Friday Follies The First
All the little nothings add up to something
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For a while long, long ago I did this Friday Follies thing on my blog, Ramona’s Voices. It may have been the most fun I’ve had on that blog, and everybody seemed to love it, but then Trump got in there and I went into a funk and Fridays were just another day. I stopped doing it.
Now I’m doing it again. Not just because Trump is gone (will he ever be gone?) but because I keep finding those funny or inspiring or thought-provoking things I want to share here but they’re not enough for an entire blog, so here we are. Friday Follies!
A daughter thought it would be fun to try to reach out to a Costco CEO when her dad lost his long-time job and spent his off-time musing about maybe finding work at Costco, even part time, in any position, because Costco is a great place to work.
Then this happened:
Dad Gets 'Dream Job' at Costco After Daughter's Plea Reaches CEO - Upworthy
Homosexuality in our country’s early magazine illustrations? Messynessychic makes a case for the hidden truth, focusing on the illustrations of Joe Christian Leyendecker, a closeted gay artist whose works graced the pages of American magazines from the turn of the 20th century right up until the Second World War.
The illustrations are gorgeous, no matter how you see them, the argument is compelling, and the story is fascinating.
Hiding Homosexuality on the Cover of America's Magazines a Century Ago
I have a thing for Dorothy Parker and it’s nothing new.
I love reading her work, and I love reading about her life, but I admit I have mixed feelings about Ms. Parker sometimes, when I let myself remember those times I saw her guesting or being interviewed on black and white TV. Her time should probably have been up but by then. She was older and an icon, still looking for a little attention, and not quite getting it that her bon mots weren’t so bonnie or that her shrill, tinny voice might bring pain upon our ears.
But Dorothy Parker was a force and a fury and she tugged at something deep inside whole generations of both men and women, until here we are, a century later, still fascinated by her, still wondering why she wrote the things she did, why she did the things she did, and how someone so obviously talented could harbor an ego that would gaslight her and tear her to pieces while egging her on to brilliance.
Now, 54 years after her death in 1967, and after her ashes took a few long, strange trips to odd places, a group of diehard fans want to finally bring her home and give her a proper headstone. They came up with a swell idea for a fundraiser and found a distillery that would produce a limited run of a unique gin they called ‘Dorothy Parker Roundtable Reserve’.
(I guess because Parker was a known drinker, often to her detriment, but still…)
They limited the run to 250 bottles at $50 a bottle, and—no surprise—they sold out quickly. And, as with anything about Dorothy Parker, the story was unique, delicious, and just ‘off’ enough to raise eyebrows.
That would have thrilled Dorothy Parker no end.
I found this on the Wonkette website and of course the mistake jumped out at me. Not to take away from Wonkette’s delicious takes on Trump’s possible indictment or the other delightful ‘shame, shame on you’ pieces there, but I had to take a moment to give this meme-maker their ‘just desserts’ for getting it wrong. Because it’ll rankle all day if I don’t.
We’ll move on now, okay?
I haven’t thought about Louise Erdrich for a long time; years, maybe, no fault of hers. It’s all me. As a writer, she was my everything when Love Medicine, her first novel, came out in 1984, during those years when I still thought I could pull off a novel and had three of them—yes, three—in the works.
Love Medicine was so awesome, so brilliant, so real, so full of life and love and laughs and triumph and sadness and pain, by the end I was sure I would never write again. What was the point? Nothing I ever did would top that. Nothing would even come close. No sentence of mine would ever have the kind of impact nearly every sentence of hers had on me.
I read The Beet Queen. I read Tracks. I read The Bingo Palace. And then I stopped. I don’t know why. Maybe because by that time I had stopped thinking I could be a novelist and realized, almost too late, that my calling, if I had one, was in essays—those short nonfiction pieces that might follow fictional guidelines, if I worked hard enough at them, but were nowhere near the pure magic that could come from fiction. Especially fiction written by someone like Louise Erdrich.
So flash-forward to about a month ago, when her name popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere, and I wondered what she might be up to. I didn’t look her up just then, but put it on my imaginary list of things to do when I had time.
The very next morning I woke up to the news that she had won a Pulitzer Prize. I’m serious. It happened like that. One day, ‘Hmmm, whatever happened to…”, then boom—Pulitzer Prize.
So since then I’ve been catching up. Louise has been busy! Sixteen novels so far, loads of literary prizes, and she co-owns a bookstore, Birchbark Books in Minneapolis! I’m thrilled for her. And I hope she never gets wind of how terribly I’ve neglected her for these many years. Lips sealed, okay?
Cartoon of the week:
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