Cleaning my house today, I found three gorgeous old issues of the
New Yorker from the summer of 1979. I bought them in San Francisco because Veronica Geng was reviewing film in these issues while Pauline Kael was on vacation. Honestly. Just flipping through them makes me feel adult. They're slightly larger than the modern
NYer and the type is smaller and blotchier, and I found myself flipping through these elegant magazines the way people flip magazines in movies but never in real life, impatiently back to front. Flipping through, I found this astonishing casual item. Just imagine seeing this in 1979, in a summer issue of a magazine, unsigned as everything was.
Of course the
New Yorker website has this bizarre capsule version of it (if you want to hurt yourself, btw, read the
NYer capsule of "Love Trouble Is My Business") and I thought I ought to type it onto the internet in its entirety. Then I found that
someone already had. (And that this person seems to be friends with someone I sort of know, which means I get to ask them next time I meet them about their reading of George W.S. Trow).
I re-paste the text here, rather than linking, only because there was one small typo in the other person's version.
Think about Country Time, a powdered lemonadelike product. The coming forward of Country Time has centered on a certain old man and hordes of eager children. Children starved for news of the past. For years, they ignored Grandpa. Tied him up in the barn. Laughed at his silly ways. But now, after reading Foxfire One through Five in their public elementary school, they crowd around, hoping he'll teach them how to make butter with a stick. There is a song, "Country Time, Country Time," etc. With this idea: Sometimes you're real thirsty, blah, blah, blah, and nothing seems to do what you need to have done with your thirst, blah, blah, blah, and what you want is something real that will satisfy your thirst
like good old-fashioned lemonade. That's right -- the idea behind the Country Time powder-product commercial is that lemonade is a thing of the past. No one can get lemonade anymore. Only some rich people. Most people don't even remember lemonade anymore. Only Grandpa, who has been bound and gagged and dishonored all these years out in the desert, like the decrepit warrior in
Star Wars, only Grandpa
even remembers what it tastes like.
The rundown is like this: Lemonade died out when the Old Ones lost out to the Invaders. But some people with the knowledge of the Old Ones escaped to Mars, where they made a kind of synthetic lemonade, using materials available on Mars. It was a powder and became popular. In the meantime, life on Earth contracted. Now, in these recent days, adventurers from Mars, sensing our need, have travelled to earth with the powder. When the powder is given to certain of our remaining Old Ones, they are made happy and remember lemonade. The idea is persuasive. It cause you to forget that you can make lemonade any time you want by squeezing some lemons in some water and adding sugar. People don't know. They really don't know that you can make lemonade
any time you want. That's right. Lemonade is still available. Right now. Any time you want. Lemons are everywhere. You can make lemonade right now if you want to. It's great. Lemonade is still totally within our capacities.
