss tv shows like Inside Edition and Hard Copy (are either one of those still on air)? Do you remember any crazy headlines like "Bat Boy" from back in the not-really-news-news-magazine day? Share, share!

If you want the real deal experience all to yourself, here's a link to the original issue. Enjoy!

I gotta go put my head down on the desk and pray that this day ends swiftly. Keep a good thought for me, and I'll see you guys tomorrow for Photo Friday!