Saturday, April 20, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Annette: Two Degrees of Separation, and Two Great Ladies Take a Certain Style With Them
Many years ago, especially MANY years before the Memsahib Era, when
I had more hair and less of the rest of me, I was at P.J. Clarke’s in Chicago
with my chum Doug, when a woman approached me.
Her name, as I recall, was
Jackie. Despite the dim light, I could
see that she was well within tolerances – she had a scruffy Princess Di look
about her, kind of a sexy little piece of brass.
I believe the word for what she did to me was “accosted,” and
she said: “I’ll bet you wouldn't accept if I called and asked you to lunch.” (That's how you know how many years and pounds ago this was.) She did,
and I did.
I don’t remember much about the lunch, except that to her,
Annette Funicello was “Aunt Annette.” Her uncle, Jack Gilardi, was Annette’s
first husband, with whom she had three children.
So Jackie, wherever you are,
my condolences.
*
* *
Annette, Annette. You
didn’t rescue England or shame the Soviet Union like Margaret Thatcher, whose
day of death you shared, but you moved a lot of movie tickets and a lot of
adolescent trousers. More than Baroness Thatcher, anyway. (Although how could
anyone fantasize about Annette?)
As I considered the interesting coincidence of the simultaneous passing of two such different ladies, I was struck by
one element of their individual styles that they shared. One doesn't see women much choose it these days. But I loved the look and
still do.
Annette Funicello, Margaret Thatcher, RIP.
We all pass, and the permanent is
impermanent.
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Twitter: @CoolHotCenter
Sunday, April 14, 2013
You Cannot Trust Ladybugs
So I’m at Callahan’s yesterday buying some flowers for some
pots I keep in our backyard. At the
checkout stand my attention is drawn to some movement off to one side. It was a display of translucent sleeves of
live ladybugs, 1500 per sleeve, it said, scrabbling uncomfortably over one
another. There was a sponge in there to
keep things moist, and because the
market for sleeves of hundreds of dead ladybugs is negligible.
The card
said that they were buddies of the backyard, voracious consumers of aphids and
fungus because they reproduced prodigiously – not such ladies after all! -- and
would keep the landscaping blight-free all season long.
Now I
had never seen any aphids or fungus in our lushly landscaped postage-stamp backyard, but ‘phids
– well, you know how they are. And fungi! You never know when their
population might explode – their morals are also notoriously suspect – and attack
the house.
I was seized with the passion
to liberate these little pals of innocent greenery and I bought two
sleeves. (By the way, ladybugs are not
true bugs; they are beetles, and your entomologist would prefer that you refer
to them as “ladybird beetles.”)
I
followed the directions with care, refrigerating them for an hour before
release into the cool of the early evening onto pre-moistened plants, so they
would have something to drink after escaping from that rancid little sponge. I slit opened the sleeves and placed them on
a couple of bushes. They escaped with
alacrity and began exploring the bushes.
Some took to the air as I spent some time removing a few of the more
adventuresome ones from my person. (I
really need to throw out that “Eau de Maggot” aftershave.)
I went inside and over the next two hours
discovered a few that had hitched a ride in the folds of my ladybug-releasing
outfit (loose fitting camo and a “BigButt Cigar” promotional cap I was gifted at
a local smoke shop where I used to trade).
Huh. “48 Hours” fans, I
guess.
I went out this morning expecting
to encounter a riotous banquet of Coccinellidae
munching merrily on landscape pests.
In my tour of the backyard, I saw precisely one ladybug.
Ingrates.
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