THE PAGE TURNS

December 2, 2024December 4, 2024

Mom’s China

“I can’t find the rest of these crystal glasses,” KK says, lying on the kitchen floor, one arm buried deep in a cabinet. There are rattling noises, and she keeps shining her phone’s flashlight deep into the Underworld of our kitchenware. “This is all the Rosenthal stuff.”

Two pieces of the remaining Rosenthal set. All photos by kajmeister, exc. Wedgwood medallion.

My mom received a set of Rosenthal china as a wedding present. When she died in 1997, I ended up with it. Most of it I stored, but I kept a platter out among our other fancy buffet dishes. A few holidays ago, when it was pulled out for use, the platter cracked neatly in half, which has made me loathe to use any other pieces.

As we were making Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings this year, pulling out the special bowl to mix stuffing and another bowl to sport cranberries, I realized that there’s a big gap between what I would use for a dinner party and what my mom would use. Not that strange these days, of course, my kids would say, “dinner party, WTF?” But the idea of hauling out a single set of matching delicate dishes for a meal seems bizarre, even on a special holiday with people you care about.

There is a history for things like Rosenthal china, a company history and a personal history. These things intersect and create waves of overlapping interference, like in a pond. This may explain why we have such a patchwork quilt of dishes when we serve dinner, all of which are precious.

November 26, 2024November 26, 2024

The Mother of Thanksgiving

Author’s Note: This post is a few years old, but I can’t improve on the “true story” of Thanksgiving. Other than to say she apparently lobbied for pumpkin pie, but that’s another story.

Sarah Josepha Hale, engraving from Library of Congress

Mary had a turkey browned
From three hours in the oven
Her guests were drooling all the while
For gravy and the stuffin’
Hale’s famous poem, variation by kajmeister

Perhaps Americans would still have invented Thanksgiving without Sarah Josepha Hale. After all, proclamations of Thanksgiving had been declared by the Continental Congresses by Samuel Adams and John Hanson and the like:

It being the indispensable duty of all nations, not only to offer up their supplications to Almighty God, the giver of all good, for His gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner, to give Him praise for His goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of His Providence in their behalf; therefore, the United States in Congress assembled, taking into their consideration the many instances of Divine goodness to these States in the course of the important conflict, in which they have been so long engaged and so on and so forth etcetera etcetera etcetera…
November 1782, text for the Thanksgiving or National Prayer Day observation (Wikipedia)

That seems a rather dry plateful of harvest to start with, taking some 250 words until it even gets to the Thanksgiving part of the equation. Why, there’s hardly any gravy at all, although there does seem to be quite a bit of lard in it, so maybe the pies were flaky.

October 17, 2024October 18, 2024

The Revolution Will Be Televised and (Saturday Night) Live

Movie poster from Saturday Night, by Sony pictures.

In October of 1975, most of the popular shows on television looked backward. The country was emerging from the chaos of the Vietnam War, the fall of the Nixon administration, economic misery, and civil rights protests. It should not be a surprise that the most watched shows were things like Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, and the Waltons — misty-eyed nostalgia for the fun of the malt shop, the slapstick antics of the gals at the bottling plant, and the family bliss of the good ol’ Depression days. There were some controversial shows as well. A few groundbreaking comedies–All in the Family, MASH, Maude, and Mary Tyler Moore–all pushed the envelope in different ways. But more shows yearned for simpler times.

This was the environment in which Lorne Michaels pitched the idea of Saturday Night Live to NBC executives. The movie Saturday Night describes those precarious ninety minutes before the show first went on the air, when maybe it still might not have made it to the air. It’s a suspense-filled narrative, as Michaels (Gabriel Labelle) struggles with technical problems, network pressures, friction among the cast, too much content, and an impending sense of doom. If you’re under forty, you’ll find the behind-the-scenes narrative fascinating and wonder how the chuckleheads ever got this thing in front of the American public. But if you’re old enough to remember the times, you’ll find it holds a mirror up to what those times were really like. Some of the reviews which have criticized the movie as too mild were clearly written by those who don’t remember. I do.