The Prom

Prom is a big deal to most high schoolers.  It was to me.  A bizarre right of passage of sorts.  And I was damned if I wasn’t going to go. I didn’t have a boyfriend and pretty much figured I was not too high on the list of primo invitees. I didn’t have big breasts, genuine blond hair or a long-legged physique.  I wasn’t particularly popular, nor did I travel in the upper echelons of the many cliques. So I decided that I would eat my pride (of which I had little) and ask a boy to be my date.  I tried three.

 The first two, who will remain nameless, were less than ideal romantic partners, but good guys.  I think they were both shorter than I was.  They were neither handsome, nor witty, nor charming.  Their only redeeming factor was that I had known them since junior high. 

They both turned me down.

Then, one day in my science class, I was sitting next to a very attractive guy while we waited for our fetal pig to defrost so we could dissect it.  Maybe it was the formaldehyde fumes, but I bit the bullet and tried for the third time.  This time the answer was YES.  Though he was one grade younger, he was sweet, and, as I have said, quite cute.

Well, that little YES set the ball rolling.  I had to get a dress.  It cost $40 dollars and I think I bought it at I. Magnin in the Sherman Oaks mall. The dress was white, floor length and sleeveless.  I honestly had no intention of looking virginal, but I guess that was the effect. And, if truth be told, it was true.

On the weekends and during vacations, I worked in the camera store at The Farmer’s Market—now better know as part of The Grove.  My bosses were a childless married couple.  He was Mormon and she was Christian Scientist--- which eventually led to her death.  They were old family friends.  The woman really got into my prom experience and lent me a beautiful white shawl.  From somewhere or the other a pair of elbow length gloves appeared. 

On the day of the prom, my friend Monica and I drove to the Sunset Strip to have our hair done at a fancy salon.  The woman doing my hair used the word “groovy” and Monica and I looked at each other.  “Groovy” was now déclassé.   With enough hairspray to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa we left to don our gowns.  My dad took many pictures of me in the living room at Angus Street.

When the doorbell finally rang, my date stood in an ordinary suit, not a tux.  Though extremely handsome, I was a little disappointed.  I don’t remember if he brought me a corsage like they did on “Father Knows Best.”   I climbed into his forgettable car and we drove to Burbank and up the hill to The Castaways restaurant. 

Sitting at the dinner table, I do remember.  It was awkward.  Dancing, I have no memory of.   In the car, on the way home, he stated a “fact” that I knew to be wrong.  I pretended to agree with him.  But at that moment I made a vow to myself that I would never play dumb for a guy again.  That was our only date.

He went on the become a very successful pop musician and then soap opera star on The Bold and The Beautiful, where he still works.    He still looks good.  I, on the other hand, have not had the benefit—nor the desire—for “help” from Hollywood…. if you get my drift.   

I’m glad this was before the days of rented limos and post prom hotel rooms.  I’m glad we just drove home and I learned a lesson about being the true me. 

The STUFF of Life

I may have grown up in Silver Lake, but I no longer live there.  I have moved many times from the house on Angus Street.  And, in a year, I will be moving again.  This leads to the question:  What do I do with the STUFF of life?

I am not a pack rat and purge belongings regularly.  This was a necessity in the days when I could carry everything I owned from one country to another, and continued when everything I owned would fit in the trunk of a used Ford Maverick. Those days have gone.  Still,  Goodwill and Salvation Army are not unfamiliar with my drop offs.

BUT, there are some items that have come into my possession that have me wondering about the ethics of their final disposition.  The item that has me the most conflicted is the American flag that draped the casket of my mother’s first husband.  He died of polio during World War Two, and my mother saved the flag until her own death.  She and my father would occasionally hang it on the Fourth of July and then stow the neatly folded triangle in a plastic case at the top of a hall closet.  When my mother and father had both passed away, the flag remained. My sister didn’t want it, and nor did I, but I took it.  I really don’t want to take it on my next move and I don’t know what to do with it.

Another item that has me in a quandary is a rather unattractive needlepoint pillow that my mother made from a kit.  Once again, neither my sister nor I wanted it.  To ensure that the pillow made its way out of her life and into mine, my sister sneaked it into my luggage.  It now lives in my basement.   Perhaps I should sneak it back to my sister’s house some day.

My husband’s father’s linen jacket sits in our office closet.  My husband has never worn it and never will.  It serves only as a memory of his father.  I have my aunt’s Hong Kong made black and gold embroidered dress and jacket that will never fit me.   And there’s the blouse that a well meaning friend gave me, the glass lobster brought back from a European trip by another friend and the beaded purse that was a gift from a visitor from China.  None of these things are items I wish to take to my new home.  But each has its clutches into memories and emotions.

What about the “challenged” clay art made by my four-year son, or the candles given to me by my mother that I’ve never put a match to?  There’s the rather ugly gold-tone watch that my husband gave me as a wedding present because the name of the brand was “Corvette” and he’d heard me talking about Chevy Corvettes every time DALLAS would air on our tiny black and white television in Edinburgh.  No one would want these things…and I don’t either.  But I can’t quite part with them.

There’s the cookie cutter in the shape of my two year old’s hand, the masks given me by well meaning people who knew I collect masks, but not which kind, and the cups and saucers from some distant relative of my husband that someone somewhere might like to display on a wall.    Just not me.   What about all the high school senior portraits with heartfelt messages that I have acquired over the years as a teacher?  Do I want to become one of those people who bring out a box of mementos every year to relive my life?   No, not yet. 

A few months ago I cleaned out the filing cabinets and got rid of five trash bags of letters of recommendations, school transcripts, contracts and virtually anything work related.  No need for it now.  If I ever decide to go back to work in education they’d be damned lucky to have me and a letter from someone who is probably dead isn’t going to help.

Then there’s the holiday STUFF:  the ornaments that are ugly and the felt stockings made by a deaf great-aunt in the 1950’s.

And lastly, there are the clothes of the babes.  I am 62 and still have a yellow hand-knitted infant jacket that someone made for me.  I have two sweet sweaters from St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh that I bought for my son.  On has spit-up stains and the other has moth holes.  

This is the STUFF of my life.  It will eventually go.   But how long that will take, I do not know.

Audience

On this blog, one that I care quite a bit about, there is a statistics page.  It tells me how many people have read my blog and from what countries.

It seems that many people around the world are reading Silver Lake.  Some of the countries mentioned in the ”Audience” report are: Germany, Russia, Turkey, France, Great Britain, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia, Slovenia, Nepal, Latvia, Canada, Sweden  and, of course, the United States.  Obviously, some of you are repeat offenders.

I would love to hear from you.  Send me your comments and tell me what you think, and what you want to know. 

Let’s make this a two-way street. 

Farewell

When I was a small child, toddler, perhaps, one of the growing members in my vocabulary was the “word” mags-mags.”  I have been an aficionado of magazines from early on.

Today I heard that NEWSWEEK would be biting the dust and I felt the compunction to send off the publication with a little tribute.

I remember coming home from school and seeing freshly received magazines on the round table in front of the fireplace.  I loved going through LIFE and National Geographic.  For a time, I found TIME and NEWSWEEK out of my realm.  But I grew into them.  TIME and NEWSWEEK, especially, became my friends when I lived for five years in a variety of foreign countries.

I still have a fondness for the 1970’s issue that had Joni Mitchell on the cover.  It kept me company for many hours at Victoria Station in London as I waited for my train to a German Christmas.  Or the time I used my sparse kroner in Stockholm to buy an issue to read on the journey to the Soviet Union (as it was at the time).  Unfortunately,  the cover picture on that issue was of recently exiled author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Wanting to get my money’s worth I hid the magazine under my seat on the train as I crossed over the border.  A guard came and inexplicably lifted my cushion and took the magazine.  Big Brother WAS watching.

BUT, having done a quick Google search of these issues I now realize that they weren’t NEWSWEEK at all.  They were TIME.

In any case, farewell to NEWSWEEK.

FEAR: In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings

When I was a child growing up in Silver Lake I remember three distinct times that I was really afraid.  Comparing those three times to the horror and fears that the students and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School have experienced cannot equate.

I like to think that my five-year-old grandson’s fears consist only of me singing “Merry Christmas, Darling.”

I had never seen a dead body, nor had I even attended a funeral.  My three fears were of a grasshopper in the back yard, the fact that my father—being much older than my mother—would die, and, thirdly, feeling terror at watching the scene in Ben Hur with the lepers.  Each of these situations was dealt with by different means.  With the grasshopper, my dad carried me outside to try to show me that the insect was of no harm.  With my father’s age, I came up with a ploy that calculated his age and mine and that by the time he was in his 70’s I would be in my twenties and able to deal with things like death.  I was 8 at the time and 20 seemed a long way off.  And with the leper scene, I crawled into bed with my little sister.

I cannot image how the children and witnesses of the Sandy Hook killings will deal with what they’ve experienced. 

Scents and Sensibility

I don’t remember the first perfume or cologne I ever smelled.  I do remember other odors like roast lamb with crisp bacon, our Christmas trees, diesel fuel from a boat, dried kelp on a beach, the oil from a tangerine when I peeled it, or the dampness of a California rain forest.   

But when it comes to scents that can be purchased, I’m a bit vague.  I do remember how Chanel No. 5 permeated my grandmother’s bathroom.  She had the entire array of No 5.   Products including the talcum powder that no one uses today.  (I once had to explain to a class what talcum powder was so they could understand a scene in a movie.)

There was the occasion when my father gave my mother a bottle of JOY by Jean Patou, probably purchased a Sav-On, and she was quite pleased.  She would adorn her neck and pulse points before she went to church or out to dinner.  But during my teen years she only wore Estee Lauder Youth Dew.  And that is the scent that will forever be linked to her in my memory.   At one of the schools where I worked, an employee also wore Youth Dew.  It was so strong that even ten minutes after she had left the room, it lingered.  I found it slightly off putting that someone else should smell like my mother.

When I entered high school, I started to develop an interest in the world of perfume.  I was intrigued that something should be called eau de toilette and be stronger than cologne.  It was during this time that I started wearing MISS DIOR.  It was also during this period that my olfactory sensations were awakened to the phenomenon of men’s after shaves.

One Christmas when I was shopping at The Broadway on Hollywood Boulevard, I spent far too long sampling the heady smells in the men’s section.  I settled on a bottle of ENGLISH LEATHER to put under the tree for my father. 

My first boyfriend used to douse himself in HIGH KARATE  (or it might have been JADE EAST!) and it wafted across to me during assemblies in the auditorium of John Marshall High School and when he would kiss me each time he dropped me off at my various classrooms. 

When I graduated from high school and started college, I switched from MISS DIOR to the cheaper and more popular scents by DANA.  One day, driving to school, I came off the ramp of the San Fernando Freeway too fast and hit the car in front of me. The driver got out of the car and looked for damage.  There wasn’t any.  All he said to me was  “Aren’t you wearing TABU?” and got back in his car.

Around this time my former Sunday school teacher, Mrs. E, gave me a bottle of FLEUR DE ROCAILLE.    I loved it.  Not only did the name sound French and foreign, it was NOT the kind of perfume you could buy just anywhere.  I finally found a small shop that specialized in European perfume at former The Farmer’s Market.   Recently, I bought a bottle at Duty Free, and, based on the advice of a Frenchwomen, keep it in my refrigerator.  It is the perfume made famous in the Al Pacino movie SCENT OF A WOMAN.

As my college years went on, I switched from MISS DIOR to DIORISSMO and wore it almost exclusively through the 1970’s.  It was my “daytime scent” and FLEUR de ROCAILLE was the “special” one.  My first college roommate introduced me to the name SHALIMAR but it was much better suited to her than to me.

Around this time a new scent was sweeping the vanity tables of America:  JEAN NATE.  A girl named Nora, who sat behind me in my Japanese film class, always wore it, and soon enough, my mother added it to her repertoire of fragrances.

A boyfriend came to visit around Christmas time and, so he would have a gift to open, my grandmother got him a bottle of British Sterling Imperial aftershave.  I haven’t smelled that since the mid 1970’s.  That’s just fine with me.

When I got married in 1979 I was rather relieved to be with a man who had forgone the whole BRUT fad.  In fact, he had forgone the entire aftershave movement.  A few months after our marriage we went to Paris.  We were to stay in the empty apartment of a friend of a friend and went to collect the key.  We were invited to have a glass of wine and I went to use the bathroom. Never have I been so overwhelmed, in a good way, by the fragrance that infused the little room.  I kept it tucked in my memory.   Then, one day years later, I was at Heathrow Airport and found something very similar: Roget & Gallet Vetiver.   Gone was DIORISSIMO and in was VETIVER.  It took a little longer to find the exact scent that I had experienced in that Parisienne restroom.  Almost twenty years.  It was Guerlain Vetiver and I have been wearing it ever since.

One of my last perfume encounters took place at Heathrow Airport.  A woman walked passed me on the concourse and I was immediately taken with the wafting aroma of her perfume.    As fate would have it, we were eventually seated next to each other on the airplane.  Before we took off, I asked her the name of her perfume.  She looked at me oddly, not sure whether I was hitting on her or just a rude American.  She told me:  PARIS by Yves St. Laurent.  I was quite grateful when the flight attendant moved my seat so I could be with my family.

More recently I thought I should kick it up a notch and try something new.  I read a novel where the character claimed that Jo Malone’s “Grapefruit” gave the olfactory impression of youth.  On a whim I bought it.   That evening my husband told me I smelled like his mother.  So much for Jo Malone.

Bygone Foods and Flavors

Foods and flavors, very much like fashion, have trends that come and go.  Some stay forever, like the perennial jeans and t-shirts of the food world.   But other dishes have gone the by the wayside ala hot pants and bell-bottoms.

In the late 1950’s through the early 1970’s no respectable hostess would neglect to put out onion dip made from a powered mix to serve with heavily salted potato chips. (If she was particularly clever in the kitchen, she might even add the mix to hamburger meat on a weeknight).  In those days “sodium counts” were relatively unheard of.

I have not attended one party in the last twenty years where this bygone dip was served.   With it’s passing was the equally popular clam dip.   I must admit that I DID have clam dip about 17 years ago. On the last day of school at University of Hawaii Laboratory School in Honolulu where I was teaching at the time, we had a student potluck party.  I can just picture the scene between a busy working mom and her 12-year-old son as they drove to school that morning.

Kid—Mom, I just remembered I have to bring something for the potluck today.

Mom—Thinking an expletive, but not saying it, she swings the Dodge Caravan into Safeway and says: Stay here; I’ll be right back.

Kid—What’s this?

Mom—Clam dip.  Just take it. Someone will eat it.

And that someone was me. ( I do know that it’s supposed to be “I” but it just sounds so stiff.)

These two former staples have been replaced by the likes of hummus, salsa, guacamole and pita chips.  Their popularity was briefly threatened by the new dip invention called “layered bean dip.”  But in today’s world, this takes too much time, unless one buys it premade in a supermarket.  There was a passing fad of dumping various substances on a block of cream cheese.  I have tasted a jalapeno jelly version and another with canned shrimp and cocktail sauce…but not recently.

Another food coup d’état took place in the early 1980’s.  Most people in Silver Lake bought their Italian dressing as a dried powder, mixed it with oil and vinegar and had a specially made bottle on hand to shake the mixture.  This was the only kind of salad dressing we had at Angus Street.  It was in restaurants that we learned of the likes of blue cheese, Russian and Thousand Island dressings. 

I vividly remember sitting in, ironically, a Mexican restaurant with my family.  After we had ordered salads, my father spun a tale of Roquefort cheese.  According to him, a shepherd had left some cheese in a cave and returned months later quite hungry.  Even though the cheese was moldy, he ate it and, voila, a future salad dressing was created.

But in the 1980’s a new food bully emerged:  balsamic vinegar.  Yes, I know, Europe was using it all along.  But not at Angus Street.  Today, my cupboards hold perhaps four different types of balsamic vinegar and one bottle of fig vinegar.  There is not one packet of dried Italian dressing.   And those shaker bottles have gone to the kitchenware cemetery.

When was it exactly that “noodles” became “pasta”?  Or bread, which in the early days of Silver Lake came in white or brown, became baguettes and chibattas?  When was it that sherbet went out of favor—except in the punch at Mormon weddings—and sorbet took over the throne?  When did canned mandarin oranges and pineapple loose favor?  When did Neapolitan ice cream get lost in the dessert wake of Ben and Jerry and Hagan Daz?  Not that one single of these changes wasn’t for the gastronomical better.

I spent five years during the 1970’s living in Europe.  When I finally moved back to the United States in 1979 I noticed quite a few changes.  I had never heard of such a thing as a Born Again Christian.  Desperate for a teaching job, I applied at a Christian school.  On the application form, it asked for my personal relationship to Jesus.  I wrote down “brother-in-law” and crossed that job off my list.  It was almost as embarrassing as applying to a Christian Scientist School and asking about health benefits.  But I digress.

In the America to which I returned, blacks had names like Jaquwana or La Toya, cocaine was becoming the drug of choice and a few new food selections poked their ways through the crowd.

Until my return, I had never heard of taco salad, mahi mahi or Chinese chicken salad.  The closest we got to this at Angus Street had been packaged, hard shelled tacos made with a powdered mix, halibut and chow mien out of can sprinkled with crunchy, curly topping.   Today halibut is too expensive and the taco salad and Chinese chicken salad are the mainstays of many restaurants.  In the entrée area, dishes like beef stroganoff and Swedish meatballs disappeared.  Dinners of roast beef and fried chicken went by the wayside.   At least at Angus Street.   My mother, always interested in new cooking ideas and recipes, experimented with red snapper, water chestnuts and Sara Lee coffee cakes. Not all at the same time.

  I remember the absolute worst meal I ever cooked for my family.  I was in college and had a free afternoon.  I thought I’d cut my mom some slack and cook dinner.  I set the table with my favorite place mats from Sweden, my Mom’s blue glassware and went out to the back yard and cut some color coordinated Agapanthus for the centerpiece.  Then I started cooking.  I used what was in the fridge.   Red snapper, sour cream and red wine.   Although my family was very polite, it was the most God awful purple meal anyone had ever eaten.  But, at least, it coordinated with the colors of the place settings.

Sometimes I miss the simple foods of Silver Lake in the 1950’s and 60’s.   I have not had a bologna and onion sandwich with mayonnaise since childhood.  Nor have I have “weenies”, as, much to my embarrassment, my mother called them.  I did buy some a few months ago when my grandson visited.  I sampled a few bites and though they tasted good, the gristle reminded me why I no longer ate them. 

I would love a good beef Stroganoff and plan to make one soon.  My mother’s recipe is about as far from Russia as Honolulu, but it’s the best one I know.