An Interview with Jack

You probably don't need us to tell you we have sort of interesting readers. I met Jack on Facebook, after doing a search on Paco Rabanne's La Nuit there, and we hit it off instantly. Jack treats his facebook profile like a perfume blog for the most part, posting vintage ads, his scent of the day, and observations about everything from why the kid in an old Arpege image is creepy to the fact that he just found Florida Water at Wal-Mart. He does a recurring thing called Edith's Shopping Bag which keeps track of his perfume purchases, with pictures for the short of attention span. It made sense that he'd been reading the blog for a while--even though it took us a little longer than your average person to figure that out. Hey, you're the guy from that blog, he said one day. Um, yeah, I answered. You know it? Duh! Jack's a really smart guy and, like Abigail, and a lot of you, a lot of fun to talk to. We met on Facebook to chat tonight, in the first of a continuing series:

The Family That Sprays Together: Some Hypotheticals Involving You, Your Loved Ones, and Smelly Stuff

Commingling with family around the holidays can be treacherous. Most of our families love us. Okay, so yours loves you. But even when there's no surplus of love, it can sometimes feel as though two entirely different species are coming into contact. By that I mean people who love perfume--a lot--and people who think it smells kind of good but only on someone in another building than the one they happen to be inhabiting.

The following are two hypothetical scenarios which might help you navigate this potentially explosive( i.e. diffusive) territory. I pulled them out of my imagination and can assure you with confidence they involve no persons living or dead.

Okay. They happened to me.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Grace (Polo, Giorgio, Poison, Shalimar, Enjoli)

As part of our week long series on John Hughes and eighties perfume, our friend Jack was going to impersonate Duckie, from Pretty in Pink, today. Unfortunately, Jack got busy with school, so I am impersonating Jack, and instead of Duckie I'm portraying him as Grace, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Ferris Bueller is my least favorite John Hughes movie. It has the manic flair of Sixteen Candles, but it misses the anchor of Molly Ringwald. It's the best thing Matthew Broderick's ever done, I think, and in a way I think he does flippant sarcasm better than Molly did in Candles, but he lacks her warmth, and despite a serious thematic thread involving his best friend's relationship with a bullying father, you don't really feel there's anything at stake. It's all lightness, with nothing much to ground you.

It does have its pleasures, and one of the most pleasurable pleasures for me is Edie McClurg. Most of the main Hughes players are hard to imagine wearing perfume, as Elisa Gabbert pointed out in her post yesterday. Ferris Bueller, his girlfriend, and his best buddy are the exceptions. It's easy to imagine them wearing the most popular fragrances of the time. And yet, I can't help it: Grace is the only one for me:

"I'm a happy person--okay? I'm just your average happy-go-lucky lady. I think on the bright side of things. But there are days at school where I think I could lose it--and how--and I might, if it weren't for the blessing of my chipper outlook. I guess you could say I'm pretty gay.

There's not even a window in my office. Can you believe that? That's how these school builders are. No window, and someone got a bright idea to paint the walls grey. A real light bulb went off over somebody's head and he thought, 'You know, it always seemed to me that the best color for a windowless room with a desk and a couple of dying houseplants would be the darkest, drabbest shade of slate, and somebody believed them, and now I'm stuck here all day like I'm pinned under a dark cloud without an umbrella.

I stare at the grey wall ahead of me straight to lunch hour while Principal Jones shouts my name at the top of his lungs. 'Gr-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ce,' he yells. 'G-r-r-r-r-ace!!' I run into his office as fast as I can and of course all he ever wants is to tell me the latest allegedly larcenous offense Ferris Bueller has committed. I come bursting in and he's sitting there red in the face, with steam shooting out his ears. He wants me to call the police, or Mr. and Mrs. Bueller. He wants me to send for Ferris at once. He wants me to jump up on the desk and scream, like him. I get a real workout running back and forth from his desk to mine.

I don't let it concern me. Okay? I'm going to tell you a little secret. I put ear plugs in. It helps me keep a smile on my face. And I have Jelly Rolls in my right hand drawer, so I keep my energy up.

Along with the Jelly Rolls I have a growing collection of perfume bottles. Confiscated contraband. The perfume problem has reached epidemic proportions here in our class rooms. The girls bring it with them from home. Every day there's a school shooting. Someone gets sprayed. And the amount these girls wear is a real nose sore. Mrs. Cabbits gets her migraines. The math teacher, new this year from Duluth, goes into coughing fits. He coughed so hard one morning he doubled up in seizures. He hit his head on the edge of the chalkboard and woke up in the dumpster. Those kids actually carried his body out like a bag of trash. It's the perfume. It clouds their judgment. It fills them with homicidal impulses. It's hard for a gay person like me to understand perversion like that.

We've asked the girls to stop bringing the perfume to school. We've alerted their parents. The problem is, their parents wear just as much as they do. That's where they pick up the habit. Principal Jones set up a security check at the front entrance. Everyday when they come in, they get patted down. First it was the girls. Now it's the boys. Polo and Giorgio and Drakkar Noir. Sometimes, principal Jones yells my name so loud and so all of the sudden that it startles me, and my leg hits the desk, and all the bottles rattle into each other. Those kids are sneaky. They've smuggled many a bottle past the checkpoint. This is where I come in. I set up a lookout post in the ladies bathroom, third stall down on the right.

I can read your mind, so I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'Golly gee, Grace, what do you do with all that perfume?'

Well, let me tell you, I certainly don't wear it.

I'm all for progress. When it looked like pet rocks were going the way of the slinky, I retired Engelbert to the herb garden. No dilly dallying from me. I might be gay but I'm no sap. Except for the occasional girdle, I'm not the slightest bit old fashioned. It's just that these perfumes, this stink they put out now, they're nothing I'd want anything to do with, unless I had a small feral creature to dispatch. Me, I favor the classics. I like something with the heaving bosom of history behind it. That's a fragrance I can get behind. Something generations of women have relied on, and generations of men have lost their heads over. Something classy. Shalimar. Now THAT, my friend, is a fragrance.

And since on a school secretary's income I can't afford Shamilar, I get Enjoli.

Which is just as good, mind you, as your Poison and your Polo and your Eau de Whoop-di-do. Whatever it is these kids are wearing. Some of these headaches act like they walked in off the family estate. Out in the suburbs. I guess they spray that stuff on and they think they're, what, of the manor born? They think they're really something. And they are. They're something else.

You've never smelled Poison? Oh please, there's only so much time in the day. I'll run out of jelly rolls. How does one describe it? How does one describe nerve gas? Tell you what. Why don't you just meet me out behind the cafeteria after lunch. I've got a bottle with your name on it. If you want to spray yourself into a coma, I'm not going to stop you, just don't go around telling people where you got it, and don't do yourself the damage on school property."

Some Kind of Wonderful: Laura Nelson (Love's Baby Soft, White Musk, Giorgio Beverly Hills)

Today's guest blogger in our series of perfumed tributes to the characters of John Hughes is Elisa Gabbert. Check out Elisa's blog, The French Exit. We often do. About her post here, Elisa says:

I’ve long held 1987’s Some Kind of Wonderful to be the most underrated, or at least under-discussed, of Hughes’ teen ‘80s films. Pretty in Pink, which had the same basic plot (unpopular kid obsesses about popular kid, while his/ her equally unpopular best friend suffers the particular cruelty of unrequited young love), is the more popular of the two, probably because it stars Hughes darling Molly Ringwald. But common wisdom has it that Some Kind of Wonderful’s script is an improvement upon Pretty in Pink’s because it has the 'right' ending—i.e., the best friend gets the guy/girl, as opposed to the beautiful guy/girl with questionable integrity 'winning.' (Supposedly, the original ending of Pretty in Pink was changed in response to test audiences.) Watts and Keith are the film’s most interesting characters, but truth be told, it’s hard to imagine them wearing perfume. Keith’s little sister, however, a whiny, nosy brat and incorrigible social climber, would clearly have embraced the scents of the ‘80s in all their status and excess. Plus, I see a little of myself in her; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a snobby streak in high school. So here, I live vicariously through Laura Nelson, played by Maddie Corman. (I was closer to the age—and the personality—of Candace Cameron’s character when this movie was released, so, sadly, I missed the perfumes that Laura would have worn the first time around.)

"Hey, losers. It’s painfully obvious you guys need a clue in the beauty department, so I carved a little time out of my busy social schedule to attempt to cool you out. First things first: Popularity is a choice, OK? You can choose to be chic … or you can choose to be bleak. And I, for one, am ready to leave the playground. I don’t want to name names, but someone in the vicinity is wearing Love’s Baby Soft. Guys. For real? Why would you want to smell like a baby, when you could smell like a woman? (What are you laughing at? Your White Musk isn’t impressing anyone.)

Here’s the scoop: If you want to run with the elite, you have to smell like the elite. And that means Giorgio. As in Giorgio Beverly Hills. The smell IS sex, OK? No one will ever mistake you for a child when you’re wearing this. I’ve brought my bottle along for educational purposes. Hey, take it easy there, this stuff is from a boutique, not Thrifty Drug, capiche?

Breathe deep, ladies. You’re smelling power. You’re smelling luxury. I have personally been to Beverly Hills, and this is the real deal. Mrs. Albright actually tried to get Giorgio banned from school. Why? Because it’s so intense, people literally cannot handle it! Fashion is a risk, ladies. If the weak can’t hang, c’est la vie. There’s no room for fear at the top of the social ladder.


Remember, men love this stuff. This will turn heads. Don’t be surprised if you get looks, even stares. The right perfume will leave the Hardy Jenn crew trembling in your wake. It might just be the difference between going to the prom on the arm of a prime hunk and staying home watching MacGyver with your little brother. Take my word for it, children: Giorgio is totally crucial."

vintage perfume ad of the day: Giorgio Beverly Hills

What can you say about this perfume, application of which was practically mandated by law at one time? You see the packaging and a boat of memories comes floating back. In one of these memories, it's high school, between classes, and you're approaching the cool girls in the hallway, wishing you could evaporate, because you really don't feel like dealing with their shit, they're such a clique, really they just want to spread shit about people, which you could never really understand, because if you're so fantastic, if you're so great, why do you need to waste so much time talking trash? What are you trying to prove? That you're not the one who's ugly? That you're not as average, as generally unexceptional, as you worry you might be? As you get closer to their crowd, they contract in toward some unseen nucleus of exclusion, their backs to you, and your stomach sinks, then tightens, then you're like, Oh get over it, grow up, this is only High School, and you remember what your mother always says, "They're just jealous, that's all, green with envy." Then you remember how ridiculously out of touch your mother sounds when she says that, so ridiculously out of touch that you can't possibly be reassured by it. So they're jealous. So what. You still have to deal with them everyday. And of course as you pass there are tremors of laughter, that heartless cackle indigenous to the shallow. They're probably commenting on your hair, or your shirt, the way you're holding your books: they take pains to make sure you can't tell exactly what they're ostracizing you for, so you can't actually change something to win their acceptance, and instead will feel an overall nagging sense of inferiority. You look ahead to get through it, beyond them to a time when these girls will be bitter and disappointed, waiting at home for The Guy, who is out making money but will come home smelling like stale office coffee and upholstery that sees a high quotient of fat asses per day. You can see how their bitterness will have shaped them; their figures, their faces, their outlooks. How boring they'll be. And where will they go, what will they do, with no one, with nothing to contract into? Like you, they wear Giorgio, but the similarities end there. For them it's badge, for you it's armor. It keeps their laughter at bay, drowning it out with the white noise of near-stink. You can't put it on or smell it without seeing those yellow and white stripes, a sunny prison consigning you to life among your "peers". Even the bottle is brutal, shaped like a club, like something you'd hit someone over the head with. It hides who you really are, protecting that, so you can preserve it for a time safe enough to bring it out, if a time like that ever comes. It doesn't matter what Giorgio smells like, or whether you actually like it. It's part of your school uniform. What matters is, they can't get through it to you.