A Piano In the Bathroom

I’m bringing someone to Vintage Thingies Thursday (I trust that the Apron Queen will not mind). This someone certainly qualifies as a Vintage Thingie. And she’s British – she loves tea parties.

I promise I will make sure that she doesn’t get too bossy, and she tells me that she has left that Family Health Soap at home. If she has got some, we will just ask her to do the washing up. She likes doing that, as you will see.

Meet the prototype for Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet), star of the 1980s Britcom Keeping Up Appearances, Mrs. Cheery.

Well, Mrs. Cheery (and what a splendid name that is) – if I was one of your moving men, putting the piano in the bathroom would only be the beginning. And by the way, isn’t that a funny way to indirectly brag about the size of your new bathroom?

That’s not the only funny business in this 1940s ad from the British Woman’s Weekly:

1. Why is “moving” in quotations? Is this a code word for something else that the Cheery family is doing? And if so, why does it involve moving men and furniture (and, of course, the piano).

2. What in the world is Mrs. Cheery holding – it looks like some sort of frightening garden tool. And look at that terrifying smile.

3. Why didn’t she sit down for eight hours? I know. She was too busy getting in the way of the movers, barking orders and complaining about dirty hands.

4. She makes the men wash up with her wretched Family Health soap after they are done, and everyone else too. Now I realize, having moved several times, that one does like to wash up afterwards. But I have never forced the movers to scrub up before they leave.

She probably tipped them, if they got any tip at all, with a bar of Family Health Toilet Soap. That sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, but it has a hygeinic wrapper! And antiseptic lather too – how refreshing is that!

And after the now-cleansed and purified men depart, she can give the baby grand a nice bath with it.

Spoon Foods and Agi-Tumbling Action

Betty Furness does not want to give up those “luscious soft foods” – otherwise known as spoon foods. Well, they are luscious, after all. And that is one word that does not spring to mind when one thinks of walnuts.

BUT! Walnuts are really good for your teeth. Especially if you crack them open like a squirrel. And if you add them to spoon foods, it magically transforms them. You can rediscover “the lost art of chewing.”

The lost art of chewing? Since when is chomping on a piece of food equated with (say) building the Great Pyramids, or cathedral-building – or even towel origami?

Still, the threat of “flabby gums and tooth decay” is unsettling enough to send one off to buy Diamond Walnuts in a hurry. I get the tooth decay thing, because really, if you are eating nothing but custard and pudding (even though today is National Vanilla Pudding Day, which is a good excuse) I guess your teeth will not be happy. Nor will your gums be. But flabby gums? Flabby? This is such a bizarre image. I am trying to imagine it.

Betty Furness was an actress (one of her more famous movies was Swing Time in 1936 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and appeared in the 1940s and 1950s in Westinghouse commercials. Her most notable Westinghouse commercial was the one where the fridge door didn’t open – only it was another actress in that ad, not Betty. But people think it was Betty, so she gets all the glory out of it, so to speak.

Here is a 1953 Westinghouse commercial featuring Betty and the amazing Westinghouse laundromat with “agi-tumble action.” Which sounds like a good description of a raging headache to me, but whatever, as long as the clothes get clean. And from the look of how happy Betty is with her soft foods, she is probably going to need plenty of agi-tumbling to get those movie-star dresses clean.

Advertisement at top is from the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1934.

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