Boots, Top Hats and Baskets of Pressed Glass Make for Lovely Window Displays

I've acquired some lovely vintage glass items that were collected by my now deceased mother-in-law.  She had a fine eye for pretty shapes and colors and unusual objects made of glass.  For instance, I had never seen or heard of glass boots and shoes pressed by the Fenton glass company here in America during the mid-century period.  But she had collected a few of them, as well as a set of four top hats, two little baskets and some bowls or dishes.   I find the colors extraordinary and the detail quite impressive.

I think my mother-in-law did too as I recall she had put them on little shelves in a large window and the sun would pour through them lighting them up and casting beams of amber, amethyst, olive green and cobalt blue into the room.

Now that I've got them up for sale on Ebay, I'm hoping there are other collectors out there who will want them and put them to a pretty window display use.  If you looking for them, go to Ebay and look for things sold by mugsim7, that's  me. Then just search on Fenton pressed glass or "glass boots" or things like that and hopefully they will pop up on your screen. 

What's With the Shoes on Bloomingdale Sidewalk?

This is the second pair of shoes I've found just perched on the sidewalk on a street near where I live recently. It's always a pair of shoes, not just one. Very strange. Who leaves a pair of sneakers neatly parked like that? Maybe we just don't grow enough flowers and trees in Bloomingdale, maybe shoes grow like trees.

Shoe Shine Men in Plain Sight

Outside the Starbucks store on K at 14th Streets NW I espied a shoe shine man waiting, apparently, for some customers with shoes that needed shining but to no avail as everyone was wearing flip flops, or open shoes or sandals where the toes don't need the shiny stuff he was selling. He sat there chatting with a friend glancing at the passersby in the morning sun as I sipped my coffee. Did he get any customers that 15  minutes I was there? No. Did anyone stop by and ask how much it cost? No. Did he try and get pedestrians to stop and have their shoes shined? No. Was there a sign about how much it cost to have one's shoes shined? No. So I came to the conclusion it might have been a surveillance unit of some sort, especially as the white truck behind the set-up was unmarked and I've heard they do surveillance in plain sight, whoever they is and there's certainly little need for shoe shine men on K Street on a hot August morning.

Homeless in DC

I've been meaning to write something about being homeless in DC because it is easy for me to be so taken up with the wonder and wealth of the nation's capital and just not see these people who live right in front of us, on park benches, in alleys and doorways and hidden corners in and outside of buildings.  I saw this fellow in the photo sleeping about 2 p.m. in the afternoon in one of the mini parks alongside Pennsylvania Avenue NW. I am glad he had a quiet place to rest and sleep, his head lolling on his chest and his bag of personal stuff on the bench beside him. I've had arguments with people who insist this man should be picked up and housed or "put" somewhere, whereas I tend to think he has a right just to be there and sleep all day if he wants. But it's the messes and peculiarities of homeless people that wear us down, I think. It's the smell of pee in the subway elevators; the wrappers and food left around public benches; the gallon of vomit on the sidewalk; the drunken man lurching toward you; the inflamed eyes catching your eye to ask you for some spare change; the unintelligible words of the individual standing on the corner raving at the sky; the almost naked woman cursing you from under a dirty blanket; the young woman in the tent in the alley who screams at you to "get away, get away." I, and probably you, just don't want to "deal with it" on our way to an appointment with cleaner, more rationale, dressed, shoed and organized people in the world of our own business.  I have given some thought to how he or she got in their predicament and was told by one "homelessness expert" that addiction creates a lot of this, i.e., there is a steady spiral downward, of non-accumulation of assets, when a person bleeds their household budget dry to feed their habit and then the family unit "snaps" or the individual has exhausted their family who can't help anymore. I got to know one homeless lady whose story was that she refused all offers of public housing and lived on the streets -- and in shelters at night -- after squatting in her building when it was sold for redevelopment.  Another man, addicted to just about anything for years, had been thrown out by his family repeatedly, he said, and made his life on the street. My urge is to want to do something right away, and the best I can muster is sometimes some spare change, or a very brief conversation, or call the city for some cleanup, or send a check to a shelter. Or just pray for these people who remind us of how much we have and who we are.

Woman in Plexiglass

This is not really "a woman" but a mannequin and in this case (hah!) it is the clothes on the dummy that make the difference.  In the Navy Yard Museum in S.W. Washington is an actual uniform and shoes from the Women's Army Corps. (WAC) in World War II. It's a very tailored dark grey-green dress with a big pleat, a belt and blouse type top with huge lapels and long sleeves cuffed and buttoned. In fact, there's a lot of buttons to the whole outfit and one wonders if the phrase "all buttoned up" originates with this one particular dress. You don't hear much about those ladies who broke that particular non-plexiglass ceiling, but their motto, or responsibility as spelled out in their training manual,  is pretty interesting:-- "Your Job: To Replace Men. Be Ready To Take Over." That must have been pretty scary for some fellas at the time to hear! In fact, I can practically hear my former father-in-law, who fought at Pearl Harbor and other Pacific sites, muttering something about how "the women are always wanting to take over" when my then mother-in-law shooed him out of the house while she was cooking.  From Wikipedia I have learned that there were 150,000 WACs and some of them landed at Normandy too!  Apparently, they were disbanded in 1978 when recruitment into the armed forces seems to have become de-linked from gender. It goes without saying but must always be said, that women have always been given parts to play in all of history.