May 16, 2023

By Leslie Drollinger Stratmoen, For Flappers to Fringe Vintage

Okay. It happened to me, again. That weird synchronicity of things showing up at the exact moment I’m thinking of them. This time, it was a clothing butler, a perfume reference and some sheet music from “The Harvey Girls.” 

The Butler

That’s the free-standing clothing rack, otherwise known as a men’s valet. I need two more for my exhibit and made that mental note last week as I was staging my static display. They’re hard to find. So, I seriously didn’t expect to have one show up. But there it was, at a local second-hand shop I just happened to pop into after lunching with a friend. Score!

The Perfume

And since I was killing time, I perused the books and magazines. And that’s where I found the perfume notation, for Emeraude, in a music magazine, of all places. A fun reference for me because Emeraude’s the perfume I wore in high school and just mentioned to my husband would be a perfect addition to my 1970s display. The reference jumped out at me as I was flipping through “The Etude,” October of 1938. There it was, listed as one of the “Ten More Appealing Perfumes” in a section called “Shopping for Charm.” 

Emeraude – “Paris”

If I had wanted to make a European perfume tour, I could not have done better than to include as one of my stops, the trip to Ireland’s luxuriant shores, which is reflected in Coty’s “Emeraude.” Inspired by Paris, it personifies the Emerald Isle. One finds in “Emeraude,” a touch of the Blarney stone kiss, more than a hint of the Lakes of Killarney, the saucy laugh of a coleen of Cork. There is the smell of the peat in it, as positive as a Donegal tweed, yet the sweetness of Ireland is there too, as its dominating characteristic. Its new packages are ravishing as are the new packages for that other famed Coty odor, “Paris.”

Wow! I had no idea I was conjuring up all that with my morning spritz. 

The Harvey Girls

In that same pile, I found the sheet music for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” a song from MGM’s 1946 film “The Harvey Girls” starring Judy Garland. Why did this strike a chord? Because I’m reading about these servers of the railway, right now, in Carolyn Meyer’s book “Diary of a Waitress,” subtitled “The Not-So-Glamorous Life of a Harvey Girl.” Even more ridiculous is that my sister mentioned this very movie and song just yesterday when talking about the book. She had the background info on the Harvey Girls because she’d visited one of the few surviving eateries on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway.

The Wrap

It’s weird, right? How I manifest this stuff and seemingly in threes? Uncanny? For sure. Interesting? You bet. Weird? Absolutely!