Historical December 1991 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Commemorative dishes. Yep, those dishes with the fancy pictures and images that we all know about. There’s the 12″ plate of Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Lion and the Scarecrow, .dancing down the yellow brick road.
Then there’s the 18″ serving plate featuring Rhett and Scarlett.
My favorite, though, is the Pearl Harbor dinner plate.
It has a picture of a Japanese zero plane diving down at United States cruisers and battleships, with smoke everywhere and anti-aircraft explosions all around the edges, where the broccoli will sit. Do we have any of these dishes? No, but I’m familiar with them from watching late-night cable TV when I’m unable to sleep. That problem, lack of sleep, happens often these days. You’re supposed to leave work at work, I know, but I wind up taking work everywhere.
There are even places I don’t go where I take work. Often I awaken in the middle of the night, fully alert (as alert as I can be, anyway), and grab a piece of paper from my bedside to scribble some great thought that I don’t want to lose. Probably half of the time I’m unable to get back to sleep, so I trudge to the den where I turn on the tube and blip through the channels. Thank heavens for remote control! Cable TV is absolutely terrible.
It contains all of the television shows that were bad the first time around, only now they’re back again. Do you miss Mr. Ed or Hawaii 5-0 or Perry Mason? No problem. Like a bad penny or McArthur, they will return. And then there are the music videos stations, the all-night news. the shopping channels, a couple of religious stations, two public service channels, sports (including tractor pulls and shoot skeeting — or is it skoot sheeting?), a Spanish-speaking station, and the Weather Channel!
The good news is that there’s a lot of it. So much, in fact, that it makes up for the fact that it’s so bad.
If you don’t have cable with a remote control, I realize that this point makes no sense at all to you.
On the other hand, if you do have cable and a remote control, you know exactly what I mean.
This is a case where, truly. more of less is more. (It’s a bit like those squishy yellow candy Easter bunnies.
Each one is pretty bad, but if you can eat enough of them, they’re pretty good!) When I say late-night tube, I mean late-night, like after David Letterman has gone to bed! What’s showing then is the absolute nadir of cable TV.
The daytime is bad, evening is worse, night is worst. and late-night is the worstest. Let’s put it this way, if a movie is terrible it stays at the theatre for a week or two and soon after appears at the video stores.
The movies on late-night cable are so bad that they never even made it to the video stores. Watching them is the equivalent to reading a book of Dan Quayle’s notable speeches. It’s not just commemorative dishes that I’m familiar with because of my relationship with the late-night tube.
I also know more than I’d like to know about hand-beaten Chinese Woks, Richard Simmons’ exercise tapes, land speculation with “no money down,” and the fact that -Americans Rent To Own”. (Such a slogan! No wonder we were triumphant in WWII.) But the dishes, most of all, stick in my mind. You see, and this is a family secret but I know you won’t tell anyone, the first wife collects dishes. Oh, sure, she collects shoes, but everyone knows that. Just this past week she received three personalized holiday cards and two boxes of candy from the managers at local shoe stores.
The first wife has more shoes than Wendell Bailey has unregistered guns, but as she says, “So what?
I only wear one pair at a time.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic, so I’ve come to accept her 100+ pairs of shoes, many with nicknames, like her brown strollers, Fred and Ethyl.
But the dishes are another matter. What she really likes about her dish collection is that you CAN use more than two at a time. Heck, if you invite enough freeloaders. oops, I mean family members, over at once, you can even use more than one set of the dish collection. – And what a dish collection it is! Normally I’m pretty much on top of things and know what the first wife is up to, but this one surprised me. Over the years she was collecting dishes, and I didn’t even realize it! How, you wonder, could I be that dense? Simple, she kept buying what are euphemistically termed “holiday dishes,” and I never caught on.
First, though, before the holiday dishes, there was the CHINA Not like in the country China, but in “don’t put this stuff in the dishwasher” China. Similar to a nuclear weapon, this china was much talked about but never used. Even today the china sits somewhere, sealed in little individual plastic bags so it won’t get dusty. We’ve eaten off it once or twice, I think, but I’m not even sure I know what it looks like. Oh, the plates are round, but beyond that it’s a bit blurry.
Then there was the EVERYDAY CHINA.
I could never understand why these dishes could go in the dishwasher, but since we got to use them I didn’t complain.
They had a blue pattern.
We had picked the color to contrast with the food we figured we’d most likely be eating on them, Pop-Tarts and bagels. Lunch was eaten at work, of course, and the Pop-Tarts and bagels took care of breakfast and dinner. (The nice thing about these particular foods is that you can easily switch them, eating the bagels at breakfast and the Pop-Tarts for dinner, with no ill effects.) Then came the start of the holiday dishes.
The first purchase was the CHRISTMAS DISHES. Cute little dishes and cute big dishes with a Christmas Tree in the middle, adorned with toys, ornaments, teddy bears, and garland. “Aren’t these cute?” the first wife asked. “Absolutely,” I replied without even looking up from the paper. “And don’t they make the food taste even better?” she continued. “Yep,” I said, “this is probably the best DOMINO’S PIZZA we’ve ever had.” I don’t remember what year we got our VALENTINE’S DAY DISHES, but one February 14. there they were! No surprise: hearts and more hearts, red and pink on white.
They seem like new after all this time, but what would you expect, using them only once each year? Our LABOR DAY DISHES really aren’t a full set.
We just have small dessert-like plate and cups and saucers. They’re pretty interesting, however, because each plate has a different picture of the American Worker. There’s a worker on an assembly line with newly-made autos in the background, a worker putting the finishing touches on a television, a worker sewing a shirt, and a worker welding a part on an airplane wing. Obviously, these are antique plates.
The INDEPENDENCE DAY PLATES are neat. There’s a different patriot on each of the twelve dinner plates. There’s Washington, Franklin, Allen, Hancock, Jefferson. Adams, Hamilton, Revere. Attucks and so on. Betsy Ross is featured on the dessert plates.
Each of the cups features a battle scene from the revolution.
My favorite is Washington crossing the Delaware.
If you fill the cup with just the right amount of coffee and move it ever so slightly, it looks like old George is right in the middle of the river! And the HALLOWEEN DISHES! They’re a real trip.
All of the plates have an orange and black border and each dinner plate features a different ghastly character.
My favorite is the Dracula plate, but there’s also Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Richard Nixon, and so on.
These are fun for Halloween, but I also like to eat from them when watching “Face The Nation.” I find the MEMORIAL DAY PLATES inspirational.
Each one depicts a scene from a battle and the dessert plates feature American Armed Forces graveyards. There’s a scene from the Alamo, one of our flag being carried by blue-coated youngsters in the Civil War, the U.S.S. Missouri on the high seas blasting away at some foreign enemy, Teddy Roosevelt bringing Spain to her knees, and John Wayne in Viet Nam, giving them what they deserve!
I always feel like watching boxing after eating off of these plates.
The ROCK STARS DISHES are great.
We use these on Friday nights. There’s Elvis, naturally, wearing a silver jumpsuit ‘covered with sequins, and there’s Jerry Lee Lewis (playing a piano with his feet, one of my more cherished images). the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Fabian, Brian Hyland, and a host of others. We’re on some kind of mailing list for this one, because four times a year we get new ROCK STARS plates! Last month we got a Roy Orbison plate and over the summer one came with Liberace on it. (I couldn’t figure that one out either, but the first wife likes his music so she was happy. At least it’s not a Lawrence Welk plate.) The Fab Four were so good that they have their own dishes, the BEATLES PLATES.
A different Number One song is featured on each plate, and each one has a picture of John, George, Ringo, and Paul.
The first wife still sighs whenever we use these plates.
My personal favorites are my CHINACHINA PLATES.
I call ’em this because they’re china plates that were handcarried from China. By me. Actually, they were back-carried.
My back still hurts when I see them!
The wife couldn’t resist purchasing them and I, with all of my resolve, said that we could buy them as long as I, personally, didn’t have to carry them home.
She agreed, we bought them, and I, personally, carried them home. That vignette captures much of our marriage.
Her personal favorite, as you might guess, are the SHOE PLATES. Honest! They’re part of a registered series, plates featuring collectable items. You could get plates featuring paintings of antique furniture, electric trains, dolls, or old movie posters.
The first wife chose plates depicting shoes.
Each of these plates features a picture of a different kind of shoe. Man, the first wife is in hog-heaven when she eats off these. They’re even better than the BEATLES PLATES. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! You should see her look of glee when she eats off a plate with a picture of brown suede boots, just like the ones she has in her closet. Barry and Ellen.
We have even more dishes, but I have to go now.
I can hear the television from the other’room, it’s on some cable channel, and I don’t want to miss the commercial about the cleaning fluid that makes your tires look like they’re new.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, December 1991.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1991_12.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
