Tuesday, April 4, 2017

the Mattel women of my era

I'm probably setting myself up for a shellacking but...

Reading the news wires in the afternoon -- my second reading of the day -- I skim more than read, since many of the stories haven't changed much since the morning visit. But this afternoon, skimming here and there on the BBC, one of the medium-consequential sources in my book, I found myself inescapably sensing that all the pictures of pretty women looked as if I had stumbled into a Mattel plastics factory.

Plastic family members.

Look-alikes.

Stamped out by some plastic-extrusion device.

And the tacked-on hair!!!

Marshmallows.

It was a bit like when I was a kid and people would idly remark that you couldn't tell oriental people apart. (My mother had a Japanese friend during WWII who once agreed that even oriental people had some difficulty.)

When I caught myself in this broad-brush generalization about pretty women of my era, I was dutifully hangdog ... what a broad-brush generalization! And yet, there was no NOT thinking of a purple cow once having thought it. Obviously they didn't all look exactly alike and were not, somehow as flavorless as my mind portrayed them, but still....

I suppose I could look up their names and post them under the picture, but the difficulty of putting the right name with the right face kind of wears me out.

I do remember that the teller who waited on me in the bank this morning had a lovely face and smile and delivery. She was, in my eye, a looker with substance: Mrs. Chu. Oh well, I guess I'm a sucker for orientals.








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