Sylvia Goes Down Memory Lane…and, revisits “The Stepford Wives”.

Hope everyone is staying warm and dry in the crazy leftover winter weather. Welcome spring, but can’t you be warmer?

A few years ago I was out antiquing up near Steven’s Pass and found a scrap book filled with assorted magazine clippings from the 40’sand 50’s. It looked like a kind of dream book. The artist probably just cut out things that they liked. No notes or words as to why they liked the pictures or even reasons for the pictures. It is not the normal scrapbook of specific memories; I think it is a book a dreams. Basically it ranges from pictures of ladies making the bed to pictures of random desserts and everything in-between. All of them probably clipped from a Ladies Home Journal or Better Homes and Gardens throughout the two decades. Page by page it is just picture after picture. No real rhyme or reason.

My scrap book came up when I read an article about another scrapbook that has just been published. It’s done by Cecil Beaton. Cecil Beaton was a famed photographer and the name of the book is The Art of the Scrapbook. I guess there are several editions. As one of the 20th century’s most important photographers, Cecil Beaton documented lives both famous and quotidian in dozens of scrapbooks now held by Sotheby’s London. In the course of his decades-long career as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as a British war correspondent, Beaton helped invent the cult of the celebrity image. In these pages, reproduced here for the first time, you enter a fabulous and surreal party where Tallulah Bankhead rubs shoulders with a bust of Voltaire and a portrait of Stravinsky, and where Beaton’s first trip on the Queen Mary coincides with Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

When I read about his book it made me think of doing some scrapbooking myself. Perhaps I can create a scrap book of my early days in Seattle. I have an autograph book from Brunch that I used to have people sign…perhaps I will combine them? Make a new one? Oh my, I’ll get out my crafting glue and scissors! Maybe even join a scrapbooking club!  The possibilities are endless!

I have also been invited to host one of the Central Cinema Favorite Series nights on April 13. They will be showing one of my favorite movies The Stepford Wives. So come out and join in watching this great classic film.  One of my favorite movies to watch as a teenager was the ORIGINAL Stepford Wives. I’m not sure why I liked it so much, probably because this was my life growing up in Mormon suburbia without the sexiness factor. All the women drove these huge station wagons, wore long conservative dresses and had potluck casseroles to welcome the new families to the new suburban homes. It was expected for women to be ready to step in and handle things as perfect housewives. It all seemed so normal yet not so abnormal to me. I grew up with a mother who was never really happy with the housewife role so it seemed that, Joanna, the main character fit mom kind of closely.  I didn’t really appreciate all the levels in the movie until I was much older. All I saw, in my view, was robot women walking around with an underlying evil factor. I love that. This totally made sense in my world growing up. It really made shopping at the local supermarket store much more fun. I read the book a few years ago and was struck how closing the original movie followed the book. I was able to play the part of Carol Vansant in one of the first Brown Derby theater shows. Carol was the perfect neighbor lady who is the first to short circuit after she accidentally backs into another station wagon. So this is what you get from this movie: pretty fembots that could change into killers at any minute, a tale of perfect 70’s suburbia that is not so perfect, a whole cornucopia of great huge 70’s station wagons hurling straight at each other. What more could you want? So if you are interested come on out to Central Cinema on the 13.

Well Thanks everyone for dropping by. Hope you have a wonderful week and we hope to see you at Bizarro Bacon Strip This Saturday, 10:30 pm at Re-bar!