Beauty Rules The World

But of course when she is doing that she – and you, the reader – should be “well corseted.” This ad for “C/B a la Spirite” Corsets is from the early 1920s. Heaven only knows what they meant, calling it that. Maybe the “spirites” are those little ghostly ladies who are emanating from the lady’s armpit like ectoplasm from a Victorian medium.

I think that this lady looks a lot like a young Margaret Dumont (born Daisy Juliette Baker in Brooklyn in 1882). Margaret Dumont was the wonderful actress who played straight man (or rather straight woman) to Groucho in most of the Marx Brothers movies, starting with The Cocoanuts in 1929.

Miss Dumont was nothing if not well corseted. Having said that it was rather hard to rule the world – or have control over anything much – with Groucho  (and Chico and Harpo) running around causing havoc. I do not include Zeppo, who was the straight man (usually Groucho’s secretary or something), who was generally quite easy to boss around.

Here is a bit of Groucho and Margaret in Duck Soup (1933) and a Margaret Dumont tribute here.

And that’s my Vintage Thingie for this week! For more Vintage Thingies I direct you as always to the Apron Queen.

The Secret Lives of Salads

A nice thing to do, ganging up on a defenseless head of iceberg lettuce like that!

Here we have the salad dressings, possibly the ones who starred in this ad, completely contradicting the copy. One bottle might be “a nice thing” for a lettuce. At least they would be fairly matched. But twelve against one, that’s just not fair.

I am especially wary of the ones named Casino and Salad Secret. I think they are the gang leaders.

The lettuce is clearly trying to roll away. I mean, wouldn’t you? If you were a lettuce.