My grandmother Edna started her travel business, Global Tours, at the age of 50 in Peoria, Illinois. She wanted to ‘see the world’. She did, leading tours to all the countries on her bucket list except China, which wasn’t open when she stopped traveling at the age of 80.
She would sometimes layover in Los Angeles, where we lived, and she always arrived dressed in her travel clothes; three-piece suit, hat, heeled shoes (about 2 inches) and stockings, which I know were held up by her long-line ‘merry widow’. When we lived in India she came to visit, arriving in full travel regalia. We toured India together and in the photo of us riding the elephant at Amber Fort in Jaipur, she is DRESSED!
Gram never, ever wore pants in her 95 years. And when she died I think she probably had on her ‘merry widow’. When she fully retired at the age of 90, and moved back to Peoria from LA (where she had come to live for a decade to enjoy the warm weather) she put on her stockings and ‘merry widow’ EVERY DAY before reading the Wall Street Journal. Wow!
I’m all about comfort when I travel. There’s not a buckle or zipper or button or snap or clasp on me, except for some jewelry. One of my gripes when I travel by air is how my hair gets full of static. So today, I’ve rubbed a dryer sheet (unscented) over my hair and clothes. Another gripe is of course the seats. So today, on my way to mid-eighties and high humidity in Mumbai, I’m taking my long (to the calf) down filled jacket to be my feather bed for the 14+ hour flight. It squishes up nicely in a suitcase.
I’ve got my chocolate; I plan to eat one an hour. And my eye mask, where I can hide and not see all the people who are SLEEPING when I’m not. My technique for long flights? Do as Wilbur the Pig did that morning in the barnyard; from 9-9:15, scratch back; from 9:15-9:30, visit toilet; from 9:30-11, watch movie……you get the idea. A well planned trip.
Talk with you on the other side!
January 28th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
We’ve arrived in Mumbai. It’s warm.
January 28th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Apaka svagata hai mumbai ko!
January 31st, 2010 at 8:15 am
wait; wait:
where’s the discussion on the etymology of the term “merry widow”?
certainly, someone here must know.
February 6th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Please start us off on the “merry widow”. Maybe it was first worn in a opera?
February 6th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Wow! Say that again….I get the ‘hai’ and ‘mumbai’ part.
February 8th, 2010 at 9:47 am
Well, with your encouragement, I did research the orgins of the term “merry widow” to find the earliest references were from Sweden; who would have guessed?
It appears that a resident of a retirement village (and because this was from undocumented folklore passed down through generations from mother to daughter while the men were busy shoveling snow, the name of the village changes with each recitation) by the name of Marae V’Doughe was the center of the village social network; always happy, always youthful, always well attended by the men who had finished their shoveling early.
That Marae was a widow was never in doubt; she had survived three husbands, each of whom had been loving and attendant to her (in ways that Swedes know how) but each of whom had not left her with any inheritance or widows endowment. So, the question always arose in village chatrooms and cafes, why was Marae always happy, and always so youthful in her appearance in spite of her hardships.
A particularly enterprising woman, a widow herself, took it upon herself to find out why (and here, the name changes regularly according to the recitation, but generally it is agreed that she was a social climber of lesser attraction and, therefore, fewer attendants).
On one occasion, offering to serve Marae tea very early in the morning upon Marae’s waking, the sleuthette discovered Marae, in her natural state, was as soft and wrinkled as anyone else in the village; but, upon rising, she donned an unusual undergarment that redistributed inappropriate sags and bags to elevated curves and bumps of the most desired kind. Not only did the undergarment reshape the anatomical landscape, but with slender garter straps and elastic bands of undetermined origins, it straightened Marae’s posture and raised her blood pressure sufficiently to bring an attractive and youthful blush to her cheek.
With the secret now out, Sleuthette and Marae entered into a commercial agreement to recreate the undergarment as a joint ventured cottage-industry, making sufficient numbers of garments to lift the spirits, and corresponding anatomies of most every woman in town.
The product was initially sold under the name “UnderGarment”, but soon morphed to a more marketable “UnderArmor- Gird Yourself in the Fight against Age” In fact, so successful was the endeavor that the town’s mayor, and entrepeneur himself, suggested the women create a calender featuring one blushing Swede a month. That, in turn, led to creation of a new calendar featuring the town’s female Olympic volleyball team clad only in the favored undergarment, a marketing coup that continues to this day.
Given the unwieldy product name, “UnderArmor-Gird Yourself in the Fight against Age” and the popularity of the volleyball teams calendar sales, it was only a matter of time before the garment took on the name of the volleyball team “The Merry Widows”, or singularly “merry widow”; and so, generation after generation, between mother and daughter, the popularity of the garment and the adopted name were propagated until the introduction of “panty hose” with control panels, and the fading into history the common lore legend of Marae V’Doughe.
February 13th, 2010 at 7:13 am
An excellent piece of research!