When a Woman Celebrity Goes On a Talk Show, Who Holds Her Purse?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about becoming a celebrity, but I’m not sure how all this “famous” business works. For example, when a woman goes on a talk show, who holds her purse? I’m sure she must need someone to watch out for the valuable stuff like credit cards, cash, expensive makeup, and jewelry. She can’t just leave her designer purse laying around in a “green room” or tossed on a table somewhere.

Celebrity women purses are not like the ones my friends and I carry around. Celebrity women have really good stuff, we ordinary women have purses full of tissues and grocery receipts. Our makeup comes off the hooks at K-Mart and our credit card has a spending limit of $200.

We ordinary women don’t carry jewelry in our purses because the gold will scratch off or the glue on the genuine, imitation diamonds and sapphires will break free.

Celebrity women must have “people” to carry big stuff that won’t fit into the teeny purses you occasionally see them with. It would be hard to stuff a full coupon organizer into a teeny purse. There’s just no room for disinfectant wipes, pair of pliers, and a squirt bottle of decongestant. Maybe celebrity women (or their kids or grandkids) don’t have to use a Wendy’s restroom or ever have stuffy noses.

Maybe I need to rethink becoming a celebrity just because of this purse business. I’m not sure all my Medicare and medical insurance cards would fit into a teeny purse and leave any room for adhesive bandages, aspirin, safety pins, lip balm, kids pictures, pet pictures, other family pictures, cell phone, calculator, tire gauge, and a ring of keys.

But then …… if I were a celebrity, I would have “people.” Now where the heck would I keep my “people?”

Well, I’ve just decided that being a celebrity is just too complicated so I’m going to Target to get a bigger purse!

© Copyright 2007 Suzzwords

Big ‘ol Glasses Frames

What ever happened to those big ol’ eyeglasses frames of the 70s and 80s? You know the kind – they went from the top of your eyebrow to halfway down your cheek and from side to side. When glasses were still made of real glass and mounted in those babies, you almost fell forward from the weight. The plastic ones were only a tiny bit lighter, but came in fake tortoise shell and cool colors like royal blue and pink.

If you needed bifocals, the bifocally part was large enough to scan an entire page of the newspaper without bobbing your head. I always thought the “aviator” styles were quite handsome on men. My girl friends and I favored a more girly style and complimented each other on how cute we were.

For the last several years when I picked out frames, I had limited choices: teeny oval, teeny oval-ish and teeny oblong-ish. The biggest frame in the store was under an inch-and-a-half high, barely covering my eye socket. Look a teeny bit up, see frame; look straight ahead, see “out,” look a teeny bit down, oops, there’s the teeny bifocal. Without the frames, I think the lenses could be called “contacts.”

I asked if they had any frames that weren’t so “squinchy” and the glasses lady nearly fainted from horror. “Why, my dear, these are the latest styles.” Yikes. The latest styles do look cute on folks under twenty-five, but when the wrinkles start to creep in, we want as much camouflage as possible. If we’re just a teensy bit overweight by, oh, say, maybe ten or fifty pounds or so, we also want a pair of glasses in proportion to our face and figure. There’s nothing more silly looking than one of us … er, of generous proportions in a pair of those little squinchy glasses with frame arms so tight that they almost disappear into the generosity on the sides of our face.

So you frame manufacturers out there, supersize some of those frames, give us some color (I vote for red and leave off the rhinestones), and make us stylish again. Damn the squinch, full vision ahead! And don’t plan on charging more for the larger size. There’s plenty of us with a drawer full of obsolete prescriptions in huge frames and we can set up at the flea market faster than you can say “squinchy!”

© Copyright 2007 Suzzwords

The Fridge

If you were born before 1940, someone you knew still used a real ice box, the kind that held a large square of ice (straight from a real ice house) that kept cold, well sorta, the contents of an insulated metal box on legs. These were soon replaced with electric refrigerators, but for years after most folks still called the newfangled inventions “ice boxes.”

The fancy new fridges came with tiny compartments that held at least two heavy-duty aluminum ice cube trays and little else. The ice trays were a challenge, especially if encased in ice. Once released from the ice tomb, removing cubes from the tray was like removing a prehistoric mammoth from the Arctic. If the release mechanism was not operated properly, it was possible to launch ice cubes throughout the room.

This magical box also made frost around the ice compartment and defrosting became an all day event preceded by several days of “eating up the leftovers.” Depending on the time lapsed from the last defrosting, this was not a job for sissies. Pans of steaming hot water set under the ice/frost clump, ice picks, kitchen knives, screwdrivers, and even hammers, were used to break free large clumps of frost.

Some early refrigerators came with “refrigerator sets,” heavy-duty glass containers in clear or green glass. Sets usually included several sizes of storage containers and a special bottle so the happy owners could enjoy ice cold water. The water containers had a serious flaw in that they did not refill themselves and were often found on the top shelf with just enough water to cover the crumbs left by a previous sipper. Serious consequences could be imposed on the guilty one for not cleaning and refilling the bottle and “I’ll rip all the hair out of your head if you ever do this again!” often reverberated through the house. (Moms were much tougher in those days.)

Today’s modern marvels did away with all that fun. They have various compartments at just the right temperature for the contents and dispense filtered water and ice through the door. (Manual defrosting is unknown.) Some models even have sensors that read bar codes and let the owner know when it’s time to shop; some even connect to the Internet and place grocery orders. The irony is that most people are working long hours to pay for their fridges and are too tired to cook, so they eat out – all that money spent on a fridge to store soda, pizza poppers, and popsicles!

Sipping from the old water container has also been updated. An informal survey of secretive fridge behavior has revealed four out of five people squirt chocolate syrup directly into their mouths from the Hershey squeeze bottle, three out of five use their index finger to sneak a dollop of peanut butter, and when given the chance, all five lick the inside of the tops of ice cream containers!

Sigh. Modern appliances, primitive man.

P.S. Try this: a dollop of peanut butter in the mouth, then a big squirt of Hershey syrup. Ummmm, messy, but good. Just don’t tell anyone where you learned this!

© Copyright 2007 Suzzwords