OVATION OF CALIFORNIA
My dad had a cosmetics franchise similar to Mary Kay. It was Ovation of California. My mother went to Los Angeles to learn more about it, and when she returned, she dumped a box of cosmetics onto the dining room table. My sister got the cosmetics, and I got a shoehorn from the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel.
My sister held up her diary. “Look what your darling son did to my diary while you were gone,” she said. I had cut the lock off her diary. Big deal.
“I apologized,” I said. (I was researching petting — as Ann Landers called making out. I was 13, my sister was 16. I thought she had some info.)
My mother said, “So you tore open your sister’s diary?”
“I’m sorry.” I bought my sister a new diary.
One more crime: my father put a bottle of Ovation cleansing cream in the bathroom and made me use it. I was supposed to rub the cleanser on my forehead with a cotton ball. “This is no gimmick,” he said. “Men use it.” My dad tried to turn me into a metrosexual! The franchise went under in a year.
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7 comments
If I were Terry Gross, who always asks the question you want to know the answer to: did you find any information on petting in your sister’s diary?
On a family vacation in Toronto in 1968 I secretly walked what seemed like miles up Bathurst Street to get to a place advertised in a magazine as offering some kind of shoe lifts that were supposed to make one 2″(at least) taller. I bought them – sort of foamy things; they made maybe a half-inch difference. I wore them a while but they were hurting my arches so that was that.
I sincerely hope you got what you wanted out of that diary. I was regularly reading Ann Landers at 13, too. The day of my very first official date, a Valentine’s day-connected Sweetheart Dance (I still have the program, from 1964), I read up on dating in a book or two at the Brighton (NY) public library. I think it was Ann Landers who said: try to ask the person about him- or herself. Don’t just talk about yourself. I still find it disconcerting when one keeps saying “I this, I that….” Take heed!
To Alice Stratton:
No good info from the diary.
Makes you wonder what sort of salacious stuff was contained in said diary.
This entry was a little too prurient for my tastes. Please scale back in the future.
For years I rubbed Phisohex into my forehead and other acne-d areas daily while banning chocolate and peanuts and greasy foods in general from my diet. Improvement, negligible; trauma, permanent.
My father also was involved with Ovation Cosmetics in the early 60’s. He was a “Distributor”; which meant he probably paid RETAIL and needed to double the price in order to create his “chain of fools”; I dunno; there were lots of those deals popping up in SoCal in those days. They generally found their source of concept in Salt Lake City.
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