Step No. 20 - Practice ventriloquism with a study buddy in a quiet library

Which one's the 'dummy'?

Many baby boomers might claim that I'm too young to remember Edgar Bergen and his woody sidekick Charlie McCarthy, though growing up with Muppet Show reruns and Ed Sullivan Show retrospectives I was privileged to witness the glory of good ventriloquism. Of course, Shari Lewis and Lambchop made a middling comeback in the late 1980s with a series of direct-to-video specials and later the PBS series "Lambchop's Play Along." The tape "Shari Lewis 101 things for kids that are fun" was such a favorite in our household that I think we actually wore the tape to the point of disintegration. The sudden popular culture interest in 'voice-throwing' instilled in me a desire to learn this dark art. Alas, even with lots of practice I could never even get past "bottle of beer" without my friends calling shenanigans.

I call on you, dear readers, to take up the challenge where I have failed so many times. This post is inspired by the countless hours I've spent writing in a quiet university library. While sitting next to a study buddy (mutual accountability is a great work incentive) affect your best cartoonish voice and try out your most ambitious ventriloquist act. The more outlandish the better. Watch your friend recoil in horror as everyone in earshot looks his or her way. Feign shock and ignorance to protect yourself from rebuke.

Step No. 19 - Choose banal blog design themes

In an effort to put off actually working on my dissertation I started evaluating my current blogging efforts and decided that the old theme just wasn't 'adolescent' enough. It took a bit of hemming and hawing looking through a lot of themes, variations, and patterns to come up with something satisfactorily tacky and adolescent, perhaps childish.

I suggest you all do the same (as long as you don't want to be taken seriously in which case you should carry on as per usual).

Step No. 15 - Complete a collection of matching peanut butter glasses

One of the unfortunately symptoms of being from a family of five children is that dishes never lasted too long, especially the fun ones. What, you may ask, constitutes a fun set of dishes? The once ubiquitous peanut butter glasses and the delightful series of Disney promotional glasses from McDonald's. For so many years, companies sold their peanut butter in reusable glasses as a means to bolster business. They were insanely popular and have since become popular collector's items. I mean, c'mon; just look at that image above with the intrepid, Errol Flynn face of Robin Hood. Who wouldn't want to have that gracing the water glass section of their cupboard?

I will admit that I don't recall my parents purchasing our peanut butter in these glasses, as it wouldn't even satisfactorily cover five children's toast even at one breakfast sitting. However, we did inherit a series of mismatched glasses from sundry relatives as they changed their living arrangements and downsized to more cozy quarters (read: the cemetery). In this instance there was never any fighting over who had the privilege of using the newly-emptied and freshly-washed PB glass. However, being on the receiving end of so many deceased relatives' glassware normalized the concepts of death and dying if only because we knew we'd soon have an influx of something original into the cupboards to replace all the glasses broken by a series of 'butter fingers.'

The fights among me and my siblings were over the limited number of McDonald's glassware.* Chief among them the Disney glasses sold in the early- to mid-1980s. Sure, the screen printed designs chipped after years of heavy use and the ink faded after repeated cycles in the dishwasher (I hear the cumulative gasp of kitsch collectors everywhere), but those glasses were very popular mostly because we had three glasses for five kids. Being the object of our respective affections, we inadvertently killed them with kindness and, one-by-one, they shattered like so many dreams of sipping from our golden goblets of Disney commercialism.

As is a common theme in this blog, I'm an adult now with the wherewithal to purchase not only the Disney glasses, but also peanut butter glasses; however, my adult doesn't want mismatched glassware. No, I will have one or two matching sets of these glasses. Only an adolescent would have one-offs. It takes a real grownup to possess a complete set and use them at nice dinners when you've special company showing up. One minor risk is that one's guests may also have come from very competitive households and liable to nick one of your treasures to fill with ice cold milk to accompany their PB&J sandwich at lunch. Note to self: purchase extras.

*In a sign that surely foreshadowed the development of my sexuality, I favoured the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" glass.

Step No. 6 - Revel in the kitschy pleasure of 1950s novelty songs

Riding the tide of post WWII optimism (and Cold War escapism), never was there a better time for novelty music when North American kids grew tired of the standard nursery rhymes. All of a sudden the market was flooded with such tracks as "I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" and Patti Page's ground breaking multitracked "How Much is that Doggie in the Window." The records flooded the market pressed on coloured acetate 45s and, later, on various-shaped LPs. Now, though the fun has been partially mitigated by release on CDs and digital files, the songs have enjoyed a renaissance as musical high camp and are regarded, by and large, by hipsters and other cultural ne'er-do-wells as desirable for ironic intent.

Now that I live alone I can crank these tunes, dance around the apartment like a stroked out orangutan, and enjoy the lyrical and melodic inventiveness of mid twentieth-century novelty songwriters without shame or irony.