GREASE GEL CULTURE

My apartment mate, who is on the spectrum, sometimes needs stuff repeated a few times before the meaning actually penetrates. And I myself, also on the spectrum, almost habitually do that. Before I'm convinced that the other person understood.
So I don't know if it's her or me.

Plus her mind gets on mental hamster wheels. She's watching Perry Mason nowadays, and obsessively analyzing the flaws and logical non-cohesiveness of each episode. In great detail. Which I am not interested in at all, but watching her mind work is fascinating. I'm fixated on the clothing that the characters are wearing. So very very period. Post-zoot-suitian. Slightly too roomy in the legs. Houndstooth, and subtle loudness in the check department.
Sports coats a tad too long.

It was the era when men had two hand brushes to polish their head hair, repeatedly stroking it after showering to make it conform to a particular coiffure style, then spending several minutes repeating that after getting dressed to ensure that it was perfect.
Hair cream would have been the easy way out.

I know how it's done. I will not do that.
Comb briskly across the scalp a few time after bathing, that's it.
Two combs. One left, one right. Different.

You know that hair creams are cheating when you see the young men in those teenage bad boy films from that era. Young toughs smoking cigarettes, dating girls in bobby socks and poodle skirts, racing souped-up cars, and being deeply broodsome.
That greasy greasy hair. Vaseline.

A day and age when every one smoked cigarettes, drank weak sludge coffee, hot sauce was unavailable, food was thick, and gin was mother's milk for well-to-do people.




PS. Perry Mason smoked cigarettes.




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