It all started with an e-mail from the lovely Vicki Smith aka CalGal. The body of the e contained a link; the subject head read “you need this,” and within an hour I had lost my virginity.
If you are scratching your head because you were pretty sure there was a husband in the picture here, you are not mistaken. The virginity in question was the one I gave up to eBay. “I don’t do eBay. I know myself too well to even start with that,” I used to say in a tone of voice that was 50% smugness, 50% fear, the same voice I would use to explain why I never did cocaine when I had the chance, mostly because I knew better than to do that to my bank account, but also because I was afraid I’d be one of those poor bastards whose heart would explode on the first toot, like Len Bias. I don’t do eBay, I said for the past 5+ years, and then all of a sudden, I did. Four hours after receiving that first e from Vicki, I had looked through hundreds of pages of vintage cookware and cookbooks. “Please tell me to stop,” I said to Lloyd in my best wheedling-junkie voice.
Vicki was right, though. I needed them, I bid on them, I won them, and today I got them in the mail. These are perfect for me, not only because I am still embroiled on the Big Egg Adventure, but also because I am a cartoon nerd, specifically a Warner Brothers cartoon nerd. Looking at the picture, I thought of the 1944 Frank Tashlin cartoon “Booby Hatched,” in which a mother duck hatches out her eggs on a freezing winter night. One of the eggs doesn’t hatch completely and wanders blindly into the forest, where he is kidnapped by a wolf with evil designs. Momma Duck tracks the egg into the woods, calling his name plaintively; finds the wolf’s lair and beats the stuffing out of the wolf. She rescues her baby egg from a boiling cauldron, just in time for him to hatch out, complain “Aw, Ma! Just when I was getting warm!” and jump merrily back into the water.
It is in homage to this cartoon that when I opened the package tonight, I brandished my new salt and pepper shakers at Lloyd and cried out, “Robespierre!” (This was the name of the little almost-hatched duckling.) Ladies and gentlemen...Robespierre!
But that’s it for me and eBay. Just Robespierre. Or just Robespierre and the vintage Ovaltine shaky-cup mixer, which I bought for Lloyd, who is a veritable poster boy for Ovaltine. (All together now, Young Frankenstein fans: “OVALTINE!") Or just Robespierre and the Ovaltine shaky-cup mixer and the chrome citrus juicer, over which I got into a surprising and protracted bidding war and on which I managed to place the winning bid ten seconds before the end of the auction.
And that’s it, really.
As soon as I finish checking out the cookbooks.