Formerly that-cedric-guy-in-enchancia 🎶 Come backstage and see what awaits you! 🎶 All the little things I love and more! If it catches my fancy, you'll find it here. 🔯 Future Convert to Judaism 🔯 ❤ Certified Safe Space ❤ 🔯 Inactive during Shabbat 🔯
They literally only exist so much because baby boomers liked how pretty they were and didn’t care that they were disgusting. By the 90s grocery stores routinely bought them and threw them away.
“…the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.” -Sarah Yager, The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious
Today’s comic was inspired by friend whose young daughter was frightened to decorate for Hanukkah after the horrible Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. So I’m decorating (and posting this cartoon) in solidarity.
☮️💟
Bonus Panel
During the Victorian era, fancy dress balls were one of the grandest and most fashionable ways for a society hostess to make her mark. These magnificent, costumed affairs were widely reported in 19th century newspapers, with a great deal of attention paid to who was wearing what. Guests dressed up as historical figures such as Marie Antoinette or Napoleon. They also wore more creative costumes—many of which were recommended in fancy dress advice manuals and costume books.
Following up to this post, here’s a fantastic look at Victorian “fancy dress balls”–they were all the rage at the time, but really picked up in the later half of the century where the focus was more on self-expression than hiding oneself, as was the case at 18th-century masquerades (Phantom hearkens back to this earlier tradition, but the idea of a masquerade hiding one’s true identity also works perfectly for its theatrical setting).
Here are some wackier costumes from fancy dress balls. I’m in love with this one:
And look! A bee!
Here’s a fashion plate with some costume ideas from across the centuries (and of course, we wouldn’t be in the Victorian era if there weren’t a bit of tone-deaf cultural appropriation with the Native American costume.):
It was actually common for women to wear shorter skirts at these balls so they could show off their fabulous boots (as you see above, and as is the case with Christine’s stage version of the Star Princess dress):
Depending on your host, masks of all kinds were welcome, so you were free to be as unsettlingly disturbing as you wanted while you lounged by the punch bowl and made rabbit eyes at the eligible young heiress whose hand in marriage comes with fifty thousand pounds a year and a lifetime of resentment because women’s rights didn’t exist yet:
Suppose you can’t make it to the most fashionable balls London or Paris this season. If it’s 1883 and you are Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and happen to have $6 million of disposable income at your fingertips, why not throw your own fancy dress ball for New York City’s elite (and spend millions on champagne alone)? And why don’t you one-up every single one of your guests by dressing as that most wondrous of new inventions, Edison’s electric light? I defy the Rockefellers to steal your spotlight when the spotlight in question could very easily electrocute them.
Like flowers? Of course you do. Like spring? Oh, my God, do you ever. Like pretending you’re but a mere shepherdess, giggling and flouncing away from the advances of the blacksmith’s apprentice? GOOD LORD, YES. Like the 18th century? HELL YES, OH MAN, GIMME THAT ROCOCO SPRING FLOWER EXPLOSION:
BUT WAIT! You’re not gonna let that Rococo Spring Flower Explosion HARLOT flounce away with your suitor, are you? HELL NO, YOU ARE NOT. Which is why you are prepared to send her running dressed as a GORGEOUS FREAKING BUTTERFLY:
But where would a butterfly be without a lovely flower upon which to perch? Enter your secret lesbian lover, the Rose:
Or, if you’re uncomfortable with NOT being the center of attention every waking moment, you could just pull the equivalent of one-upping the bride at a wedding by wearing white and come dressed as the DAMN SUN:
But maybe you’re more of the goth persuasion. Might I suggest a tasteful sorceress?
A dainty Batman ensemble to match your wife’s delicate moth angel gown?
Vampire mistress of the night, perhaps?
Actually, bat motifs were an extremely popular costume option, not just in the 19th century, but also at 18th century balls:
But if it’s 1880 and you want to carry on grandma’s bat tradition, this might be a more modern take on a pocket-sized blood-sucking demon:
Or this:
You are so thrilled to attend the costume ball like the goth nightmare you are, you can hardly contain your enthusiasm:
Here is a tastefully acceptable take on Satan. Might I sample your punch, Mrs. Higgenbottom, before I make away with your soul?
“Oh, Ella!”
“Yes, Constance?”
“Oh, I do so love your seagull gown.”
“Oh, why thank you, my dear friend!”
“But I’ve not the slightest idea what I shall wear to the ball!”
“Why, Constance, it is a simple matter of identifying something near and dear to your heart and then adapting it into a suitable costume. I, for example, find solace in the sea, particularly in the birds of the sea, and most particularly when they nose-dive into and defecate upon the boat, shrieking like banshees in heat. Hence, the seagulls adorning my gown. What do you like the very most, Constance?”
“MOTHER-EFFING LOBSTERS.”
Or, maybe you’re just a shameless ho and don’t give a brass farthing about showing your ankles, your calves, your thighs, or your hoo-ha at the Embassy Ball, in which case, blaze it:
hey so i don’t wear a hijab and i’m not muslim so i definitely don’t have the authority to answer this question (or any other questions i’ve been getting abt this) (i’m just a lil canadian politics blog i didn’t expect this to blow up lol)
BUT here are some tweets by the original tweeter (who wears a hijab) that clarify some things
This is also good if you’re meeting an Orthodox Jewish person who’s not the same gender as you! Not all Orthodox Jews hold by this restriction, and many consider it a permissible exception to shake hands in a formal greeting context; I’d guess this is parallel to Ms. Soueidan’s last-quoted tweet above. And as that says, the sensible thing is to wait for initiation.
Saying “rest in peace” instead of “may their memory be a blessing” about a Jewish person: a bit of an irritant, as it’s Christian normativity in the midst of mourning, but generally taken in the spirit it’s intended.
Accusing Jewish people who explain that we don’t say “rest in peace” of trying to control the narrative or of telling people they’re mourning wrong or generally of acting in bad faith: at bare minimum it’s incredibly insensitive, but it’s really hard not to read it as an antisemitic microaggression as well.
This applies pretty broadly, I think, to many cultural practices. “Be decent to people” is not that high a standard. If you don’t want to question or even consider how your default is Christian and white and that’s invisible to you, that’s your business and it’s not my job to fix it, but not starting an argument about why that shouldn’t even be brought up costs $0.00 and will make you not look like an asshole.
I just learned that some websites use cookies to adjust prices. That is, if you visit a certain website a lot the price will increase.
You can tell if that’s the case by checking the same web page on a different browser if you have a different number of stored cookies for that site. I checked something on Chegg and it was $14.95 on Chrome, $19.95 on Firefox, and $16.95 on Safari.
When you’re looking for plane tickets and waiting for prices to drop, ALWAYS clear your cookies beforehand and switch between browsers. A friend of mine was looking for a flight and getting prices that were the CHEAPEST at $800-1000, I sent her a link for a round trip that was like $495, and it read as $900 on her computer because she had been hounding the airline site.
This whole NSFW situation is exactly like when America made alcohol illegal in the 1920s to combat rampant alcoholism and it 100% backfired and actually made people drink way MORE and actually made it more accessible. They realized what a mistake they had made and repealed that shit.
i imagine getting my own place all the time and going down to the grocery store early in the morning before everyone else and to the coffee shop and having a really small place with wide windows and lots of plants and shelves of books and a tiny kitchen where i can make tea and noodles and a bed with a pile of blankets and just a place i can make uniquely my own or maybe a place i could share with someone but i just think about this place a lot idk
One of my professors is an extremely famous, well-known painter who has been in galleries since he was a young man in the 80s. He once asked me in class, “Alyssa, what are your dreams and aspirations for the future?”
You should have seen the puzzled look on his face when I described something similar to the post above.
“Why so humble?!” He laughed. “You know you’re talented, right? You could aspire to a lot more than that for sure.”
And I had to take that moment to explain to him that this is what my generation is given, this is how low our standards for happiness have to be. A humble existence, a small piece of the world for ourselves, and comfortable stability are just as out of reach for some of us as fame and reknown was for him in the 80’s. His face went somber immediately.
2087
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romaincrisis
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