Thursday, October 02, 2003
Extreme Ironing How pleasing to see this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday and I do think I might be considered very qualified to join this new sport. I have long had a penchant for ironing (see Saturday, July 19 2003 blog). Or here is an excerpt:
Admittedly one of the stranger things I do while ironing is to envision an overhead video camera taping what would be equivalent to watching a professional sporting event on television, but a sporting event that requires the commentators to speak in a soft-spoken voice -- much like golf. I am the Tiger Woods of ironing. I imagine two moderated whispers giving play-by-play commentary with respect to my intricate ironing finesse. Occasionally they also make reference to the inferior techniques of my inferior invisible competitors.
MUSEUM PIECE REALITY When I was a girl, I remember my mother inviting friends over to our little San Francisco apartment to play bridge about once a week. They sat around a kitchen table my step-father had crafted from old planks he had found near his art studio -- smoking like chimneys they would, and drinking a gallon bottle(s) of cheap Gallo wine with a screw-cap top because that is all they could afford and because, well, savoring sips of buttery Chardonnay from a bottle that required a cork screw really wasn't the point of the evening anyway. Occasionally someone would remember to walk down the hallway to the living room to put on a new record on the phonograph or flip the record and carefully lower the needle to hear Side B. There would be a crackle until the needle found the first groove and then music. On these carousing evenings of bridge, I could usually be found on the living room floor leaning against an enormous pillow my mother had made from a south-west-Indian-patterned material, and had stuffed with two sacks of peanut-sized bits of foam rubber. Here I sat to watch my favorite show, the Mod Squad -- the black-and-white, rabbit-eared TV and I impervious to Chet Baker and his band wafting out of the loud speakers. I could tell you that we had one black rotary telephone with a party line, which for the too-young-to-know crowd meant that you shared a line with another Bell Telephone subscriber (Bell being the only telephone company one could subscribe to). There was no way to tell if the phone was in use other than to pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. If instead you heard voices, you quickly hung up or issued a perfunctory 'oh, sorry' and then hung up. I could tell you too that parked outside in the driveway was my mother's Datsun 1600 SP311 convertible -- at the time an affordable racy silver sports car that I might compare to a Miata today. Had she held on to it, the car would probably be worth a fortune; only 23,000 were made and I never see hide-nor-tail of one on the roads (Click Here and Scroll Down to the Datsun Fairlady 1600 to See What One Looked Like). I could tell you that I had just recently grown out of saddle shoes and had metal roller skates with a key to tighten them up snug to my Converse sneakers. The list goes on and suffice to say that none of the above-mentioned artifacts are, or ever were, a part of my own kids' reality growing up. If I were to detail the above-mentioned evening to my children, it would simply not provoke a reaction other than maybe a renewed confirmation of how old their mother is. Whereas if I told this story to someone closer to my age they would likely come to certain conclusions about my family life. At the very least I would get a raised eyebrow about the gallon bottle of Gallo.
Which brings me to Screw Caps -- a perfect example of the clean-slate marketing approach that allows marketers to repackage old products that not one generation before would have elicited stifled snickers, if not a horrified sneer. The above link is from Paul Reidinger's Without Reservations, a regularly featured column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper (SFBG), and one of my favorite reads of the week. Reidinger is a restaurant critic extraordinaire, and also offers up insightful culinary commentary that is remarkable in its ability to use gastronomy as a barometer of the world at large. If you are planning a trip out to San Francisco and want to know the restaurant to go to, Reidinger is a must read!
Admittedly one of the stranger things I do while ironing is to envision an overhead video camera taping what would be equivalent to watching a professional sporting event on television, but a sporting event that requires the commentators to speak in a soft-spoken voice -- much like golf. I am the Tiger Woods of ironing. I imagine two moderated whispers giving play-by-play commentary with respect to my intricate ironing finesse. Occasionally they also make reference to the inferior techniques of my inferior invisible competitors.
MUSEUM PIECE REALITY When I was a girl, I remember my mother inviting friends over to our little San Francisco apartment to play bridge about once a week. They sat around a kitchen table my step-father had crafted from old planks he had found near his art studio -- smoking like chimneys they would, and drinking a gallon bottle(s) of cheap Gallo wine with a screw-cap top because that is all they could afford and because, well, savoring sips of buttery Chardonnay from a bottle that required a cork screw really wasn't the point of the evening anyway. Occasionally someone would remember to walk down the hallway to the living room to put on a new record on the phonograph or flip the record and carefully lower the needle to hear Side B. There would be a crackle until the needle found the first groove and then music. On these carousing evenings of bridge, I could usually be found on the living room floor leaning against an enormous pillow my mother had made from a south-west-Indian-patterned material, and had stuffed with two sacks of peanut-sized bits of foam rubber. Here I sat to watch my favorite show, the Mod Squad -- the black-and-white, rabbit-eared TV and I impervious to Chet Baker and his band wafting out of the loud speakers. I could tell you that we had one black rotary telephone with a party line, which for the too-young-to-know crowd meant that you shared a line with another Bell Telephone subscriber (Bell being the only telephone company one could subscribe to). There was no way to tell if the phone was in use other than to pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. If instead you heard voices, you quickly hung up or issued a perfunctory 'oh, sorry' and then hung up. I could tell you too that parked outside in the driveway was my mother's Datsun 1600 SP311 convertible -- at the time an affordable racy silver sports car that I might compare to a Miata today. Had she held on to it, the car would probably be worth a fortune; only 23,000 were made and I never see hide-nor-tail of one on the roads (Click Here and Scroll Down to the Datsun Fairlady 1600 to See What One Looked Like). I could tell you that I had just recently grown out of saddle shoes and had metal roller skates with a key to tighten them up snug to my Converse sneakers. The list goes on and suffice to say that none of the above-mentioned artifacts are, or ever were, a part of my own kids' reality growing up. If I were to detail the above-mentioned evening to my children, it would simply not provoke a reaction other than maybe a renewed confirmation of how old their mother is. Whereas if I told this story to someone closer to my age they would likely come to certain conclusions about my family life. At the very least I would get a raised eyebrow about the gallon bottle of Gallo.
Which brings me to Screw Caps -- a perfect example of the clean-slate marketing approach that allows marketers to repackage old products that not one generation before would have elicited stifled snickers, if not a horrified sneer. The above link is from Paul Reidinger's Without Reservations, a regularly featured column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper (SFBG), and one of my favorite reads of the week. Reidinger is a restaurant critic extraordinaire, and also offers up insightful culinary commentary that is remarkable in its ability to use gastronomy as a barometer of the world at large. If you are planning a trip out to San Francisco and want to know the restaurant to go to, Reidinger is a must read!
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