Bubble Barf?

This is a nester:It represents a young woman in a cocktail glass–either a very tiny young woman or a very huge cocktail glass. Or wait, maybe it’s not actually meant to be a cocktail glass, but just in the shape of one–for few cocktail glasses are opaque mauve with white dots. So maybe it’s just a sizeable mauve bathroom sink, or small bathtub on a pedestal. One way or the other, though, it seems to signify the frivolity and lightedheadedness of champagne and jazzy nightclubs, a gay life in a different time when gay meant something different than it does now. So the set is, I suppose a kind of old-fashioned symbol of a sophisticated (or sex-crazed) life of wild abandon, a Playboy or even older and better, Esquire magazine lifestyle. Exotic cocktails and tempting wide-eyed blondes wearing nothing but long black gloves, high heels, and soap/champagne bubbles. What the with-it crowd in the Big Apple was supposedly up to as represented for the little old ladies and gentlemen of Dubuque.

As a nester, of course, the set comes apart as two separable components: the cocktail glass/bathtub and its contents:What is odd here (beside the fact that the condiment-holes seem to have ended up providing the young lady with two navels) is that the contents of the glass have accompanied the young lady on her journey out of it. somehow that focuses attention on those contents–and thus, reveals how disturbing odd they are. They are strangely beige–a beige quite unlike the colour of champagne bubbles. Since they retain the shape of the glass/bathtub even after having been removed from it, they look weirdly like a cookie, as if the sexy young woman had been baked into dough: Or, no wait, not dough, for it still looks kind of liquidy. Like . . . Well, like vomit.

And so, a true depiction of the dissipated life after all.