Promises, Promises

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I have a very bad habit of singing old commercial jingles over and over again. Especially when I’m using some similar product. Or just walking down the street. Sometimes when I brush my teeth I’ll hum, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” Even though I’m using Crest. Afterwards, when I’m washing the sink, “Ajax, bumbum..the foaming cleanser, wash that dirt right down the drain. You’ll stop paying the elbow tx, when you start cleaning with Ajax.” It’s sometimes annoying enough that someone will relieve me of my task. Or divorce me. Remember Castro Convertible sofas? “So easy even a child can do it.” The last time I tried to open one, I pulled my back out. Best leave that to the children, I’ve since decided.

My dad once won a contest for creating a jingle for Blue Bonnet Margarine. I wish I could remember what it said. He was a big fan of margarine. He thought margarine was going to save him from high blood pressure or alcoholic dementia. My mother, on the other hand, believed the tag line on our favorite bakery in Roslyn. Butter Makes It Better. It turns out margarine isn’t so good for you. And neither is butter. Nevertheless, both my parents made it into their 90s.

Anyway, the prize for the best BBM jingle was free art classes in New York City. Dad wasn’t interested. So my mom and I got to take the train into The City a couple of times and take free art lessons. I must have been less than 5 years old. I remember being told the cat I drew didn’t look like a cat. Which I’m sure was true, and is probably why I have always hated cats and preferred Picasso.

We stopped at the bakery and bought blueberry muffins for a picnic on the train. That is a much more pleasant memory than the art classes. We’d unwrap our muffins, carefully pick the blueberries out of the muffins and eat them one by one. I don’t recall if my mom had coffee to wash them down, but if she did it was probably Chock Full o’ Nuts. “The heavenly Coffee. Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.” That was before Starbucks.

While I do think some of today’s commercials are pretty cool, especially now that they’ve co-opted all our old songs from the 60s and 70s, I like the catchy jingles from long ago that worm around in my brain. “Mr Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute. Mr Clean will clean your whole house and everything that’s in it!” So where is that guy, anyway? Promises, promises.

Dishes in the Dishwasher, Please!

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Where did I go wrong?
Now the breakfast dish is left on the counter,
The ice cream bowl from the night before put in the sink with no water.
The peanut butter knife put in the dishwasher, but not rinsed.

I tell him – he needs to rinse dishes before placing them in the dishwasher.
These entreaties go unanswered. Why?
He read on the Internet that dishes don’t need to be rinsed first.

That might work – if the dishwasher weren’t 34 years old,
If we washed dishes every night. If things didn’t have food stuck on them, including dairy products that
REEK!

 

RetroFlash – 100 words

 

A Little Dab’ll Do Ya!

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First, to set the scene: My dad and I are sitting on the couch on a Friday night (a Friday night that we don’t go to the synagogue for Shabbat services), and it’s time for the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports’ Friday Night Fights on TV. My dad, first in his family to go to college and get his doctorate, lived a life immersed in theater and surrounded by actors. Did two guys in shiny trunks slugging it out in in the ring in front of a noisy crowd at Madison Square Garden represent just another kind of theater to him? I don’t know the answer, but he watched the fights religiously, unless he was doing his other usual Friday night activity–also religiously, but in a different way. He may have studied the sweet science at some point, or at least he knew enough about it to call out the punches and “oof” appreciatively when a right cross or a left hook landed especially hard. Did he know the Marquess of Queensbury rules? I don’t know. Maybe he just liked watching these fights the same way he liked watching baseball. It’s a thing you can appreciate for what it is without ever having done it.

Since the biggest share of the Friday Night Fights audience was likely male, the commercials were about things for men: Brylcreem, Gillette razors, and Hamm’s (the beer refreshing). The Hamm’s commercial featured a steady tom-tom beat (DUM da da da, DUM da da da) that was the background for the jingle that began, “From the land of sky blue wa-a-ters…” One night as we sat at the dinner table, my sister and I started doing the back beat and my dad sang the jingle. We thought it was hilarious. My mom: not so much.

I think my favorite part of the Brylcreem commercial was when the male and female animated dolls appeared. I loved her long pony tail! (I cannot imagine what the real man’s hair felt like when it was completely slicked down with grease! Who would want to run their fingers through that hair?) Was he also an Aqua Velva man, or did he use Old Spice like my dad? Little girls didn’t really understand why people used some of these products if the end result meant getting your hair messed up or worse!

My other favorite commercials were for Gillette razors. There was a parrot involved, which always adds to the entertainment level. The theme song  (“To Look Sharp”)  was stirring, as demonstrated here by no less than the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Looking at some of these old commercials, it’s interesting how LONG they were. We’re so accustomed to pop-up ads and quick, to-the-point messaging, some of these old ones seem endless! But even so, many of them were entertaining and went beyond just plugging a product. I do remember singing along with Dinah Shore when she sang “See the USA in a Chevrolet!”–especially after my parents bought our 1958 fire engine red Chevy station wagon, which we proceeded to drive cross country from Detroit to the Bay Area, which is a story for another time.

 

And to wrap this up with another boxing reference, complete with Farfel the dog, I leave you with Nestle’s Quick. N-E-S-T-L-E-S…Nestle’s makes the very best….chocolate!