Rabbit Hole Bread

     All I wanted was the answer to one simple question.  I thought it was going to be “This is another product of food corporations hiring Home Economics majors to make up recipes and dates to 1954”.  Ah, that might have been possible in the LAST century.  But now we have those Interwebs.

     By the way, I have not double-checked the story offered by an expert I knew, who said there was definite proof linking the money given to schools with Home Economics as a subject by food companies, and the use of those companies of the graduates of said programs.  “Here’s what we make,” the company would tell its grateful new employee, “Make up recipes so that every housewife in America needs it.”  She derived all salads which start with Jell-O and all casseroles involving the opening of a can of soup to this phenomenon.  I just accept that with the faith of all of those who attended any kind of potluck dinner during the twentieth century.

     So, as I was breaking off bits of monkey bread, and someone said “Why ‘monkey bread’?  Who came up with that?”, I simply assumed it was all a plot by Pillsbury to get people to buy more tubes of biscuits (which I, as an unashamed child of the past century, consider one of America’s perfect foods.  I have always regarded biscuits which do not come out of tubes with suspicion.)

     According to the Interwebs, however, it is not so.  They all agree Pillsbury does not come into the Monkey Bread question until the 1970s, by which time Monkey Bread had appeared in any number of cookbooks.  One must go back farther than that.

     What is wonderful about the Interwebs is that I was able to find seven totally different origin stories.  This is actually refreshing: not everybody had stolen their data from the same source, but had done some original digging.  Of course, we had to consider the history of bread, and the fanciful ways in which people used bread dough.  Monkey bread, it is clzimed on one or two of these sites, was not even possible until the nineteenth century, when people started making bread in pans.  (Can’t make Monkey Bread without a pan, see, and up to this point, most people made bread with a heavy dough that could simply be plunked down on any flat surface near a heat source to cook.  Some bread, I was told, was actually cooked on the side wall of the fireplace.  How did you tell when it was done?  It fell off into the fire?)

     Anyway, at SOME point, somebody in the Middle East came up with the idea of dipping small lumps of bread dough in fat and then piling them together, so they would cook but not merge, and each bit could be pulled off separately.  The recipe moved north, and butter became the standard fat for this.  This led to a Golden Dumpling bread, brought to the western hemisphere by Hungarian immigrants, who in time developed it into a street food.

     So who added the cinnamon?  Early monkey bread was plain buttery bread for dipping into jelly or gravy or anything else handy.  One Interwebs food maven gives the credit to frozen bread dough makers in the Fifties while another pins the addition to comedian (and serious chef) Zasu Pitts, who may also have originated the idea of making it in a Bundt or Angel Food pan, leaving the middle open.  Nancy Reagan gets the credit for really spreading the culture, after she discovered it in the 1970s, and started serving it every Christmas, at the ranch, the Governor’s mansion, or the White House.

     Then how about the name?  It’s popular, but not the unanimous choice: you can get the same thing with Hungarian coffee cake (remind me some day to talk about the history of coffee cake and tea biscuits), Sticky Bread, Plucking Bread, Pull-Apart Loaf, Bubble Bread, Pinch Me Cake, and on and on.  (given its addictive nature, you COULD just call it And On And On.)  Theories vary.  Nancy said to make it you had to monkey around with the pieces of dough.  Zasu said the recipe was perfect for quieting small children (those little monkeys.)  A popular theory is that it comes from a monkey’s habit of studying something by pulling it apart.  (Reference the scene of King Kong pulling Fay Wray’s dress off, occasionally censored for sensitive TV viewers.) Monkeys huddling together for warmth, monkey hands, and, yeah, somebody out there does have a recipe called Monkey Brains.  (Calvin and Hobbes readers know better.)

     Now, about the history of coffee cake, which always implied the presence of sugar, and suggests that the Hungarian Coffee Cake recipe might have started the whole brown sugar and cinnamon mix…hey, just remembered this is NOT a food blog.  Anyway, there’s leftover Monkey bread, so I have things to do.

Eat, Drink, and Be Harried

     Ah, Monday: the dawn of a new week, a time for new beginnings, new challenges, new opportunities!  And old jokes.

     We pick up the quiz with another section on Food Jokes, though I think this might also be Diner Jokes or Wait Staff Jokes.  Just don’t tell these to your waiter or waitress.  You may be quite some time waiting for them to laugh.

     J1.Ryan really liked that joke in the last food joke blog, about the man who asked for greasy eggs, burnt toast, and weak coffee because he was homesick.  So he decided to pull that one the next time he had breakfast out of town.

     The day came, and he told the waitress “Bring me really greasy eggs, toast burnt to a crisp, and coffee so weak it looks like water.”

     The waitress leaned toward him and said, “(          )”

J2.There are as many jokes about flies in the soup as there are bowls of soup and nearly as many as there are flies.  (Is there a fund for flies who never get bowls of soup?)  But you HAVE to know the one about the customer who shouted, “Waiter!  What’s this fly doing in my soup?”

     The waiter took a look and said “(          ).”

J3.Another customer snapped, “Waiter, I cannot eat this soup!”

     “There’s nothing wrong with the soup, sir.  It’s our specialty.”

     “Nonetheless, I cannot eat this soup!”

     “Let me fetch the manager, sir.”

     The manager bowed a little to the customer, and said, “I understand you have a complaint about our soup, sir.  Our chef has been a master at preparing this soup for the last twenty years, and I am sure there can be nothing wrong.”

     “That’s all very well, but I cannot eat this soup.  YOU eat it!”

     The manager sighed.  “Very well, sir.  Where is the spoon.”

     “(          )”

J4.”Waiter, I can’t find any corned beef in this sandwich!”

     “Try another bite, sir.”

     “There.  I still can’t find any.”

     “Well, I’ll be.  (          )”

J5.”Waiter, I have stabbed this steak, torn at it with my fork, and twisted it with my bare hands, and I can’t get any of it to come loose enough to eat.  Take it back!”

     “I’m sorry, sir.  I can’t do that.”

     “Why not?”

     “(          )”

J6.”Waiter, these pork tenderloins are so terrible I refuse to eat them!  Get the manager!”

     “That’s no good, sir.  (          )”

J7.”Waiter, my cottage cheese has a splinter in it!”

     “Well, Ma’am, (         ).”

J8.”I ordered apple pie.  What is this?”

     “What does it taste like, sir?”

     “Glue!”

     “(          )”

J9.”Waiter, this coffee tastes like mud!”

     “I’m not surprised, sir. (          )”

J10.”And how did you find the steak, sir?”

     “(          )”

J11.”Waiter, these oysters are very small!”

     “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”

     “And they’re not very fresh.”

     “(          )”

J12.Graham wandered into a grubby diner on Clark Street and ordered a cup of coffee from the surly man behind the counter.  He glanced out the window.  “Looks like rain.”

     “Well,” snarled the counter man, “(         )”

Assuming you’ve had your coffee this morning, you don’t need these ANSWERS, but perhaps you had coffee at one of the diners above.

     A1.You’ve eaten here before, haven’t you, honey?

     A2.Looks like the backstroke

     A3.Aha!

     A4.You bit right past it!

     A5.You’ve bent it.

     A6.He won’t eat ‘em either.

     A7.At these prices, did you expect the whole cottage?

     A8.Then it’s apple.  The peach pie tastes like paste.

     A9.It was ground this morning.

     A10.I just moved a fried potato and there it was.

     A11.Just as well they’re small, then.

     A12.It tastes like coffee, don’t it?

No Crime to Rhyme

     I thought we might conclude our consideration of postcard poetry with the ever-popular miscellaneous section.  There are always a few postcards which don’t fit in other categories (at least not in my inventory) but which are too good to allow to slide by.

     The item at the top of this column is, of course, another consideration of the use of an accent to communicate information which might otherwise seem trite or too sensitive.  The dialect plus reference to pumpkins and the marvelous rhyming of billets-doux (a useful French phrase for love letters used through most of western civilization) makes it possible for you to laugh off the love poetry as a joke if the recipient doesn’t care for it.

     As long as we’re admiring ingenious messages, how about this one? The last time I saw any data on the subject, birthday cards were the number one greeting cards sent in the United States, and even in the day of Facebook wishes and emails, I would guess that’s so.  The writers of these cards have a long row to hoe.   Is this the sentiment of the sender or of the poet, who thought, “Golly, gotta write one more birthday sentiment this week.,  What can I say that I haven’t already said?” 

     There are plenty of disposable poems written about what we ought to do when we are feeling low.  This poet came up with a nice way of turning it into a compliment to the recipient of the card.  (And got credit for the verse…if you can call three initials credit.)

     Here’s an example of the usual kind, just for reference.

     This puppy at least knows he’s being silly about it.

     And here’s a writer who takes the opposite attitude entirely.  (Some philosophers of the period would scold him for being so depressed when he does, after all, still have ink.)

     Speaking of those who may seem to be grounded a little more in reality, we return here to a poet who is using dialect of another once-popular type: the semi-literate child.  The poet invites us to agree with Dad.

     I like the hint of understanding thrown in by this poet, who suggests that if the weather is nice, some people may find things to do besides go to Rally Day.  (This forced me to do a little research.  I was brung up in the Midwest, I was, in a town with roughly a dozen churches, and I don’t recall any of them having a Rally Day.  This is the first Sunday of a new Sunday School year, generally observed in September: the aim was to get as many kids to start the school year right.  As an added note, I don’t recall being taught about the flag shown here with the American flag, which is the Christian Flag, an institution just about a hundred years old and news to me.  Maybe I just never asked, or maybe our denomination had its own flag.  Can’t go back in time and check it now.  Anyway, our new Sunday School year started in January, when we opened the new box of collection envelopes.)

     Of course, there was always a market for postcards with verses which were simply cute.  Here, for your delectation, are some puppies, who seem   Does it matter that the poem isn’t terribly coherent?  Never!

     Simple is better, naturally.  Here’s a postcard with a bit of black felt attached to it, and a reassuring message for the recipient.  THAT’S poetry a-bruin.

A Letter Is Better

     There are those of you who are not going to understand a word of this column,  But stick with me: I’ll explain.

     Once upon a time, younglings, we did not have the electronic communications devices of today.  There were no computers, so email, texting, tweeting, social media sites, and all that was…no, wait.  I heard that, you in the back with the curly hair.  (At least you’ve been eating your breadcrusts.)  “They still had phones.”  Yes, we DID have telephone communication.  But I warned you that this was in pioneer days.  Our phones DID NOT HAVE SCREEM\NS.  All we could do was talk into them.  And during the golden age of postcards, a telephone was still, in many parts of this country, considered a luxury.  It was expensive, and it was available only in those parts of the country which had been wired.  Yes, if you’ve looked at that landline phone your grandmother still keeps attached to the wall for emergencies, you have seen a few of these wires.  We did not even have WiFi in them days.  And because phone systems were rather rough and ready even in most places which had been wired, we had something called a party line, which meant phone calls were not especially private.

     “Private”?  I can try to explain that in a whole nother blog.

     So for news from people you couldn’t talk to face-to-face, the best option was to write a letter.  Postcards were nice, but rather like tweets or calls on a party line: not private.  So in the days before there were other possibilities, a MAJOR genre of postcard was the “Write Me a Letter” variety.  And whilst travelling through my postcards on the way to those with verse, I found a lot of these rhymes dealt with that heartfelt plea.

     Another blog I’ll write someday, when I’m feeling braver, is the whole ethnic mockery  postcard.  There’s a nice series of cards by Frederick Cavally in which he had the face of  a member of an ethnic group demanding, with an accent, why you hadn’t written.  He would do a man from that group on one card and a woman on another, so he could use the accent twice.  These are not in verse, so they’ll wait for that brave blog I’ll write one day.

     Ethnic mockery was toned down as the twentieth century went on, but it was still going strong when, in the 1930s, possibly in response to popular novels, a whole new ethnic group sprang into view and Hillbilly Humor took the nation by storm.  Numerous artists took it up, including artist Luther Landis Irby, who is responsible for the card at the top of this column as well as dozens of others.  Many of these, like the following, took up the age-old question of wondering why you were taking so long to write.

     The nagging was generally heavily loaded with affection: why would I want a letter so badly if I didn’t care?  So some of the verses are almost indistinguishable from Valentines.

     Other artists took their cue from nursery rhymes for their combination of longing and demand.  (This is illustrator Mabel Wright Enright putting Little Jack Horner to work.  Did he EVER stand up?)

     Of course, SOME artists leaned a little bit more on the demanding part of the equation.  This is Frederick Cavally, mentioned hereintofore, sarcastically assuming you’re pretending to be at work.

     Though he was more comfortable drawing faces.  (I’m not sure which is more annoying here: the face or the verse, but I think he did both of them.)

     And as long as we’re saluting artists by name, here is Mr. Irby again, with the only verse which addresses, via Hillbilly Humor, one of the few downsides of getting a letter.

Moldy Miscellany

     And here we are again, on another Monday, preparing to face the week.  What is the one thing you need to be fully prepared?  A good breakfast?  Aspirin?  A few red jellybeans?

     No, what we need is another old joke quiz?  (If you knew the answer already, you are ready for both the quiz AND Monday.)  These jokes come from the Miscellaneous chapter, so it’s a mix.  Maybe a few funny ones got mixed in with the rest.

     J1.”The professionals have traced my grandmother back to Charlemagne.”

     “Yeah? (          ).”

J2.Once upon a time, we are told, a man walked past a newsstand and saw a large picture of Dame Edith Sitwell on the cover of a magazine, with her name in big letters underneath.  “That’s a shame,” he said, “They shouldn’t (          ).”

     J3.Ace walked into the store and asked a clerk, “Do you have any talcum powder?”

     “Certainly, sir,” the clerk replied.  “Walk this way.”

     Ace watched for a moment and said, “(          )”

J4.”Where were you until three this morning?”

“Was that when I came in?”

“Why didn’t you at least call to say you’d be late?”

“Didn’t I call?”

“And why do you always have to answer a question with another question?”

“(          )”

     J5.”Your hair’s getting thin.”

     “Well, (         )”

J6.”Um, why do you have a banana in your ear?”

“Excuse me?”

“I asked why you have a banana in your ear?”

“What?”

“Would you please tell me why you have a banana in your ear?”

“Sorry.  (         )”

     J7.”You just don’t have anything up north like what we’ve got back home in Texas.  Everything’s bigger and better there.  You know, I can get on a train at dawn, ride all day, and still be in Texas at sunset.”

     “Oh, (          ).”

J8.Elroy’s wife was difficult to please.  One year, for his birthday, she gave him two new neckties, a green one and a yellow one.  Next morning, when he came to breakfast wearing an old black tie, she snapped, “Why didn’t you wear one of your new ties?”

     “Well, Honeycomb,” he replied, hoping for a quiet breakfast, “That was such a wonderful party last night that I left all my presents in the living room, and didn’t think to go down and fetch one of those wonderful ties while I was dressing.”

     “If you loved me at all,” she said, “You would have come down without a tie, and gone to the living room after breakfast.”

     “Well, Dearlove,” he said, “You KNOW how I spill things.  Why not spill on an old tie, and change into a new one after breakfast?”

     She was still scowling, so without another word he left the table, strode into the living room, pulled out the yellow necktie, and changed it for his old one.  “Satisfied?” he asked, returning to the table.

     She burst into tears.  “(          )”

J9.Years ago, I went out for a career as a boxer.  I did four rounds once with Muhammed Ali, and I really had him worried.  (          )

     I think today’s jokes were really of impressive vintage.  (Contrary to popular usage, this means age, not quality.)  But if you really need to check the ANSWERS, here they are.

     A1.They traced an uncle of mine to Poughkeepsie once.

     A2.ought to call a classy broad like that a dame

     A3.If I could walk that way, I wouldn’t need the talcum powder

     A4.Do I?

     A5.Who wants fat hair?

     A6.You’ll have to speak up.  I have a banana in my ear.

     A7.We have trains like that in Chicago, too.

     A8.So you hate the green one!

     A9.He thought he’d killed me.

Just Thinking of You

     I am not here to mock those who have never gotten into the habit of writing verse.  I am here merely to enlighten those who are unaware of the mental processes of versifiers.  See, to the person who does not write poetry, the art is something rarefied and elite, an outlet for people who are inspired by the sun, moon, and stars and think elevated thoughts beyond “Getting late: am I missing the latest episode of Ridiculousness?”

     The fact is that for those of us who speak Poetry, anything can bring on a couplet or quatrain.  You have only to look at the wall of an old school restroom to realize that.  Speaking of which, postcard poets are frequently inspired by the outhouse.  The card at the top of this column reflects succinctly on the camaraderie of sharing a roadside rest stop (a reflection which, thank goodness, is almost unobtainable today.)

     Other outhouse poetry isn’t nearly so romantic  But it takes all types of poets to make an anthology.

     And I am sorry to say that in this fast-paced modern age we are losing an ability to think of insults as an inspiration for verse.  We are more likely to get off a quick tweet, or simply repost somebody else’s prose wisecrack than pause and think “Hey, this would be even more devastating if it rhymed.”  But once upon a time, one could insult a whole social movement with a few short lines with rhymes at the end.

     Mind you, they could retaliate by rhyming a few observations on your own situation.

     Once upon a time, THIS was how we reposted other people’s remarks.  Did you know some young lady who was on the prowl for matrimony?  You could pick up a postcard poem and let her know you’d noticed.

     Other poets could be relied upon for a card to send to the young man whose matrimonial goals were fairly obvious.

     And if any of these couples had kids, you could pick up a poem to mail it and insult the offspring.

     You could insult specific groups with a well-chosen poetical postcard.  (Let us pause for a moment to consider a cultural artifact here.  No, not the old-style spelling of sauerkraut.  When, exactly did firehouses become associated with great amounts of food.  This was before the days when firehouse chili or fire department cook-offs became popular.  Just another note to these who are in search of their degrees: a thesis topic that could please and help them toward their Ph.D.s.  There: a free poem with no postcard attached.  Now where were we?)

     Postcards remarking on a fisherman’s inability to catch fish or a hunter’s failure to bring home anything but an appetite are legion.  But it takes a poet to really show it.  (No charge for that couplet, either.)

     But the bestsellers were probably the simple, basic digs.  Here is a fine old leather postcard which states things as simply as possible, so you could send your regards to anyone at all, at all.

Dutch Rhymes

     Okay, we have tiptoed around the subject long enough.  We looked over the Dutch kids postcards in a couple of columns recently, and we discussed postcard verse.  But we have, except very briefly, evaded the subject of Dutch kids and poetry on postcards.  We will repair this omission today.

     As you may recall from previous episodes, the craze for postcards featuring Dutch kids (or, to be precise, kids dressed in Dutch costume and speaking whatever the postcard artist considered a Dutch accent, usually Pennsylvania Dutch, which was derived from German) prevailed mainly in the 1910s, with numerous postcard companies and artists and some business ads getting in on the trend.  So far, no one has explained this to me, but this was an era when the united States was celebrating its diverse ethnic makeup by making fun of it.  Much (not all) of this funning was good-natured, since immigrants bought postcards, too, and there was no sense offending a possible customer.  This was especially acceptable, apparently, if the immigrant characters were children, as cuteness can sometimes defeat the general xenophobias of the human species.  Sometimes, as seen in the postcard at the top of the column, the immigrant’s plight could be used by anybody who had moved to a new place and felt lonely

     It also, as mentioned hereintofore, made for a way to state an obvious truth if you adapted it to an accent and put it in the mouth of a child.  The sentiment here has an edge, which we enjoy even more because we have figured out the accent on our way to the punchline.  (Giving your readers a chance to pat themselves on the back is good business.)

     Of course, poetry was frequently employed in the cause of love, and the Dutch kids were very interested in the subject.  This young lady is fairly modern ion her knowledge of germ theory, and romantic warfare.

     This poet has taken the easy rhyme, using no real dialect in it, but if is short and simple.

     But one subject which always moved the Dutch kids to verse was correspondence.  The whole subgenre of “Sorry I Haven’t Written lately” and “How Come You Haven’t Written Lately” brought on numerous odes.  (Note the use not only of Dutch dialect, but the pale blue and white tones associated with Dutch tiles.  Not missing a trick here.)

     The modern world, with its technological communication systems, offered a substitute, of course.  (Of, what if our ancestors had been able to text each other?  Why would the acronyms of textlingo have looked like if they had been mixed with Dutch Kid Language?)

     And, of course, the unhappy child with an accent made nagging about such things acceptable.  Could you get angry when confronted with a complain like this?

     Or a heartfelt outpouring like this one?

     This young lady goes even further, diagnosing the problem and offering a remedy.  I am sure she went far in the brave new world of the twentieth century, even if in her case it was an accentury.

Hard Thinking

     It is Monday, and time for another old joke quiz.  The theme for this Monday is one which has perhaps changed its name with the new century.  Once these were known as moron jokes, or dumbbell jokes, or some such.  I prefer, as someone who has frequently decided to save time by washing the dinner dishes before making dinner, to think of these as Original Thinkers.  The answers, for those of you, er, original thinkers out there, will be found at the end.

J1.”I think this package is for this address, but the name is obliterated.”

     “Can’t be for me, then.  (          )”

J2.”This,” said the real estate dealer, “Is a house without a flaw.”

     “Heavens!” said Maggie, “(          )”

J3.”Can you help me look for a twenty dollar bill?  I dropped it on the corner of Walton and Clark.”

     “If you dropped it over there, why are you looking here?”

     “(          )”

J4.Pete stood on the corner of Dearborn and Oak, opening and closing an umbrella while shouting “Pro sec ter qua!”

     “What are you doing?” Jason inquired.

     “This is an old Scottish spell,” Pete told him. “It keeps tigers away.”

     “There aren’t any tigers for miles around here,” said Jason.

     Pete said, “(          ).”

J5.”I’d like two pounds of birdseed, please.”

     “Certainly, Madame.  What kind?”

     “Well, I’d like (         ).”

J6.”Gosh, Terwilliger, it’s been twenty years at least since I saw you!  You’ve changed.  You’ve gotten a hair transplant, and lost about forty pounds, and I guess it must have taken three or four surgeries to fic up that old nose, eh?”

     “My name’s not Terwilliger.”

     “Gosh!  (          ).”

J7.”You have your socks on inside-out.”

     “I know.  (          ).”

J8.”Those flashbulbs you sent for my old camera don’t work.”

     “Impossible!  (          ).”

J9.”Nice flowers.”

     “Yep, I bought ‘em for Ma.  I’m writing a note to go with them now.  ‘Dear Ma: HJere are….”

     “My mom likes roses, too.”

      “Huh!  You don’t know anything about biography.  Those are chrysanthemums.”

     “I know roses when I see ‘em.”

     “Well, they’re chrysanthemums.”

     “How will you write that in your note?””

     “Like anybody else.  C-R-I…C-H-R-I…C-K-H…hey! (          )”

J10.”Why did you knit three socks?”

     “They’re for my brother in the Army.  He wrote to say (          ).”

J11.Ty and Gar were rehabbing an old house.  As Ty measured the boards, Gar brought out the hammers and nails.  Studying the bucket of nails, he frowned, and then started to throw some on the floor.

     “What are you up to?” Ty demanded.

     “You got gypped,” Gar told him.  “Half these nails are pointing the wrong way!”

     Ty came over and looked.  “You sap,” he said.  “(          ).”

I know, I know.  Most of us don’t need to read the ANSWERS but any excuse to make Monday go faster.

     A1.My name’s O’Brien.

     A2.What do you walk on?

     A3.The light’s better here.

     A4.See?  It works!  (Scholars would insist on pointing out the set-up line “There are no tigers in Scotland” as a suitable alternative, but we’re not scholars.)

     A5.to grow robins and bluebirds

     A6.You’ve changed your name, too?

     A7.There’s a hole on the outside

     A8.I tried them all out before I sent them

     A9.What do you know?  They ARE roses!

     A10.He’s grown a foot since he signed up

     A11.These are the nails for the other wall!

GGA Rhyme Scheme

     ‘Tis Spring, or so they tell me.  Living in the Midwest, we all know it isn’t REALLY Spring until we have put our winter coats away for the season…for the fourth time.  (My personal record for winter coat wearing is June fifteenth, but they aren’t making summers the way they used to.)

     In any case, spring is a time for flowers and joy and poetry.  In the days when newspapers published poetry regularly, the staff poets as well as those who wrote in to the editor with verse would be filling column space with sonnets and odes which treated spring once again with rhymes and images exactly like the ones they’d used last year.  And the year before that.  (Spring is a time of rebirth.)

     It has been a while since we have discussed postcard verse in this space, so I thought I’d see what new couplets and quatrains had appeared in my inventory since last time.  And I was shocked—SHOCKED, I say—by the number of poems which appeared simply as an excuse for another picture of a woman.  Postcard companies were run by people who knew what the market wanted and poetry ran a distant second to what is known to collectors as GGA, or Good Girl Art.  (I have never understood this, myself.  What’s Bad Girl Art then, I wonder to myself.  Bad poetry I can figure out, but…well, let’s move on.)

     I seem to recall there was a term for the sort of verse illustrated at the top of this column: verse that rhymes but follows no particular meter or rhythmic design.  I don’t THINK it was “crummy”, but it weas something like that.

     We have met this young lady and noted her rhymes before, but she was in the bathtub those other times, and here she is more securely clad, if only for a few more seconds.

     Here we have a postcard on which the picture and the poem perfectly match.  They are pretty and pleasant…and the more you look at them the more you notice they don’t quite work.

     But the postcard companies kept trying to give us women and song suitable to go with our wine.  Even the Dutch kids got in on the poems and pretty faces genre.

     Of course, the naysayers had their day, too.  Postcards describing the falsely fair were available as well.

     And here is an early attack on the health food industry.  (As well as another insult to those of us with natural beauty spots.)

     Romance, however, motivated most of these poems, which sometimes necessitated the presence of a man to contemplate the women involved.

     Occupying his mind even when they were not present and he had other things he ought to be working on.

     Timid and unsure, these men approached the objects of their affection with trembling knees and shaky verse.

     The truly timid had only pipe dreams of pretty faces to rely upon, waiting in sorry solitude for Leap year, when a woman could propose to them.

     The result, of course, was exquisite happiness, which the postcard poets were overjoyed to celebrate.

     Kind of a pity they went on rhyming after that.    

And What Became of Maa?

     It is always an accident when this column is insightful.  (Who invented that word, by the by?  Was there really no other word that could fill that space?  We could use…no, we are NO going to use this space being insightful about insightful.  It seems rather insightless.)

     In any case, I was just thinking about how much our lives are tied in with advertising.  There was a time, centuries ago, when things didn’t have brand names.  Oh, maybe Otto the butcher put more bread in his sausages than Maxwell the butcher, but that was as far as it went.  And even that was dependent on whether you lived in a town big enough to have two butchers, or any butchers at all.  (You’d have to make your own sausage.)  But nowadays, we are fixed in our brands.  Certain brands bring nostalgic memories to certain generations: Keds, red Goose, Nike, Buster Brown…each type of shoes brings around different images for different ages.  But we are not here to be insightful about shoes.  (That word again!)

     No, what brought on these thoughts was an inquiry from a relative who remarked that it was funny how some brands were associated with just one product, and a seasonal one at that.  Specifically, she inquired, “Does Paas make anything besides Easter egg dye kits?”

     This was something I need to know, and since I spent all of five or sizx minutes on this, I wanted to pass along what I learned.  No.  Paas makes only Easter egg dyeing kits.  It is, of course, now a part of a larger company, but once upon a time….

     William Townley was one of THOSE guys: a tinkerer looking to invent something to make people’s lives easier generally, and his own easier by making him a bunch of money.  He was of a chemical turn of mind, and was interested in home dyeing kits, since making and dyeing your own clothes was a laborious process.  He figured out a way to compress dyes into tablets, which could be awakened and used with the proper mixture of water and vinegar (and probably  in the beginning, other things.)  For some reason, however, the most popular use for these dye tablets was Easter eggs.  Maybe it was the colors he could produce, maybe it was the size of the tablet needed to dye a few shirts—I couldn’t find that out—but eggs seemed to be the easiest things to dye using his kits.

     As it happens, William ran a drugstore in New Jersey easily accessible to immigrants who came from countries where easter eggs were highly traditional.  The name “Paas” came about because it is the first syllable in the word easter in a number of languages, though the Dutch immigrants who celebrated Pasen get direct credit for Townley’s trade name.  Within eight years, just after the turn of a new century. He had 27 full-time employees in his plant making his dye tablets and/or producing egg dyeing kits.  He was also good at inventing advertising campaigns, and is said to be a motivating force behind convincing Americans of every ethnicity that Easter eggs were fun and Eastery.  (I could explain why eggs are symbolic of Easter, but chances are you can figure this out by yourself and, anyway, I don’t want to be accused of being insightful again.)

     The Townley family ran the company for several decades, but I cannot find out whether they are still involved, now that it belongs to a conglomerate.  Whatever marketing mind is behind it, there are about two dozen different kits now (some involving shrinkwrap designs you microwave around your hardboiled eggs instead of those messy dyes.)  And some ten million kits are sold every spring.

     We never bought those, by the way.  We used the non-branded alternative, as many people did, using water, vinegar, and drops of the liquid food coloring our mother bought for year-round use.  AND a white crayon, since the wax from the crayon repelled the dye, allowing you to write and draw on the eggs (we were seldom trusted with that job.  I’m surprised we were trusted with the dyes, since we learned early how to mix the red, yellow, and blue to make purple, orange, green, or, by mixing, as we always did, all the colors together, a muddy grayish brown that someone—possibly my mother—dubbed “blar”.  If you NEED to know how this worked, we would leave the finished eggs in the refrigerator so the Easter Bunny could take them out again and hide them, after first setting up those baskets filled with Peeps, Palmer bunnies, and jelly bird eggs.  I WAS going to discuss a history of Palmer (and Frankfort) chocolate bunnies, Peeps, and why the heck were they “jelly bird eggs”, but I think this is enough holiday-specific brand insightfulness for one day.)