All tomorrow's parties

Coke Party invites by Buzza/Cardoza

When I was in NJ last month, I bought these old-school cocktail party invitations at one of my usual thrifting stops. I wonder if Hallmark makes an invite equivalent to this "Let's unwind" anymore, or if American Greetings still perceives a market for "Cocktails"... And does anyone still make invitations to, ahem, Coke Parties? Seriously, WTF. I'm going to give Buzza Cardozo the benefit of the doubt and assume that "coke" was being used as the generic for "soda" or "pop"—that rooster (cock?) is clearly a Coca-Cola bottle but did Coca-Cola really not care about trademark infringement? And did a "soda party" ever seem fun to anyone?

Anyway, these too can be filed under Soon-to-Be-Obsolete Ephemera, thanks to the rise of the evite.

Let's Unwind invites from Hallmark

Cocktails invites from American Greetings

Cruisin'

I bought this souvenir case full of coasters from a cruise ship called the S.S. Homeric several years ago at a rummage sale in NJ. The case and coasters were in such good condition that my fellow vintage hounds were skeptical that they were legit—they figured they must be some Restoration Hardware knockoff. But, no, they're real. The S.S. Homeric—then known as the S.S. Mariposa—was a luxury ocean liner that launched in 1931 and by the 1960s cruised the Caribbean for the Italian shipping company Home Lines. No, this is not something I knew when I bought them; I learned it from this handy website for devotees of cruising, which features a totally great video of a bunch of pasty white folks clad in ’60s resort attire, playing bizarre and somewhat risque games on deck during a Homeric cruise to Barbados.

I took a Royal Caribbean cruise to Barbados (and four other islands) back in the ’90s. Have you ever been on a cruise? Well, I highly recommend it, IF (a) you have the right attitude and (b) someone else is paying. I was able to fulfill both criteria: I was in my late 20s when F-U-N was priority one, and my in-laws foot the bill. My in-laws, who were laboring under the misapprehension that cruises were all classy like in Cary Grant movies and Titanic and Atlantic crossings on the QE2 and probably what the S.S. Homeric was like back in the ’30s and ’40s. Swanky! Exclusive! But, no, cruises are ridiculous, and as it happened, Lindsay and I were totally prepared because David Foster Wallace's hilarious and cruel essay about his cruise experience was published in Harper's only months before we embarked.

The cruise experience is the opposite of classy and you've got to be able to embrace that or you won't survive. So we hot-tubbed with strangers and played shuffleboard and rallied for muster at an ungodly hour and drank too many umbrella drinks and got sea sick and hit the slots and played a colossal game of bingo with 1,000 fellow passengers and saw the Spinners perform "Rubber Band Man" live and went to discos and groveled before a cream cheese mermaid at the midnight buffet while my in-laws stewed and smoldered. The photo of me below, posing joyfully with a pirate who appears to be aiming his gun directly into my lap, is one of several photo souvenirs I've saved from the trip, along with a pair of very hideous complimentary Royal Caribbean glasses, which are always right next to the bag destined for Goodwill though somehow they never quite make it in.

Maybe that's how the person who owned these S.S. Homeric coasters felt. He/she obviously never used them because they are pristine. And I've never used the coasters either; in fact, I'd forgotten all about them until I decided to clean out my sideboard a few weeks ago (the sideboard is full of forgotten stuff like this. Pretty sure that along with housing the holiday china, that's all sideboards are really good for). And I still can't see myself using them, or getting rid of them because they really are cute and they remind me of my own excellent cruising adventure (I mean, all of the scenes depicted on the coasters went down on my cruise too). Plus, the Homeric was scrapped in 1973 after a serious fire—so what remains of the old ship? Perhaps I should just save these and finally take my Royal Caribbean glasses to Goodwill, where they can remain for a decade or so, till some youngster who collects ’90s kitsch snaps them up. May the circle of stuff be unbroken.

Therma-Jacs: the midcentury koozie

Growing up in the chilliest corner of Northern New Jersey, I never once encountered a koozie or coozie or cosy, the snug little sleeve designed to keep one's beverage—generally, one's beer—nice and frosty. I'm not saying that they didn't exist, that there weren't all kinds of Jersey jokers floating down the Delaware with koozie-wrapped Yuenglings in hand, but I never laid eyes on one till I visited Texas for the first time back in 1989. I thought they were brilliant, and like Columbus bringing back parrots and pineapples from Hispaniola for Queen Isabella and her cronies to marvel over, Lindsay and I returned from our trips to Texas bearing all variations on the koozie theme (like the Freeze Sleeve) to wide-eyed New Yorkers. We even had custom koozies made to commemorate our wedding. Classy!

We're not big beer drinkers anymore, so most of our koozies collect dust atop the laundry-room refrigerator, and we've still got a cache of wedding koozies in the garage. But I've maintained a soft spot for the concept and was pretty thrilled to discover the Therma-Jac a few years ago at an estate sale. Manufactured in Fort Payne, Alabama, by a purveyor of terry-cloth coasters called the Hi-Jac Corp, the Therma-Jac was designed to keep your cocktail cool. The thing is, in all the time I've had my Therma-Jacs, I've never once stuck my glass in one. Cute as they are, they're a little unwieldy and if it's hot enough outside to boil my gin and tonic, I'm probably inside partaking of the AC.

That's why it was pretty easy for me to pass up the pile of Therma-Jacs in this photo, which I took a couple of weeks ago at an estate sale for a woman touted as having been San Antonio's "hostess of the year" (I'm not sure what year precisely but it had to have been 1950-something). The place had been pretty much picked clean by the time I arrived—the only things of interest were a peculiar cellulite-flattening device that resembled an abacus, and the Therma-Jacs shimmering behind the bar. (True fact: all the best estate sales have bars.) If I were in the business of reselling, which I should be, I probably would've bought them—they are a flashy bar accessory irresistible to Mad Men fetishists and other would-be Hostesses of the Year. Even if you never do end up using them, they look sweet.