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| That horse must smell awesome to get a girl like that. |
When I was fourteen, I (like every other fourteen year old, but no other seventeen year old) read 17 Magazine. Well, not the magazine itself, but the ads! Those wonderful, pink and frilly ads that made me wish I could transport my life into that of a upper-middle class girl who wore Love's Baby Soft and Gunne Sax dresses, rode perfumed horses to prom, and dreamed of her upcoming nuptials (to either Morris Day or Kevin Cronin...whoever asked her first) at the edge of her canopy bed while seated atop a Lane's Hope Chest. Those Hope Chests were confusing. I knew I wanted one...like really wanted one...but I had no idea why because I didn't know what the holy heck a hope chest was. I asked my mother, and she said, "They're for teenage girls to put linens and towels and stuff like that in for their wedding." Got it. I would need towels for my wedding, and if I didn't start putting them in an expensive box now, at fourteen, I was horribly behind the game.
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| This towel is already making my friends bitterly jealous. Thanks Lane! |
Of course I didn't actually ask for one. That would be stupid. My mother would sooner buy me a perfumed horse than an expensive box for my wedding towels. But I decided that I would one day buy my daughter a Lane Hope Chest, and a perfumed horse. The problem with that plan soon revealed itself twenty years later when, fully knocked-up with the daughter in question, I finally got married. If I had gotten a Lane Hope Chest at the age of fourteen what good would it have done me and my blushing groom? On the odd chance that my mother hadn't sold the thing a decade earlier at a yard sale, it still would've been filled with a bunch of Tiger Beats, a magazine-clipping-on-poster-board collage (heavy on the Reo Speedwagon and Purple Rain, of course), and one Laura Ashley sheet (not set, but sheet), reeking of mold and a Love's Baby Soft knockoff called Burt's Baby Smell. Totally useless! (Except for that collage. I really want it for the bare spot in my entry way.)
I did a little research and found that, in older-gal magazines like Redbook and Vogue, the ads suggested a girl wait until she got engaged before getting a Lane...and then it should be gifted to her by her betrothed. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Lane is still in business, I'm sure those ads failed miserably. What man wants to buy romantic furniture? And even if he did, if I, a fourteen year old girl, didn't really get the whole idea behind a hope chest, what hope did a thirty-year-old man have? None. No. It makes no sense. Lane must be some sort of front for a smuggling-heroin-in-cedar-hope-chests ring...or possibly an illegal alien border crossing operation. And they nearly got away with it, too...if it weren't for the intrepid musings of one formerly fourteen-year-old girl.
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| Oh! Lane sells other furniture too? Also packed with heroin? Or just the hope chests? |
Now that I have a daughter who, at six, is already starting to plan her own wedding (to the cat or her imaginary alien friend...whoever asks her first), my stance on hope chests has changed. If, in seven years, she comes to me and asks me what hope chests are for, I will say, "They are for mob guys who want to smuggle heroin into countries with strict anti-drug laws, Sweetie." The problem is that if 17 Magazine still runs ads for those things, she will want one...and she'll want one bad! Great. I'll have to be the big meanie to tell her no because, whether they are filled with drugs, towels or illegal immigrants, expensive boxes are a waste of time, space and money. If she wants a perfumed horse, though.... I might consider it. Those things could be useful as hell...especially during prom season.
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| Well baby, I've got you, a bunch of towels, some heroin, a new gardener and a super-sweet collage all wrapped up in cellophane. Now if only we didn't need oxygen to live. Choke...gasp..... |
