Apropos of Not Much: Meandering Musings for a Monday (August 4th Edition)

 

As I have mentioned before, for some strange reason, I am on the American Girl catalog list.

 

And, for some strange reason, I am compelled to read it.  FROM COVER TO COVER.  It fascinates me.  And it makes me hate LEGOs less (although I still curse them when I step on them), because as annoying as the LEGO Store is, I feel like it's just a drop in the bucket - headache-induction-wise and expense-wise - compared to AG.

 

This go-round, I took particular note of "Julie's Roller Skates" ($20).  For the uninitiated, Julie is the 1970s-era American Girl doll, and as a child of the '70s I can report that these skates are ABSOLUTELY, 100% HISTORICALLY ACCURATE: 





By way of proof, I offer you the following:

My blue-and-yellow tennis shoe skates were by Braun-Bilt, and they were my most prized possession.  I wore them EVERYWHERE, including in the house.  Yes, just like Tootie on "The Facts of Life."  I tricked mine out with giant hot pink pompoms that had jingle bells in them.

The photo of "Julie's Roller Skates" ($20) in the catalog is accompanied by the following Italicized disclaimer:

Kids didn't often wear helmet in the 1970s.  Please wear a helmet whenever you skate.

Unlike "Julie's Roller Skates" ($20), this statement is historically INaccurate.  Kids NEVER wore helmets in the 1970s.  Fairly sure that helmets were not commercially available.

For the record, based on personal experience, kids in the 1970s also rode their bikes, sans helmets or adult chaperones, to the other phase of the subdivision to buy popsicles at the Stop N Go, and traversed public streets in the backs of pickup trucks and station wagons, unencumbered by safety devices of any kind.  Kid-specific rules pertaining to transportation could be accurately summed up as "flexible-to-nonexistent."

And, yet, we survived.

On the subject of survival (did you like that segue?), how did we get by for so long without One Kings Lane?   WITHOUT ONE KINGS LANE, IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT-TO-IMPOSSIBLE TO ACQUIRE FIREPLACE ACCESSORIES ONCE OWNED BY TV'S RICHIE CUNNINGHAM:

Now, Opie Taylor's andirons are merely a click - and $825, plus shipping and handling - away.

For the record, "acquire brass home décor from Steve-from-American-Graffiti" has never been on my bucket list . . . UNTIL NOW.