As most of you know, I also write for a website called Purple Clover. I know. You can't get the eff away from me. I also edit my company's newsletter. Soon I'll be writing your entire local newspaper (your sports section should be riveting), all the greeting cards at your Hallmark and the Christmas letters from everyone you know. My point is, on Monday I have to float a new column idea for my editor at Purple Clover, and I really just like to say "my editor."
I've been writing for them for 34? 35? weeks now, and coming up with a new idea is not easy. Sometimes I write my editor and he says, yeah, you know what? Not so much with your stupid idea, June. And that is what he did this week, and that is why I am instead writing here, where no one pays me and you're stuck with whatever cockamamie thing I want to write each day.
But that's not important right now. It's a big building with patients. But that's not important right now.
Who will never, ever get over that movie? Is it me? Could I watch that movie every day and still giggle at it? Yes. Yes, I could.
What's IMPORTANT is that I am going to write here what my editor rejected yesterday. So without any more ados, here it is.
The Perfumes I Wore in This Life, and the Memories They Bring
I KNOW! I think it's a fine idea, too. What do editors know?
The first perfume I really wore in earnest was Love's Baby Soft, which by the way I still own because I saw it at the drug store and peed myself, like how sometimes Edsel gets so happy he pees his leg. It was really just like that. If I had a tail, I'd have wagged it.
I fell for they way the advertised the shit out of Love's Baby Soft in all the hard-hitting magazines I read at the time: Teen, Young Miss, Seventeen. Basically I just read magazines that mentioned my age range. Now my magazines politely abstain from that. I read Vanity Fair and Allure and so on. They don't call themselves Old-n-Haggard, Put Away Wet or DroopAss. Although if they came out with a magazine called DroopAss, I would so check that out. Maybe I'll start my own magazine. I think I'd be good at it. And there'd be another thing I wrote that you're stuck reading.
"Is there ANY column, ANYWHERE, that doesn't use the phrase ding-dang?"
This greeting comes to you with a little bit of cheer, and a lot of ding-dang love cause you lived again this year. Happy birthday, Grandma! I love your droop ass!
Anyway.
I loved me the Love's Baby Soft. I used the spray, and the shampoo, God help us, and the powder. I must have burst into every room smelling of diaper rash. The whole thing reminds me of being 14, lip glossed to the nth degree, and convinced I looked as hot as those pedophile's dream women up there in the ads.
I know I've mentioned this before, that I wore Gloria Vanderbilt perfume in high school. There was a very 1980s overdone commercial that came on during General Hospital, where they said, "Gloria Vanderbilt perfume. Let it release the splendor of you." I was CONVINCED you all needed the splendor of me released, that your lives would not be COMPLETE until the splendor of me was evident for the world to smell.
Oh, HELL YES. Here it is again.
"Break free and feel how splendid you are." I had no trouble breaking free and feeling how splendid I was, with my 16-year-old self.
By the way, here. Here was the splendor of me, in 1981. Break free. And wear a tube top.
I am sorry to tell you that I also was a woman who was ready to start something. Usually a kegger.
I got Tatiana for Christmas in 10th grade, and Christmas of 10th grade is also the first time I ever fell in love, with Giovanni Leftwich, one of my high school boyfriends. I do like to open this up and sniff it if I ever see it in a store, because I was over-the-moon smitten during that time.
Two months later, the deep love affair with Giovanni was over, but the Tatiana lingered.
What the hell was wrong with us in the mid-80s? This ad is ridiculous. "Pull my finger. With your teeth."
I wore Obsession for YEARS. I loved it. It reminds me of college parties, and getting my perm ready for a big night out. You had to just tip the bottle on your finger, so then some naked blue man could suck on it, and I can tell you you don't want to put on your Obsession and THEN your contacts. Other way around, sister. Little tip for ya.
I stayed true to Calvin Klein in the '90s and wore the unisex CK One, as did everyone else on Planet Earth. I remember being at this club in Seattle, the kind of club that had a mosh pit, and the entire room smelled of CK One. I still kind of like how it smells. And, in a weird coincidence, I met one of the people in this ad when I lived in LA. I will not say who, because I am subtle. Like CK One.
In the early 2000s, I went online and took this long, elaborate quiz and had this company make perfume for me. It was really fun, and they asked questions like which of these smells do you like. Place them in order. And the choices were fresh-cut grass, biscuits and honey, baby powder, a spice store. Anyway, for some inordinate amount of money, they made me my own fragrance and it was the best perfume I ever owned. I used it all up and when I went back, the website was gone.
Then I got into Demeter fragrances for awhile. Look them up. They have all kinds of weird scents like Funeral Home and Laundry and Play-Doh. I combined Earl Grey Tea and Sugar Cookie, and I liked to think I smelled like teatime, but I probably just smelled like a lunatic. Let it release the splendor of me. This was during a time Marvin and I were happy, and we were making a good living between us, and we lived in a really cool neighborhood in a really wonderful place, and basically I was content as shit. I was convinced I had this life thing figured out. I think if I smelled those scents now I'd smile.
When Marvin and I moved here to North Carolina, I had a huge stupid terrifying health scare, and Marvin's aunt sent me a bottle of Joy Perfume. She knew I'd always wanted some, because when I was about eight years old I saw an ad that it was the costliest perfume in the world, which naturally made me WANT IT MORE THAN ANYTHING.
They should study me. I think no one falls for advertising harder than me.
The point is, to cheer me after my scare, she sent me this, and it smells wonderful, and it doesn't make my throat close up like most perfumes. I still have it and it hasn't turned. I try to save it for special occasions.
I know. She bugs the CRAP out of me, too. But dammit, her perfume smells wonderful. I have a couple bottles of perfume that I rotate right now: a vanilla bourbon, the Joy, some carmel stuff Ned got me last year. But every time I whip out Taylor Swift, Ned says, "Wow, you smell really good" and I tell him it's Taylor Swift again and he says, "SONOFABITCH, really?" We cannot help it. Taylor Swift. Her scent is a siren song.
So there it is. I don't know why MY EDITOR balked at this topic, because you know you stayed riveted to the very end.
For all. For ever.
June
