Starlet Showcase: food and beverage

Showing posts with label food and beverage. Show all posts

3/4/09

The Buffalo China Party

Photographer Loomis Dean shoots a 1952 Hollywood
party for Life magazine. Everybody who was anybody
was there. So was the Buffalo China. Such heavy-duty
dishware seems a little out of place at this most elegant
gathering, but maybe they were expecting some of it
to get thrown around.

9/29/08

A Cup And A Smoke With Vera Miles

Last week I watched Episode One, Season One (1963) of
The Fugitive. What a great show!
He's on the run from the police for a murder he didn't
commit, but he always stops to help out the ladies.
Bless him.
Vera Miles plays an abused wife that fugitive Richard
Kimble helps out in this first episode. You may remember
that Vera Miles also starred in the very first episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Yes, we have slobbered over Vera Miles before.
Anyway, The Fugitive and Vera sit down and have a cup
of coffee together. And they smoke cigarettes. It sounds
kind of familiar, doesn't it? I love the lighting and the
photography. Of course, I love the black & whiteness, too.

9/6/08

Raise A Glass. . .

Lets drink to the hard working people
Lets drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Lets drink to the salt of the earth

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Lets drink to the uncounted heads
Lets think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio

SALT OF THE EARTH
Rolling Stones

9/5/08

The Buffalo China Saga Continues

8/9/08

Getting Lit With The Starlets

That's Hope Lange on the left and Diane Baker on the
right with Suzy Parker in the middle in 1959's The Best
of Everything. And, yup, Hope is holding that glass in
her glorious right hand. Mmmmm.

8/1/08

Buffalo China - Part Two

We haven't talked about Buffalo China since April.
Quality photos of movie stars with good Buffalo China
coffee cups and saucers are hard to find. We probably
have cornered the market on such pictures here.
What's in your kitchen?

7/1/08

Batgirl Action Figure

So I sit down to my usual "Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal" with "Whole Grain Guaranteed" and "three grams of soluble fiber" Cheerios breakfast, and out of the box comes a "Batman Stunt Figure." I can collect all four. I can "join in the Batman action." I could either study the Nutrition Highlights on the side of the box or take the "Batman Mental Agility" test on the back of the box. Apparently, there's a new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, that I have forgotten to ignore. I skip all that and get back to the regular book I'm reading this week. But I'm thinking that a Batgirl Action Figure would make a nice breakfast gift (and an excellent excuse for a Starlet Showcase post). And I look up "batgirl" on the Internet. And there are, of course, Batgirl comics and action figures and scale models and batgirls at conventions and dirty batgirl pictures and batgirl-catwoman contests and assorted nonsense. And I see that they've remade Get Smart. I knew that some idiot had remade Psycho, and I knew that some other idiot had remade The Getaway, and I had heard that some morons had made an unfunny movie out of Bewitched, but Get Smart? Get a clue! Let me pause for a moment and make one earth-shattering admission: I have never seen a Star Wars, a Lord of the Rings, or a Harry Potter movie. Never. In my whole life. How I got through half a century of breathing (smoke, mostly) without having sat through one of those, I'll never know. But I haven't. There are too many good older movies I have yet to see. I can't be wasting my time, watching remakes of Get Friggin' Smart. And I'll not be attending The Dark Knight anytime soon either. But I found some Batgirl photos of Yvonne Craig, and that made it all worthwhile.

6/3/08

Lady Kisser

I watched Lady Killer (1933) last night. It's formula Warner Brothers-early Cagney stuff. Bad boy Cagney and bad girl Mae Clarke escape the law by running West. They end up in L.A. He gets a job in the movies. There are Hollywood in-jokes. Mae wears terrible hats. Cagney ends up falling for a bland good girl (Margaret Lindsay), and everything works out in the end. The high points include James Cagney rather openly kissing Mae Clarke's left breast in one of those delightful little asides that make the pre-Codes so interesting. Everybody notices Cagney dragging Mae around by her hair and booting her out of his apartment, and they always refer to the grapefruit scene in Public Enemy, but very few reviewers seem to notice that gentle little kiss. Wonder why that is.

And there's a great shot of some
Buffalo China in a Chicago restaurant scene.

5/26/08

Have A Drink On Me!

I'm dizzy drunk and fightin'
On tequila white lightnin'
Yes my glass is getting shorter
On whiskey ice and water
Yeah so c'mon have a good time
And get blinded outta your mind
So don't worry 'bout tomorrow
Take it today
Forget about the cheque we'll get hell to pay
-AC/DC

5/7/08

NOT Gone With The Wind

I stopped at the grocery store this morning for some low-fat milk, mayonnaise, cranberry juice, and. . .well, it's not really critical to this story that you know all of those details. So I purchase my nameless groceries, and I go out to my car in the parking lot. This guy pulls in next to me with his somewhat older, somewhat rustier maroon Pontiac Grand Am. There are untold billions of old rusty Pontiac Grand Ams here in the Rust Belt. The guy gets out and goes into the store. He's sort of a generic late-20s or early-30s unshaven white male with baseball cap sort of Rust Belt guy. His name is probably Jeff or Al or Randy or something. So on the right side of Jeff's older rusty Grand Am is a spray pattern of dried puke that runs from the rear edge of the now-closed passenger window all the way back across the right rear door, the fuel door, and the right rear fender. Probably from a party last night. Ah, I remember those days. The dried spray is sort of yellow and sort of greenish and brown. Very possibly that fatal mix of Taco Bell "Fourth Meal" late night drive-thru food and one of the standard varieties of Budweiser or Miller. The spray can take on a reddish hue if you mix in tequila and a knife wound. But this was just your routine beer-and-fast-food chunk-hurling stuff. Been there, done that. I've been the frantic driver. I've been the helpless puker. You can't quite pull over before the action begins. You somehow hope that the window blowing on your drunken friend will make him or her (your barely conscious date or your stoned little sister) feel better and maybe settle their stomach. But it never works. You're driving, but you're drunk too, of course, and it all just makes sense. You hope your passenger's stomach contents will simply be gone with the wind, but it never quite works out that way. And, of course, it's worse if it's a white car or your dad's car or a convertible. It's also bad if you've borrowed somebody's car, done this awful thing to the whole right side of it, and then returned the car without really noticing the incriminating color change you've made. But Jeff and his rusty maroon Grand Am have probably been through this baptism a dozen times by now. Which may explain some of the rust. And I got into my un-puked-on grandpa car and thought of that dream date where you're doing 85 down Pacific Coast Highway at four in the morning while a barely dressed Scarlett O'Hara, her hair an insane tangle, her shoes in the back seat, leans out her side of your milk white Packard convertible and lets go with all the rum punch and Polynesian appetizers you bought her at Don The Beachcomber's. And you, filled with desire and tequila, think it's fine. Just fine. Life is good. As Ernest Gantt, the real Don the Beachcomber used to say, "If you can't come to Paradise, I'll bring Paradise to you." Things never quite work out that way here in the Rust Belt, but it's the thought that counts.

4/14/08

Buffalo China

Have you ever been watching a 1930s or 40s movie where someone walks into a diner or a roadside hash house or some little drugstore lunch counter, and they order a donut and coffee or a cheeseburger "hold the onions" and coffee or "no thanks" just coffee, and the waitress brings them a thick, clunky cup and saucer, and the waitress pulls a pencil from behind her ear and fills out a little ticket for the thing, even though there's hardly anyone else in the place, and it's Saturday night, and if she had any kind of life, she would blow this town, but from what she's seen of the world one sorry little burg is just as bad as another, so what the hell? I digress. The clunky cup and saucer combination is called restaurant ware, and the best examples were made by companies with names like Buffalo China, Carr, Shenango, Jackson, Sterling, Syracuse, and Wallace. They had to be thick and clunky so they could withstand years and years of rough use by tough customers and manhandling by the dishwasher in the back who says he came from Kansas City, but he don't know nothing about Missouri or Kansas, and the waitress spotted a gun in his room on the one and only time she ever visited it, and sometimes it's just better not to ask too many questions.

You can stop by an antique store and buy one of these little gems. And if you ever use it, like pour actual coffee into it and drink from it, well, you'll realize that they only hold about six or eight ounces of liquid. Which, along with the prices back then, might explain why the character at the diner in the movie only pays a nickel for his cup of coffee.

If you go to eBay and look up the word "restaurant" under the Pottery & China category, you'll find oodles of them. Can I say "oodles" here? (American English is such fun, isn't it? For our foreign visitors "oodles" basically means "scads.") Buffalo China cups and saucers make nice accents for bookshelves and video shelves. On one of my bookshelves, I have a Shenango cup and saucer next to my copy of Weegee's Naked City. On one of my video shelves, I have a Syracuse cup and saucer in front of Union Station and Half Shot at Sunrise. They complete that art deco retro noir look you're longing for.

The above photo is not really a good example of Buffalo China-type restaurant ware, because it's Ciro's and the cup handles are kind of bigger than the clunkier stuff. But you'll notice that Ava Gardner (Mrs. Mickey Rooney/Mrs. Frank Sinatra) has already finished a smoke (it's in the ashtray), while Howard Duff (Mr. Ida Lupino) is still holding his. And the publicity guys have swept away all the vodka glasses and replaced them with coffee cups and saucers. And these two notorious boozehounds are not ordering food anyway, but the Ciro's menu in the photo is good for business. The look in Ava Gardner's eyes tells us that a bullfighter in tight pants has just entered the restaurant. (That's a lot of history in one photograph.)