the game is rigged

The ice cream vendors are total hustlers at my son's school. One is set up by the front door with his fridge sized push cart, the other guy's truck is parked askew at the back entrance so there is no way you can sneak out with your kids past the ice cream. I do not think the vendors are friends but, nonetheless, they are co-conspirators. They pray for screaming kids like some people pray for rain.

Drive your moms crazy! their sly smiles seem to egg on to the ninos and ninas as they laugh while kids throw fits and scream for, mommy knows the cure, ice cream!!!

I heard that many of the street vendors were working to pay off immigration debts and they had to buy an inventory every morning and hopefully make a profit from the day's sales. I always wondered how those guys made money with the pushcarts full of icicles and assorted creamery sundries walking block after lonely block with kids rarely playing out front of East Oakland residences. Now I know, $3 poorer every time it's a school day, where Old Faithful is. The schools are paydirt for the ice cream man.

Dude had a fistful of crisp twenties and he was a happy man as the kids clamored around him not knowing how to take turns in a circle closing in.

Later on at home, the Pavlovian bells ring on the vendors' little pushcarts throughout East Oakland's flatlands rousing kids off of their seats and away from Sponge Bob and Spiderman on the t.v. screen, ice cream! Ice Cream, ICE CREAM!!!

One out of ten kids who hears his cue bangs on the door loud enough and convinces his mother to take him out front for a treat. The kid spies Sponge Bob, Spiderman or a Ninja Turtle on the ice cream man's cart or truck side, SPONGE BOB ICE CREAM!!!!!!!! Mom will pay for this ice cream one way or another.

The game is rigged.

Mother knows best

San Antonio Express 1933- Mexican socialite flappers

Last year I salvaged a bound volume of June 1933's complete San Antonio Express. Why I found an antique book of Texas newspapers in Oakland, California I have no idea. . . I'm just *lucky* that way. Look at these stunning photos of Mexican debutantes visiting Mexico City society events . . . The headline for this society page reads Mexico's Loveliest "Ambassadresses" to the Black and White Ball.

The first solo pic is of Pas Gaisman. The woman looking upward with the revealing beaded decolletage is Olga Najera Bouchez. Elisa Antonia Diaz is the name of the woman in the long dangly earrings with her eyes closed.

The profile vixen is Maria Amparo Viderique!

The woman with her hair parted down the middle is named Constance Drake.

What great names and what lovely ladies . . .

San Antonio Express 1933

More images, ads and articles from the San Antonio Express June 1933 . . . I found a bound edition of the month's issues in a dumpster in Oakland, California last year in 2010.

Speaking of the Midnight Hour

True story excerpted from a facebook exchange on artist Lou Beach's page between me and my mother.

ME - During the last years of a man's life he went on a drinking binge and drove his car over the neighbors' lawns in an upscale area of Englewood, New Jersey. His car crashed and the inebriated elderly entertainer proceeded to meander on foot drinking and tossing mini liquor bottles as he made his way home. My mom's artist friend gathered the bottles on her morning dog walk as though she were picking up pebbles left by Hansel and Gretel. When she picked up the last bottle it had lead her to her neighbor Wilson Pickett's front door. She gathered the bottles into a neat little art assemblage wrapped with the yellow CAUTION tape from the car crash scene that she named Pickett's Last Charge. This art piece is now in the collection of Zap cartoonist S. Clay Wilson. Luckily, Wilson Pickett had emerged unscathed from the wreck and nobody had gotten hurt. The lawns were dutifully restored and life went back to normal.

Marcia Wilson (MY MOM)
becky, that story is about a musician named WILSON PICKETT. the artwork was/is called PICKETT's LAST CHARGE. my friend ann davis (formerly a jeweler, now a knitter), was a neighbor of mr pickett and apparently there were an abundance of little liquor bottles (the tiny kind) strewn in the vicinity of his house. one day mr pickett drove his car around the lawn of the mayor. i do not remember the extent of the crash involved, or even if there was a telephone pole involved in addition to deep ruts in the sod, but i believe there was some animosity between him and the mayor, for some reason or other. At any rate, pickett paid to have the lawn restored. meanwhile, my friend ann gathered up a few of the empty liquor bottles and a half a foot of crime scene tape from the scene, and made a little "cornell box" out of it, and called it "pickett's last charge."