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Sign on window during Thanksgiving week in South Boston, Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Turkey Day at the Ideal Cafe
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Sign on window during Thanksgiving week in South Boston, Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
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5 comments:
The wonderful FSA photographer of the South, Marion Post Wolcott, approached her subjects, always, with sympathy -- but also with a hard critical eye.
'Eat your Turk' I am thinking of eating Turkish people! But of cours, I smile; somewhat.
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Thank you for noting this by posting Marion Wolcott's photograph. Seeing Thanksgiving dinner announcements in the windows of small restaurants and coffee shops is something I noticed and always affected me a lot after leaving college and moving to New York City to begin "life" as we're supposed to know it. For all sorts of reasons having predictably to do with family tensions, I never loved Thanksgiving as a child and teenager, but later things smoothed out a bit. Still, I was always happy and grateful (probably excessively so) not to be spending my Thanksgivings in coffee shops. I may have been mistaken about this. I expect the proprietors really try hard to put on a good show. And very often they serve excellent pie.
It's rather poignant to consider the forlorn spectacle of a solitary diner in a counter cafe on the Holiday of Warmth and Abundance. A somewhat Hopperesque image.
But that is to assume that in fact there was not a great and goodly gathering in the actual event, at the Ideal Cafe, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 30, 1940.
I once knew a fellow who dwelt in Emeryville (that sounds like the beginning of a limerick)... I saw him on the day after our own traditionally relatively modest holiday, and asked how his had gone.
"Well, my sister and I stayed home and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches," he said.
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