Kitsch from the Bitsch

It's oh so late, I am bloody tired, but this is when I do my major blogging. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been to try to set up the launch of my Harold Lloyd book. It just isn't coming together, and now I realize it's been ten years since I've even done one of these! Never mind, let's bury ourselves in some enjoyable imagery from one of my fave FB pages, The Kitsch Bitsch.

Strange woman in bra and girdle talking on a lot of blue phones at the same time. Oh, those cords.

I don't know about the food on this page. It's almost like the dog had an accident on the rug. Nearly everything is jellied, held in suspension and quivering. This has a little moat in the middle, holding the Lord knows what. So long as it isn't moving.

As the immortal KB says, you can't make this stuff up. I devoted a whole previous post to the Munsingwear men, gleefully bantering back and forth about the state of their underwear. These undies look sort of like girdles and feature the patented "stretchy seat" that these fellows just love to dish about. Munsingwear also patented the kangaroo-pouch fly, which I can't look at for very long if it's on a certain kind of guy, because my body just sort of does this "thing" all by itself. Some sort of primitive reflex, no doubt. A hangover from my reproductive years.  Ye gods. . . time for bed. . .

https://www.facebook.com/thekitschbitsch

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Every day, a new discovery: Stairway to Stardom!

Yes! Every day, and in every way, I'm getting better and better. I don't know how I've lived so long without Stairway to Stardom, which actually appeared in a short Wikipedia entry:

Stairway to Stardom

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stairway to Stardom was a public-access television series aired in New York City from 1979 to the early 1990s. It was described by NPR as "an amateur talent show many see as a low-rent precursor to American Idol."^[1] Filmed "in what appeared to be a freshly carpeted Staten Island basement,"^[2] the host Frank Masi would bring on amateur singers, dancers, actresses, and comedians to show off their questionable talents. Describing the show, The A.V. Club claimed that "without exaggeration, it was one of the greatest shows ever to be on television."^[3]
Clips of the show have appeared on the web and gained a cult following.^[4] The opening theme song was performed by Steve Luisi and All The King's Men.

I wouldn't have found these gorgeous and  gif-ready YouTube clips (God, just think of the gifs. . .stand back, I hope you like gifs, because this is about to become an all-gif blog) without the guidance of a wonderful Facebook page called Kitsch Bitsch. When I first started watching them, I thought someone had mislabelled old SCTV variety show broadcasts from Melonville. But no! This was a real show that went on and on for years, though by now most of the slightly-chubby and/or crazed contestants are either middle-aged or dead.

Aieeee. This could be the start of something big, or something awful, however you want to look at it. It seems to me these choice bits from Stairway to Stardom are being uploaded by the dozen now. Having watched a few, the cheesy camera effects are perhaps my favorite touch. But oh, I just don't know where to start!

Here, maybe?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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Hype and hard rubber

Since I like to do things bass-ackwards, I'll spoil the

surprise right off the top. This is what you got.

When you sent away for them.

They came in one of these-here things.

A brown cardboard box with a suspicious rattle.

Close-up, they appeared larval, like this thing.

Looks a bit like the Elephant Man with a hat on.

It was this thing, see, this ad, this - didn't you used to read comic books, or what? How old are you? All right. I DO remember this ad, though since I didn't like dolls to begin with, I never sent away for them. Plus I could never scrape together a whole dollar anyway. My allowance always went on things like Lik-M-Ade, wax lips with red syrup in them and those sherbet fountains, the powdered stuff you sucked up with a liquorice straw. Once I bought a Hercules ring modelled after the Trans-Lux cartoons, but it broke the first day.

But to get back to these things, these 100 Dolls for a Dollar. I was suspicious. Just what were they talking about? What the hell was "Lilliputian cuteness"? (Jonathan Swift might have had a problem with that.) Was this just another Sea Monkey caper, another X-Ray Specs con? Another Grog Grows Own Tail? How many little girls were they disappointing, anyway - sending in their damp crumpled dollar bills in eager anticipation - only to get something that wouldn't caper, spec or grow?

As with the mind-boggling sex manual I just translated, I will attempt to make the grainy type from 50 years ago more decipherable:

100 Little Dolls all for $1.00

100 Dolls made of genuine styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber only $1 for entire set. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS, and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. And made not of paper or rags but of STYRENE plastic and hard synthetic rubber. If you don't go wild over them your money will be promptly refunded. Send $1.00 plus 25 cents for postage and handling for each set of 100 Dolls you order to: 100 Doll Co., Dept. 315, 285 Market St., P. O. Box 90, Newark, N. J.

People still have them, obviously, as these photos illustrate (and don't they just look like boxes full of dead insects?), and I would imagine that  a complete set of 100 might fetch a handsome price on eBay or Craigslist, but what the hell would you DO with them? For that matter, what did little girls do back then when they received these rattling toothpicks, looking something like those plastic things you stick birthday candles into?

The fact that they seemed to come in two colors is confusing. The pink is no more fleshlike than the sickly Chee-toh orange.

But wait! Though it looks almost the same, THIS ad has completely different copy. It's effusive, it's gushing, it's pure Madison Avenue in the '60s: Peggy Olsen might have written it during her coffee break with her feet up on her desk, chewing Wrigley's spearmint gum:

Don’t shake your head in disbelief! This is TRUE! For only 1 PENNY EACH you can give that little girl the most thrilling present of her life. This set of ONE HUNDRED DOLLS for only $1 – 1 penny A PIECE!

 Baby Dolls – Nurse Dolls – Dancing Dolls

Costume Dolls – Ballerina Dolls – Mexican Dolls

Indian Dolls – Clown Dolls – Cowboy Dolls

Bride Dolls – Groom Dolls – and many more.

 The wonder of this unprecedented offer is that every doll is made from beautiful high-quality Styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. Your daughter or your niece or the cute child next door will love you for this gift. She will play with them for months and not grow weary of them. What a family for a little girl! Just think of it – 100 exquisite little dolls – in beautiful high-impact styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber at this unbelievable price!

So fill out the coupon below. Order as many sets as you have little girls to give them to. Enclose $1 for each 100 doll set you order. And even at this amazing bargain you take no risk. If you don’t go absolutely wild over this bargain, just send the Dolls back and we will promptly refund your money.

(But don't go away, there’s more – to the ad, I mean! This freakin’ thing goes on forever.)

Our Guarantee     HERE IS WHAT THESE DOLLS ARE MADE OF

People seeing our ad, and not believing we can give such value, write us to ask what our 100 Dolls are made of. “Are they paper dolls, or rag dolls?” they ask. NEITHER! Each and every one of our 100 dolls is made of GENUINE STYRENE and SYNTHETIC RUBBER, expensively molded in true dimension – Height – Width – Depth! Every doll has come out of an individual mold, manufactured out of high-impact styrene to resist breakage, and is life-like in its proportions. They are truly delightful dolls!

How many times can you read the word "styrene" without puking? These people were obsessed with it. And all that hard rubber makes me worry. If these dolls had been a little less Lilliputian, if they had been, say, life-sized, think of the sin they might have spawned. But then they wouldn't have fit into that little brown box, would they?

And just what happened to the 100 Doll Company in Newark, New Jersey? Is it still there? Why did they only manufacture one thing? What sort of dolls would they be turning out in 2012: the kind that appear on TLC shows like My Strange Obsession?

Life slides me into tender melancholy, virtually daily, because I always think it was Better Back Then, more magical. It probably wasn't - I couldn't wait to grow up and get the hell away from school and my parents - but such is the power of nostalgia, a word that literally means "Don Draper pitching bullshit to a bunch of Kodak executives".

To be fair to the 100 Dolls Company, and to clarify any residual confusion, we should define Lilliputian once and for all.

Noun 1. lilliputian - a very small person (resembling a Lilliputian)
small person - a person of below average size

2. Lilliputian - a 6-inch tall inhabitant of Lilliput in a novel by Jonathan Swift Adj. 3. Lilliputian - tiny; relating to or characteristic of the imaginary country of Lilliput; "the Lilliputian population"
3. lilliputian - very small; "diminutive in stature"; "a lilliputian chest of drawers"; "her petite figure"; "tiny feet"; "the flyspeck nation of Bahrain moved toward democracy"

bantam, diminutive, flyspeck, midget, petite, tiny

little, small - limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent; "a little dining room"; "a little house"; "a small car"; "a little (or small) group"

3. lilliputian - (informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction"

fiddling, footling, niggling, picayune, piddling, piffling, trivial, petty, little

colloquialism - a colloquial expression; characteristic of spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech

unimportant - not important; "a relatively unimportant feature of the system"; "the question seems unimportant"

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Teetering on the brink

After writing my yearbook-nostalgia piece about 1966, I had to do a little digging about the songs that were popular back then.

Ye gods and little fishes! What happened? How could there be such an explosion of passion and talent and innovation, cheek-by-jowl with the most inane slop?

I can't name them all here, but I went on the Billboard Top 100 for '66 and just pulled out a few, not randomly but because they caught my eye and/or I liked/remembered/hated them.

There was an idiotic thing called 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. The DJs on CKLW Detroit ("Windsor and Detroit know/It's Radio Eight-oh!"), which we all slavishly listened to every day, must've had a bit of trouble with that one. Then there was Red Rubber Ball by a band called The Cyrkle, who might as well have named themselves The Oblivions.

The Lovin' Spoonful, who were many-hit wonders and (at their best) superb, scored a couple of big ones: Summer in the City (which still evokes for me those sweaty, cicada-chanting days in Chatham when I slept over at Shawne Aitken's house and played Archie and Veronica. Never mind) and a real gem called Did You Ever Have to Make Up your Mind.


Rumor has it that this was based on the bees-buzzing-around-honey effect Joan and Mimi Baez seemed to have on men during the height of the folk craze, and Richard Farina's big dilemma: which one to suck up to? (He finally chose Mimi before dying in a motorcycle accident a couple of years later.) Even Bob Dylan went through the "make up your mind" bit before shunning both of them. Their father Albert Baez must have been relieved.

Oh, and the Mamas and the Papas, laid-back but somehow completely focused, with their voices so perfectly meshed that they sometimes created alarming, spinning overtones in the studio that whirled like little tornados above everyone's head. This seldom happens except with those rare operatic sopranos whose high notes can shatter glass.


They put out Monday Monday that year, the song that makes absolutely no sense when the lyrics are analyzed ("so good to me"? The rest of the song vilifies it.) The rest of the group didn't even want to do it, it sounded so lame: a day of the week? Later they came out with one of their most brilliant '60s anthems, California Dreamin'. (My personal fave is Twelve Thirty, a haunting memoir of the life of a young prostitute. Their heyday was so short that this must have followed soon after.)

Oh, and. Donovan was getting big then, with Sunshine Superman. This one reminds me of the smell of oil paints. Yes. Shawne and I used to do paint-by-numbers, as well as stroll over to the park where perverts were known to hang out. Associations are weird. Last Train to Clarksville reminds me of peanuts. Paperback Writer is hoppity as a hot hen. 

Then there's Nowhere Man. What had happened to the Beatles, anyway? All their songs were getting so melancholy. We didn't know it, but it was the beginning of a gathering storm.

Oh, there are tons of others, Wild Thing, Good Vibrations, Rainy Day Women #12 and 35: but as good as these sounded then, I can't get into them now. I loved Walk Away Renee and found this strangely beautiful video, I found Summer in the City badly lipsynched on one of those teen shows (where no one ever performed life). I am a little afraid to look up Twelve Thirty or Ruby Tuesday (which came later, and which for some reason tear my guts out).

Noel Coward or some snoot like that once said, "Amazing how potent cheap music can be." I'd reverse that. Those 45 rpms only cost a couple of bucks back then. Amazing how cheap potent music can be.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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Fifty Shades of Grey: yearbook photos

I was going to title this post Daydream Believer, because this-here lovely young lady is a Homecoming Queen from that succulent year, 1966.

It's a strange coincidence that my fall-down-and-worship slavish addiction, Mad Men, is right now in the midst of that august (actually it's October) year. A year when the whole world seemed to be balanced on the point of a pin.

And here are the runners-up, complete with poofy hairdos and hopeful expressions. The Marlo Thomas look vies with the '60s beehive and side-flip that will all-too-soon give way to two curtains hanging sullenly on either side of the face.

OK, here's the backstory: it all had to do with painting. When you paint, every century or so, you generally repaint the closets, which means a major purge. Which yielded what seemed like dozens of yearbooks from junior/high school. Most of these belonged to my kids, and we spent a hilarious evening reading the scrawled comments out loud to each other. My son's wife Crystal kept bursting into whoops of laughter so loud it raised the roof (that is, until she saw a spider, jumped straight up in the air and disappeared upstairs for the rest of the evening).

But the choicest cut was this one. Turns out my husband Bill, now 65, kept one yearbook from all his university-hopping days: the Brown and Gold from the University of Manitoba, circa 1966. That year when things were still just barely teetering on the side of innocence.

That skateboarding fiend above is mysteriously captioned ATHLETIC PROGRAM. The skateboard looks to be a handmade job cobbled together using rollerskates and  a piece of plywood.

Here we have an even more enigmatic mystery: the Rifle Club, consisting of two pistol-packin' mamas. No boys in sight (so to speak), but is it any wonder?

Some clubs, we noticed, had only one member, but we could find no pictures. Too excruciating, I guess. But the elections would be fast.

Ah, 1966, when accountancy was still Not Boring!

Hey look, everybody. . . it's Robert Vaughn!

The Rhodes Scholar. No one smiles in these things. Where is he now, I wonder? He might be dead. Dear God! Most of my high school teachers must be dead by now, and all of my grade school teachers. How did that happen?

One of the racier, lovelier photos in the collection, found in "candid shots" which look anything but candid. "C'mon, Peggy Sue. . . lie on your stomach." Come to think of it, that IS pretty racy.

And here he is, MY Rhodes scholar, looking deadly earnest, complete with Big Bang Theory glasses. (When I met him in 1972, they were held together with tape.) I had a thing about science nerds even then, though I have to admit that in 1966 I was only 12 years old.

In 1967, I heard the word "hippie" for the first time, but wasn't sure what it meant. In 1968, I first heard the sound track to the musical Hair and began to get stoned to Donovan records ("First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. . . ").

By 1969, Woodstock exploded, the unwitting pinnacle of that magical, idealistic time which all too quickly plummeted into the dirty rotten shame of Altamont.

But the kid from Manitoba grew up, and lived through all the rich and rough and bumpy times since then. As did we all.

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The shocking revelation that made me spit out my tea

Were we-all talking about the Wizard of Oz? Am I obsessed with this topic right now? A few posts ago I shared something from my childhood: a YouTube video of a low-budget, extremely weird cartoon from a series called Tales of the Wizard of Oz. I noticed a few people had posted comments along the lines of "I remember watching these in Ontario in 1961!" and "why do all the characters have Canadian accents?"


They do, but you have to listen carefully for a "hoose" or "aboot" (or "hewwwse," which is REALLY southern Ontarion, in fact right out of Scotland). I can even hear them trying to replicate the Bostonian/Bronxian accents of the actors from the 1939 movie: "If I only had a haaaaaahhhht"; "Puddem uhhhhhp."  But the "hewwwse" still pops through.

I had some idea that these were produced by a Canadian impresario named Budge Crawley, but the more digging I did, the stranger it got. Familiar names like Bernard Cowan kept cropping up (he was a jack-of-all trades announcer: "This is Bernard Cowan speaking", a hangover from radio when nobody knew who the fuck was talking).


But this! This was pay dirt, gold in my hand. Whenever I find an old scanned newspaper clipping, I have to try to blow it up (figuratively speaking). I was able to section up this yellowed old thing from the Montreal Gazette, circa 1961, so that it's almost legible.

I don't know about you, but the smudgy black and white photos that ran along with this piece remind me of that surreal silent movie Metropolis with all the identical workers trudging along in lockstep. Positively Orwellian. At best the Crawley animation factory must have been a sweatshop with slave wages, and not even Disney looking down his cheap-ass nose at you and getting his cigarette-ash all over your Day-Glo-colored cell of the witch's groovy castle.

The piece itself ain't much: it's mostly a nuts-and-bolts account of a "new" style of animation (read: cheaper than Disney's). But right in the middle of the dull grey prose came a surprise that nearly blew me out of my chair. Oh OK, it didn't do that, but I nevertheless did  a spit-take with my Red Rose tea.

Not too exciting, is it? But look at the names of the voice actors! Along with such then-notables as Alfie Scopp, Paul Kligman and Pegi Loder, we see none other than. . .

Scotty before he was Scotty! No wonder those characters said "hewwwse". I have no idea which voice impressions were James Doohan's: not the witch, surely. Not Rusty the Tin Man, nor the Wizard, who sounded like W. C. Fields. He must have voiced the gabbledy-gabbledy sound of the munchkins, or done guest spots as the dragon or Rubber Man.

The secrets of Oz never end.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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