One of my favourite books as a kid was Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Stories for Children. Singer has other good books for kids, which I like, and apparently books for adults—I tried Gimpel the Fool once, it had sex in it, and I was immediately repelled, for that is not how I picture Singer—but Stories for Children is The One for me. As was my way as a child, I read it over and over and memorized most of the stories so although I do dip into occasionally in my present form, I almost don’t need to—it lives in my mind.
My mother recently told me a story she learned in an Oral Storytelling class in her undergraduate years, about a poor man who tricked a rich man into believing his silverware was having babies. (I don’t know, what do you do when you get together with family??) “Shrewd Todie! Lyzer the Miser! That’s an Isaac Singer story!” I said excitedly. No, my mom insisted, it wasn’t—it was a much older story, passed around in villages, told in Yiddish by the fire. It makes me a little sad to realize that Singer didn’t originate this tale, or probably a number of his others—merely wrote down stories that had been passed down to him through the generations, presumably with a bit of his own flair. He was a writer but also, somewhat, a transcriber of tales. If you google the Singer story, you can find an audio version here, if you’d like to hear it—the description even says “Singer's retelling of a classic comedy” so I guess others were not as surprised as I was.
Anyway I guess I have no need to feel guilty for retelling the story yet again in my own way, since we had an incident here this week that begged for it.
Years ago, when we were deep into watching Mad Men, Mark was impressed by the rocks glasses that Don Draper drinks from in one particular season and I got him some as a gift. I think at the time they were just being sold as “Mad Men glasses.” Recently, long after the end of Mad Men, Mark mentioned that he had broken all but one of the glasses and if I was looking for a gift for him, more would be nice.
Despite the facts that a) there were no gift-giving occasions coming up and b) I would really like Mark to stop breaking everything he owns, I tried to find the glasses. It turns out the internet doesn’t cough up “Mad Men glasses” quite as readily as it used to, 11 years after the show went off the air. I eventually found some for $90 for two, and they’d have to be shipped from the States, which seemed like altogether a bad bargain. I also found out that they are actually called Roly Poly glasses and designed by someone named Dorothy Thorpe—I have mixed feelings about Mad Men in the rearview but they did get little period details like that right. The actual 1960s glassware really just costs as much as I was seeing—they are fancy antiques! I can’t imagine we paid that much a dozen years ago—maybe our previous set was knockoffs, though they look just like the pictures online? You can see them in the header pic here if you are curious.
Anyway, then I started looking at the websites of local cocktail stores to see if they had any knockoffs and sure enough, the first one I tried did. Cocktail Emporium, where I regularly get nice stuff for Mark had quite cheap and nice-looking glasses. Really cheap—I decided to get [number redacted]. Here’s the link if you want some too, although if you do want to, please read a few more paragraphs first.
My plan was to stick them in the bar with Mark’s lone remaining glass from the first set, and see how long it would take him to notice he had more than he thought, or if he would just gradually accept he had miscounted. Surprise presents and a small amount of gaslighting are the perks of marriage.
But then the glasses arrived and they turned out to be much smaller than the original set; lighter and flimsier too. Of course, there was a reason they were so cheap! I wasn’t sure if they were ok, as I neither make nor consume cocktails myself, so I took all the rocks glasses out of the bar (Mark was away for the weekend at this point and couldn’t ask questions) to see the scale—I discovered that the original Roly Poly was the biggest rocks glass we had and the new set was the smallest, maybe usable for a shot of whiskey on ice or if people wanted to split a cocktail. Satisfied there would be at least some value in keeping them, I stuck a couple of them in the bar (the rest didn’t fit) and waited for Mark to get home.
My plan now was to tell him a version of Shrewd Todie’s story, which is: the rocks glass had babies. Complicated slightly by the fact that the original Roly Poly is now a single mother, but perhaps she had a tryst with one of the other rocks glasses? I figured we would be able to work something out when the subject came up…
This is as far as I have gotten with the story on May 2, because Mark is in the cab coming back from the airport. I will update this draft when there is more to report.
Update May 4: I called Mark from the library despondent over bad news, and after he cheered me up as best he could, he texted a few minutes later saying he was emptying the dishwasher and putting things away in the bar and found the glasses. He was delighted! I tried the story about reproducing glassware but was too sad to do it justice and he just texted back “Haha ❤ ❤ “
Update Evening May 6: I wanted a do-over on the previous day’s flop, so I took one of the remaining new little Roly Polys and put it in the bathroom with Mark’s shaving stuff, thinking he would find it in the morning, but he found it within the hour, and demanded to know what it was doing there. I shrugged and said, “It’s just a little kid, they’re wild.” He refused to play along and just said we should wash it.
Update Later Evening May 6: Mark went to take the garbage out and I ran down the hall, got another little Roly Poly, and put it in his reading chair. He did chuckle a bit at that but he is still not getting into the spirit of the baby glasses. Am I going to have to get a BONNET?
I may have further updates at a later time.
