Phonebook or Vogue?

I've been reading Vogue since the fifth grade. That's before the Age of Supermodels for you kids out there. My mother was strict when it came to the more consumer-driven forms of feminine expression. She thought most of it was wasteful and detracted from one's true sense of self. Blah...blah...blah... (Pipe in Carol King and Carly Simon on cue)

This was a woman who owned exactly one ancient compact of blue Estee Lauder eye shadow. Yes, that blue. You know the one I am talking about. There was a crusty tube of Jackie Kennedy-esque pink lipstick (also Estee Lauder) and one bottle of Estee perfume. That scent still resurrects her from the dead when I catch a whif of it from someone passing by.

Anyway, let's get back to Vogue. My mom let me have my monthly dose of fabulosity probably in a vain attempt to get her severely dyslexic girl to read something... anything. It worked. I became hooked and I fell for all that blatant, predatory consumerism hook, line and sinker. My poor mother - with the Masters in English Literature - who drug me to folk and bluegrass concerts, collected poetry records and read Salinger was sharing living space with the antithesis of all that she had absorbed in the Sixties and Seventies. It wasn't that bad really. She'd roll her eyes at the sheer silliness of the size of the September and March issues each year. They were monsterous. My kid-sized self marveled at the weight of those tomes heavy with the posibility of a sexier life, travel, a peek at a world far removed from suburban America. Those issues were pretty big - even way back when.

That's why I wasn't too shocked when I came home last night to 600+ pages of the March edition. What would my long gone mother think now? There really isn't much left for her dyslexic little girl to read in each issue. Most of the volume is a series of advertisements. Bill (my husband) often says they are really just pretty phonebooks. Those ads always make sure you know how to contact them and where the nearest store is...

Yes, they are phonebooks. Maybe mother should have given me a phonebook in the fifth grade instead? I sure would have saved me a mint when I convinced myself I needed that first tube of Clinique lipstick in the seventh grade. Some say it started with the lipstick, I say it was the Vogue.