No Twigs in Your Blender
- Fern
- Jul 17
- 4 min read
I stumbled upon notes from my illustrious retail career in Woodstock in the nineties. Twigs in the Blender hails from 1999. You can click on the link below and find out how to make paper in your blender.
The day started off benignly enough, the squeak of the green and white striped awning outside 'Letters and Lace' repeating itself on every whisper of a breeze. Early June, and Woodstock buzzed with activity, a fresh new batch of T shirted, white reebokked tourists walking and gawking like sea birds on a newly discovered beach.
I was down in the poorly lit Kafkaesque cellar amassing extra stock for the potential sunglassed hordes of the day when the creaking floor overhead alerted me to the first customer of the day. I raced up the stairs and into the shop where I came face to face with a burly, slightly soiled about the edges, thirtyish man, with a little girl beside him. He asked about journals, and I steered him to the ones we had, trying not to notice when he spit into a Pepsi bottle he carried. The bottle had long since held cola, but something dark brown was inside. He spit again after a remark about the kennel for pit bulls he was launching, and the tune, did your mother chaw tobacco flit across my mind. Quick retail guidelines followed: smile wide, ring up the sale, thank him, wish them a nice day!
A woman returned with a greeting card she’d bought the day before. “How can I send this? It has such big printing all over the back! Do they have to put the price so big?” My various assurances about the well-meaning intent of the car outweighing the price on the card fell on deaf ears. Would White-Out help I asked? She left satisfied after I blocked out the price.
Maybe the next pair of customers were mom and son. In the back corner of the store I overheard their introspective discussion about the small wooden gift boxes handcrafted in Poland. Was the red too harsh? Was the green too feminine? Was the geometric design appropriate? Was the box too big? Maybe too small? Would it fit on the table? Would it maybe be too small for the contents? Approaching them I offered, “Perhaps I could help if I knew the purpose?” “Dental floss, he keeps it as his bedside,” the woman said, “it's the last thing he does before he goes to sleep.” “Last time I came in here I had ten minutes to catch the bus and I found something great for my friend!” said the hysterically jolly young woman with brown twisted curly hair and pink laughing face. Gales of laughter! “Now I have two hours what will I do with it?” Her body shook with hilarity. She shopped, she exclaimed, she chose, she laughed and laughed. Stories of Paris, five hours before flight, not being packed, no suitcase… “I'm always at least a half hour late” she laughed, as she chose greeting cards, specialty papers, journals, pens, book ends. I listened while packing it all up.“I love being frantic it gets the adrenaline full flowing, you know what I mean…” Uproarious laughter continued as she paid for the biggest sale of the day.
A sour puss blonde lady paid me in exact, tediously extracted and counted change, but a penny too much. “Do NOT give me the penny back.” She instructed, and left.
The afternoon went by, a cute guy, flirty and smiley who bought nothing, a serious nice guy with a winning smile and a pink shirt bought a fountain pen, a tiny woman with a long gray ponytail inquired about laminating, an elegant woman dressed monochromatically in blues, routed about in the stationary section like a squirrel looking for nuts. After she purchased a $2.00 bookmark I went to fix the pile of boxes she’d left in an upheaval.
A frog lover picked up everything ‘froggy’: paperweights, bookends, note paper, cards, doorstop, exclaiming and rhapsodized over each item, “Adorable! love this! So darn cute!” then left with nothing. A young woman with a daughter of ten bought cards then inquired about using the bathroom. They disappeared together into the room. How did they do it? No bigger than five by six, the room was packed with a huge bag of paper garbage, boxes stacked up to the ceiling and a mop and bucket. They came out smiling and thanked me warmly, as though they’d just left the Ritz Lounge complete with a towel offering monitor.
The last customer brought all the tasteless (and undeserved) dumb blonde jokes to the fore. Midway through answering her questions about a paper making kit, I hoped she was putting on the dumb act in some perverse female ploy to impress her boyfriend, who stood off to the side in laughing disbelief. She was so beautiful and shapely! But was she listening? Could I maybe just grab her and shake her a little bit? She ignored everything I said and pointed to, by way of explanation, “it says right here on the box." Then she asked the ultimate inane question. Taking a deep breath, I looked into her big beautiful brown eyes and firmly said, “Do NOT put twigs in your blender!”