Big Brother & the Curtain Company

But I don’t get emotional about curtains! Honestly, I don’t think it ever occurred to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I like curtains. They can be very nice. Although we really just have mini blinds. Not because I am overwrought about curtains in any way. It’s just that the blinds are enough.

Once I tacked up an Indian bedspread over the front window, back in grad school. That made a pretty good curtain. I felt fine about it.

Why do they think I might get emotional about curtains but not about curtain track?

Because curtain track can be sort of annoying. I made curtains once, and it was very tough trying to hang them up and get them in the track thingie. I am not much good with sewing and crafty stuff, I admit it. It really isn’t my thing.

So I was a little bit annoyed. That is not the same as emotional. I mean, I wasn’t getting all weepy and dramatic and tearing the curtains down and so on.

I cursed a fair bit and then I did the best I could.

After which I got on with my life.

Having said all that – this guy looks like he might get a bit emotional about curtains. You don’t think he’s the guy in 1984 – Cyril Cusack played him in the 1984 movie – whose old-guy disguise is given away by his black eyebrows. He owns the bookshop where Winston and Julia meet secretly – Mr. Charrington is his name. Seems like a nice old guy but is really a member of the Thought Police.

Who knew that he was emotional about curtains? I thought they didn’t like curtains in 1984 – Big Brother can’t peek in on you when you have curtains!

Big Brother is not going to like this, Mr. Charrington. And then he will get emotional. That’s not going to be good.

Remains Of The Tray

I am having some trouble with this 1960 ad on a number of levels. For starters, I know this is supposed to be a Hot Tray but they way they spell it with only one ‘t’ it looks like  Ho Tray or Hot Ray – neither of which sounds all that appealing.

This woman has a smile that would terrify a wolf – surely she is not the sort to keep a Ho Tray around the house. Right?

And that ghostly staff behind her!  They are all so elderly, too. Are they Edwardian great-house servants who, through some bizarre time-travel mishap, are being punished by having to work for this evil matron?

Or did they emanate from the Ho Tray, like Jeannie from her TV bottle? That would make a great sitcom – I Dream Of Hot Ray.

But which one is Ray? Maybe he’s still in the tray. Nobody else looks very – er, hot. Do they?

Also Benny Hill appears to be the chef. And he seems to be leering at the grande dame. I’m not certain what’s going on there. She doesn’t really look like his type, does she?

If Benny makes any of the kind of jokes he used to make on his show, he’s going to get that plateful of dinner right in the face!

After that, maybe Hot Ray could sing. He just sounds like a retro lounge lizard – a suburban Dean Martin clone with a martini and a microphone. And that will make the evening really gracious and charming.

Aunt Emily’s Revenge

Indeed, what a charming young lady! If I was an elderly relative with antique furniture, I’d be panting to give it to this pouting ingrate. Not.

She is so charming, in fact, that Aunt Emily is busy rewriting her will.

And Cousin Alice? She wants her Empire Secretary back (after all, it’s so hard to find a good secretary these days! Alice thinks it even takes dictation).

As for dear old Uncle Gerald, he’s been a bit lacquered himself these days. But when he snaps out of it, I think he might reconsider who’s going to inherit his chinoiserie.

And Aunt Emily, who’s been demoted to sofahood?

She’ll be leaving the family fortune to those white elephants. They make good pets if you have a big enough mansion, she always says.

Ad from 1968 McCall’s.

Into White

OK, people, people – I don’t know how to tell you this, but you may be overdoing the color scheme just a little. Could someone please sneak out to the garage and take the rest of the white paint away from this couple?

They were listening to Tea For the Tillerman while they redecorated. Big mistake:

1. Building house from barley rice: Who’s the contractor here, the Three Little Pigs?

2. Construction materials include green pepper walls and water ice: see above. The water ice is an especially bad idea.

3. Tables of paper wood: OK, I see we’re going to be shopping at IKEA!

4. Windows of light: Slight problem here. They are supposed to let in light, not be made of light. May I add: heat loss, A/C issues and all the wildlife in the neighborhood getting into the house (and I don’t just mean the neighbours).

5: Summation of design goals: everything empties into white. Yeah, and look at the result!

Because I have to tell you – and please don’t wave your paint brushes at me! – a new light fixture is not going to solve your basic room-decor problem. Or any other problems that you might have.

Radio Dispatched Service

“…And after you do that, go clean my house, make a four-course dinner and do the laundry. Oh, and on the way here, you can pick up a few things at the store. Let me give you a list. Have you got a pen and paper handy? Well, get them! Hurry up! Some “Extra Help” you are!”

Radio Dispatched Service in the Windsor Star, 1962. I’ll have what she’s having…

Happy Friday to all – more to come on the weekend, so please tune in tomorrow!

(If I have time I might even post again today…we’ll see! You know, if some kind Radio Dispatcher offers to do some stuff around here for me -)

A Moody Colonial

For Vintage Thingies Thursday – a Vintage Thingie, with bonus (yet bogus) Colonial Hat.

Now see, if the sultry dame in the evening gown was in front of the sideboard, this would be an ad for Revlon makeup, or aqua satin ballgowns, or Final Net hairspray – a name which has always freaked me out. Doesn’t it sound like something Batman catches crooks in?

But she’s behind the thing, so it must be the Main Attraction. It is supposed to “capture a mood from the storied past.” Oh I see, like the Colonial past. Maybe what they meant to say was that it captures a hat from the storied past.

But it’s been “interpreted” in a modern style. Which means it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the past, really! Martinsville just wants to have it both ways.

It is not a “wistful reminder of our Colonial heritage.” And neither is that dame!

She’s not exactly on her way to a DAR meeting in that getup.

And who left the hat there in the first place? Either Thomas Jefferson got stuck in a time machine and then left his hat behind in the future (he didn’t really like 1960) – or it’s Halloween and this lady’s husband is out trick-or-treating without his three-cornered headpiece.

And he needs it or else he won’t be scoring the kind of candy she’s clearly jonesing for. He’d better bring back a few mini Mars bars at least. She looks pretty cranky and that might cheer her up.

That – or a bottle of Scotch.

“A wistful reminder of our Colonial heritage” – well, they can’t mean the sideboard. That’s straight out of the 1950s. The hat….maybe they’re talking about the hat. But it doesn’t look a bit wistful. Stupid, yes. A stupid reminder of our Colonial past?

Doesn’t have the same ring, does it.

Personality Glasses

Before we get onto today’s post I just want to say a huge thank you to all my amazing, terrific and witty commenters, old and new – you guys are the absolute best! And you make every post better with your additions, that’s for sure!

OK, now back to our regular programming…Here’s some help for anyone who just wants to be the kind of happy shiny peppy person about whom all the other guys and gals say, admiringly, “Boy, has she got personality!” And yet…and yet. There are those days when even the peppiest among us – is not so peppy. You know what I mean. Like maybe the cats ran around the house all night chasing each other up and down the stairs making yippy meowing noises, thundering like cattle stampeding on the prairie.

Or maybe you broke a bottle of tomato sauce all over the floor five minutes before you need to leave the house to be somewhere important. At which point several telemarketers decide that this, this is the perfect moment to start phoning you about an amazing opportunity. Or to ask you a quick twenty-five questions about your newspaper-reading habits.

At which point the washing machine gets sick to its stomach and barfs all over the place. Oh, and it’s a bad hair day, that goes without saying.

What you need right this second is Personality Glasses! We can only imagine what they might do for us. The ad does not deign to tell us that. What psychosocial magic do they work? Are they the apocryphal Rose-Colored Glasses? (They look untinted, perhaps there’s an extra charge for that). Do they say happy positive things to people in your voice?

Maybe they reprogram your brain (which is in quite a bad mood by now) into thinking that you are having a really good day.

Could you get different pairs of glasses and change personalities with your outfit? That might be fun.

Then you could get one personality to clean up the tomato sauce,  one to go out and work, and one to call the washing-machine repairman.

And that would leave you free to go take a nap with the cats.

Advertisement from the splendid Windsor Star newspaper of Windsor, Ontario, from 1962.

A Breath Of Stale Air

There’s trouble in Mudville, as my grandmother used to say. Or perhaps in this case, trouble in Moose Jaw.

This is another family we have probably met before. I’m thinking that this is the wife of the Colgate Cream guy -several years later. The sequel to the first ad, if you will.

That is quite an arresting photo in the middle there. This is one scary lady! Jim’s mother is pretty brave. But even she realizes that she’s gone too far. Her daughter in law is a tiger! You don’t tell any kind of tiger that they have bad breath. It’s just not a good idea.

But look up at the beginning of the ad – everyone’s starting off wrong here! The daughter in law is complaining about her husband to his mother! Like that’s going to help. And mother dear starts right up, too, doesn’t she? “It’s not Jim’s fault. Maybe if you’d take care of your breath…”

Subtle, isn’t she? She’s had that little bombshell bottled up for weeks. Couldn’t wait to say it.

Don’t you get the sense that these two will never get along – even if Tiger Girl had breath like Shalimar perfume?

Next, Tiger Girl brings in the next generation – she’ll prove the old bag wrong! And here’s poor Joan – the baby from the Colgate ad, six years later. It hasn’t been an easy six years. Check the body language – the kid’s about to bolt right out of the cartoon panel.

Still, she has inherited Grandma’s bluntness. Yes, Mummy, your breath has been terrible – “loads and loads of times.” I’ll bet that went over well with Mummy! Run like the wind for Grandma’s, Joan! You can hide there – and also get a few lungfuls of clean air.

Cue the insane gargling of Listerine “morning and night” – probably all day. That’s all this lady does! She’s buying cases of the stuff. Stands in front of the mirror all day. In between gargles, she cackles to herself  “nobody can criticize my breath again” – yeah, lady, that’s because they’ve all passed out from the stench.

In the last scene the fmaily is reunited – sort of. They are at the beach, and Jim and wife are supposedly “spooning” – though if you look closely, Jim is staying pretty far back from his wife. Well out of spooning range. And Joan is really far away, with the dog. She doesn’t want to be anywhere near these two losers.

The nosy beach neighbor ends by saying “They’re so devoted!” You can just hear the sarcasm in her voice.  Devoted as long as there’s a two foor buffer zone between them, ha ha.

[Sorry for the lousy scan - the library printer-scanner was having a bad ink day]

Knitwits

It’s Vintage Thingies Thursday again (at Confessions of an Apron Queen) and here’s what I’ve got for you!

Remember Kathy, the Artex lady who painted all over her family’s clothes (while they were wearing them), birth certificates, and the furniture?

Well, this is her sister. Her little hangup is knitting.Specifically scarves and hats. Many, many scarves. And many, many hats.

This is the family’s Christmas card photo for 1976, get it, the Bicentennial. Notice the frozen smiles on the faces of the other adults. The grimaces on the kids. And the dog and cat?

Well, the dog’s kind of confused. But dogs do wear sweaters, so he figures, hey, what the hell, I can do a hat too!

The cat, on the other hand, is totally disgusted. That hat’s coming off in about one second and then there’s going to be a feline free-for-all! The cat-people know what I mean.

Kathy’s sister shouldn’t have left all those skeins on the floor. There’ll be tangles and knots and chewed-up yarn all over that den.

The cat has plans. Big plans. You can see it in her eyes.

Acrilan: you can’t put it down.  But maybe you should.

Kathy and this lady have a cousin who likes to needlepoint – she really, really likes it! Do go and pay her a visit over at Found In Mom’s Basement. Mind you don’t trip over those beautiful needlepointed blocks!

Not A Simpleton

Oh, well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Tampax! For one thing, though, that’s not my daughter there in the picture. I really don’t know who she is but she looks pretty mature – thirty, at least. Mind you back then teenagers did look rather old, what with the pancake makeup and the dark lipstick. (Hey, just like the Lohan girls! They’re actually retro, who’d have thunk it?)

Also I wasn’t even born in the early 1950s so I just could not be the mother of that elderly-looking girl.

Anyway, I’m sure she is not a simpleton. Save for agreeing to pose for your ad. That was a bit – simple. Though as these ads go, this is fairly tame really.

Although I wish you wouldn’t go on and on and ON about Tampax. Lets agree that it is – fine. It’s an OK product. Now would you please stop writing Ph.D length dissertations about the how and why of it being so great. A wonder product, no less. As in I wonder why we have to keep reading about it in such excruciating detail.

There is a little interesting psychological stuff going on, though. That is the part I always like about these ads – the family drama. The ad says that:

(a) Not only is your daughter not a simpleton, she probably knows about lots of stuff you don’t…

So does that mean the Tampax people think that you (that’s you, there, mother dear!) are the simpleton by implication?

(b) Whoever buys this product, the other one ought to thank them. Thank you, brilliant female relative, for introducing me to this wonder of wonders!

Oh, and one more thing. At the end of the ad they state that you can carry a month’s supply in a purse.

Oh, really?

Is my not-daughter there carrying Samsonite luggage around every day? A suitcase full of Tampax.

What a simpleton.