I
recently featured some cool vintage earrings I'd purchased from one of my favourite online purveyors. They are so pretty. They are so unique. They were so missing from my ears all of a sudden this past Saturday...
Backing it up a little, I was delighted to receive my little package of loveliness in the mail this week. With a birthday brunch for G planned for Saturday, I thought: what better venue to showcase the famous earrings to my friends, who make up the sole constituents of my blog readership?
But the thing about the dangly little lovelies is that they're screw-ons. For those who have never inherited jewellery from their grandmothers' 50s collection, or purchased vintage jewellery, or generally living under a style rock, screw ons are, well, exactly what they sound like. Rather than putting the earring into your pierced ear, they have a little blunt-ended screw that you tighten to fasten the earring to your lobe. (There's a women's studies paper waiting to be written on this mid-century aversion to ear-piercing/piercing as a harlotous act of penetration in the 1950s...) If the screw on sounds uncomfortable, it can be. If you tighten them obsessively. Which I will now do every time I wear them.
Because after we walked about 6 blocks from the restauarant to an art show, and I spent half an hour casually perusing the exhibit, I reached up to touch my lovely earrings--only to discover they were gone. My lobes were naked. One of the earrings was nearby, but the other was nowhere to be found. Check my coat, check the floor, check baby J's carrier over which I'd been leaning to goo-goo-ga-ga, check the floor again, obsessively re-check pockets, check purse, enlist friends in re-checking all of the above.
These can't be replaced, of course. They only cost $32, which comforted me a little, but it was just such a shame. I retraced my steps twice, covering all 6 blocks again and again. Needle in a haystack doesn't even cover it.
But guess what? On the sad trip back to the car, I found my little treasure! She'd been run over, stepped on, and possibly marked by a large canine, but she is basically intact. The gods of vintage smiled on me that day, and all I can say is 'bring on more vintage jewellery!'
I remember the 80s. I was there. (God help me, I sound like my mother talking about the 60s). I did the lie- down- use- coat- hanger- to- zip- jeans thing. But that doesn't mean I want to see my husband doing that. Ever.
