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"Teen-Agers" From 1954:
Grooming and Body Issues


Oh my, Louise's new look almost bares her knees. How shocking! "Louise" is consulting with a fashion advisor, who is apparently advising her to dress like a 45-year-old woman. Or maybe she's advising her to dress like "Teen-Agers" dressed back when she was a teen -- sometime during the Great Depression. Without a cheat sheet, I'd be hard pressed to figure out which was supposed to be the "before" pic and which was the "after."

Oh, wait. In the grey dress, potential mates can better gauge her fitness for childbearing because of her hourglass figure. And that is of the utmost
importance for the average Teen-Age girl.

 
It's a trifle disheartening to go through this checklist and see how far removed I am from the '50s idea of good grooming. Heck, where I work, I could probably wear sweatpants to the office, and I don't even think I own a slip. Not to mention the fact that if I'm at home I probably have my long hair unattractively arranged in a ratty old scrunchie so it won't feel like I'm wearing a large, fluffy cat around my neck.

However, I'll try not to get too
depressed by my lack of "evenly applied" lipstick, or by the fact that my nail polish would seem "moderate in tone" only to the colourblind. You see, I usually have at least a shower a day and am clever enough to know that the phrase "if needed daily," when applied to deodorant, is redundant for most people. As far as I'm concerned, that trumps the rest of the list every time.

Seriously, could anything be more becoming in colour than my all-black wardrobe? No, I didn't think so.

 

You know how that guy's arm *really* got to be that big, don't you? Gawd, I always thought people tend to get more attractive when they exercise. But check out this guy, with his grossly elongated torso, poor posture and freaky Popeye arm.

The girls behind him are either laughing at his inexplicably deeply cuffed floods or taking up a collection to get him some plastic surgery for that sad arm problem.

 
Did I forget to scan in the part of the drawing that shows the third, correct, answer?

Shh! We're receiving messages from outer space.

 

Rrowr, that is one hot-looking small intestine!

Given the fact that Luke Perry (left) thinks this is "the most interesting set of pictures [he] ever saw," you'd think he and his nebbishy little friend there were looking at porn or something. Well, they're not. These geeks of yesteryear are looking at an anatomy pamphlet, specifically the section on the digestive system. See, the nerd on the right is annoyingly stating that this plastic pamphlet thingie is "almost like 3-D" -- not 36-D. Sorry, I should have scanned it a little bigger so there wouldn't be any confusion. It's not even National Geographic, dammit.

Luke's looking pretty good, don't you think? I guess he must have posed for this modelling assignment back around the early '50s -- more than 35 years before he was hired to play a "teen-ager" on Beverly Hills 90210. Wow, impressive!

I think it would be fun to spend a day in a world where everyone talked as if they were narrating a bad health film. I'll bet one day would be enough, though.



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