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Sears Charm School
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2021/11 – November
A dose of Charm School can carry you through the decades. Especially when backed by a Sears Lifetime Guarantee.
Illustration by Norma Jean Zahner
Flash back. It’s 1967. My BFF and I are trapped in an alternate universe – except it’s for-real. Our co-conspirator mothers, unbeknownst to us, signed us up for Charm School.
I repeat, Charm School!
First of all, we were perfectly charming already. Granted we were hard-core tomboys, but we were quite adorable tomboys, decked out in a busted-knee-dungarees-baggy-dad-shirts kind-of-way.
And second of all, Sears and Roebuck Charm School? Seriously? There are some things you just don’t do. Teach a pig to sing and fly, expect a fish to pedal a unicycle, and buy charm by-the-pound at Sears. Buy a Sears washer and dryer that will rumble and ka-thunk ka-thunk for 20 years, maybe, but charm?
Not likely.
So there we were. Two deer in the headlights awaiting a hefty dose of Sears charm.
We hadn’t a clue about how to conduct small talk, how to eat soup without slurping, or how to discreetly dispense with mosquitoes that are biting our ankles at a fancy party without yelling, “Don’t you people have a Black Flag spray gun? The mosquitoes are biting the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks out of my feet!” Okay, so we did need a little tweaking in the manners department. I’ll give you that.
But for Linda and me, dancing on land mines would have been preferable to enduring Charm 101 at the store that also sold Dr. Rose’s French Arsenic Complexion Wafers, Magic Flesh Builder and Cupper (Don’t ask.), Giant Power Heidelberg Electric Belts, The Set of McKinley Assassination Slides, and Opium. All available by mail order right at your very own doorstep.
Dang. Why didn’t we think of that? Mail order Charm. We could have practiced it in the privacy of our own bedrooms.
Flash forward to 2021. I am just about as charming as I could ever hope to be, and I have Sears and Roebuck to thank for it. Sigh. Now I’m kinda nostalgic for the good old days. I think I’ll go tease my hair into a beehive and see if I can balance a Sears catalog on top of it whilst daintily walking down the hallway.
If I break a hip, I hope I do it with 21 pounds of charm.
