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February Contest Image
Try your hand at coming up with a winning caption!
Coasters from the edge
Zosia Bielski wrote this post for me – appearing in print tomorrow in THE GLOBE AND MAIL!
Thank you, Zosia!
Design
Coasters from the edge
Zosia Bielski
Anne Taintor’s wry sayings have been sassing up images of retro-fabulous women for a quarter of a century. Now the studio has launched a search for the models who made it all possible.
Medicated and motivated.
Who says children need to eat every day?
Someone was going to have to set a bad example.
Now be a dear and fetch mommy her flask.The phrases might ring a bell for any woman who has ever trolled her favourite gift shop for some private shopping therapy. They float atop Anne Taintor’s kitschy collaged accessories, the ones with beautiful women beaming dementedly from vintage advertisements.
Christened “the patron saint of female frustration,” Taintor has been churning out accessories for 25 years. The massive line of products – everything from postcards, luggage tags and pill boxes to mouse pads, air fresheners and flasks – now sells in 25 countries and earns Anne Taintor Inc. annual revenues into the seven figures.
Aside from the kitschy images of women baking cakes and ironing shirts and the subversive taglines, the line’s lasting appeal lies in the naughty, but also often self-deprecating, tone. Women “who’ve had a lousy day” appreciate them, as do gay men, Taintor said in an interview.
To celebrate the silver anniversary, the company has launched a search for the women behind the images, all of them models from ads dating back to the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Only a handful of the “Taintorettes” have been identified, and many have passed away. Usually, it’s a grandchild who recognizes grandma on a magnet or sticky note, and buys out the shop.
“These women weren’t the airheads they were portraying,” said Taintor, 56. “They were working women before there were working women, supporting families and putting themselves through school. They thought it was kind of funny that they were portraying women who were just delighted to have a new laundry detergent.”
Taintor started crafting the accessories as a way to pay her own bills when she was a single mother living in Maine. “I went to a career counsellor and she asked me what I could do and I was like, ‘Uh, well, I can make collages.’ She said, ‘Oh. Good.’ She encouraged me to do something with that because I really had no viable job skills,” said Taintor, who graduated with a degree in visual and environmental studies from Harvard University.
Riffling through some old issues of Ladies’ Home Journal at a garage sale, Taintor wondered if the cheerful housewives in the appliance ads were really as vacuous as they appeared. She started imagining their inner dialogue, snipped words from other magazines and pasted them onto the ads, later gluing the collages onto wooden lapel pins.
“I felt like the women were speaking to me and it made me laugh. Apparently it makes other women laugh too.”
Taintor uses magazine ads that are more than 50 years old; the copyright has expired and the images are in the public domain. If she wants to use editorial content, she has her lawyer research whether copyright has been renewed or not.
She still comes up with some of the snarky one-liners herself from her studio in Youngsville, a town of 110 in New Mexico. She also has an office in Brooklyn and now employs 12 writers. During “long-distance brainstorming sessions,” Taintor sends them photos and they send back potential captions.
Her best sellers usually involve the theme of domestic angst: “I dreamed my whole house was clean,” “Make your own damn dinner,” and “WOW! I get to give birth AND change diapers!”
When the models started surfacing in 2006, Taintor was amazed: “I never even thought about it. It’s been one of the delightful surprises of this job.”
One of them was Georgia Carroll, who stumbled on her photo peering out from a magnet at a gift shop in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she lives. “An attitude is a terrible thing to waste,” read the magnet.
“I think it’s a good caption,” said the 90-year-old, who bought all of the magnets and then ordered some more.
Today, Carroll’s well-coiffed head also appears on sticky notes and stationery, which she writes to people on. “[Taintor] has sent me wonderful things with my picture on them, like luggage tags that I put on other things so that I won’t lose them. It’s very convenient to have your picture on it.”
In the 1930s, Carroll would often model with her “most constant friend,” Katharine Aldridge, a witty brunette from Maine. In 2008, Aldridge’s daughter, Carey Cameron, discovered both women were Taintorettes.
“I was walking down 8th Street in New York City and I passed a store that sold mostly kitchen supplies, and there was Georgia’s face staring at me from a package of file folders. I bought every package they had in the store,” said Cameron, a 58-year-old writer.
Carroll’s daughter, Amanda Kryser, happened to be staying at Cameron’s apartment, so Cameron put the folders on her pillow. “I was leaving for Maine and I was in a hurry so I didn’t look at the package. I just assumed that all of the photographs were of Georgia. Amanda called me and she said, ‘Did you know that your mother is in the package too?’ They were best friends and they were together in the same cellophane package.”
Aldridge died in 1995 and never got to see herself emblazoned on the products.
“She would have loved it. She loved attention,” said her daughter. “Hers was a very little star, but it just keeps twinkling, here and there.”
Straw Bale Studio in the High Desert
I’ve been asked on several occasions for a photographic glimpse into my creative process – for pictures of my studio when I’m hard at work in it. I can tell you right now, that is never going to happen. Remember: I work in collage. Collage = mess. In addition, I run a business in a very right brain sort of way, so the mess inherent in collage is overlaid with the mess inherent in right-brain-business-management: file folders everywhere, notes on the back of everything and taped to everything. Not a pretty picture.
I am willing, however, to share a glimpse of my studio after a thorough (for me) cleaning. Something that happens more than occasionally. After all, I can’t be expected to work efficiently in the chaos I continually create.
Only Five Days Left!
This design was inspired by a conversation with my ever-inspiring niece Meg Taintor, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of critically-acclaimed Boston fringe theatre group Whistler in the Dark… and coffee shop manager extraordinaire. (I remember fondly all the singers, painters, actors, and musicians with whom I waited tables when I was starting this business!)
My favorite review ever (of Whistler’s 2009 production of The Bacchae) comes from Louise Kennedy in The Boston Globe:
This is theater at once returned to its ancient roots and rejuvenated with modern artistry. Somewhere, Euripedes is smiling…
Go. See. Feel. And take your children. Show them what theatre can be.
A year later, I still cry tears of aunt-ly pride whenever I read this!
If you live anywhere near Boston, you are in luck! You still have five chances left to see Whistler’s astonishing production of One Flea Spare. EDGEBoston says:
One Flea Spare is as hot and urgent as any fever – a riveting theatrical triumph.
Go!
http://whistlerinthedark.com/boxoffice.htm
What Was She Thinking?
Men are not inherently annoying.
They are, however, annoying to live with. At least occasionally.
The day I came across this happy housewife I had been mulling over possible solutions to a small domestic dispute of my own.
I saw the answer in this woman’s eyes…
New York, New York!
I spent last week in my booth at the New York International Gift Fair. I spent this week recovering.
No, really… I love doing trade shows. I spend most of my time all alone in my little straw bale studio in the desert, and trade shows give me the wonderful opportunity to visit with customers I have known and loved for years and to meet new ones.
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