In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [104]
Rumors spread. The Pearleen DeLuxe display was a phony, just a come-on, and the dishes we’d get would be cheap, hollow reproductions of the truly beautiful original.
Finally the doors opened and the mob surged forward. The Box Office roared with activity as we pushed and stumbled toward the marquee. Just inside the door Mr. Doppler and two ushers stood, packing cases stacked behind them, handing out to each lady a beautiful, gleaming butter dish.
What a start! Doppler, the master showman, realized that a smash opening was imperative for the success of any Big Time act. He could have opened with a prosaic cup or saucer, but his selection of a butter dish as an opener was little short of total inspiration. Handing a butter dish to housewives who came, almost to a woman, from Oleomargarine families was masterful. In fact, few people in the crowd had ever even seen a butter dish before and some had to be told how to use it. My mother, a reader of Good Housekeeping, recognized the rare object for what it was, a symbol of Gentility, Good Taste, and the Expansive Life. She was delighted. And my kid brother had to be forcibly restrained in his desire to look at it and feel it.
We were Oleo people, and my mother would mix the white, lard-like butter substitute in a glass mixing bowl, adding coloring from the gelatin capsules which accompanied the package. We always referred to this as “butter,” and it was invariably served on a cracked white saucer used only for that purpose. Our new butter dish was a step into the affluent world of the twentieth century.
Mr. Doppler beamed, his black suit crinkling as he clanked out butter dish after butter dish, distributing largess to the multitude.
“Next week there’ll be a different piece, lady,” he said over and over.
“Maybe a bun warmer, who knows?”
Thus he insidiously planted the seed in the mind of each butter-dish clutcher that next week could be even more Exotic. The hackles of desire rose even higher as they filed into the darkened auditorium.
“What is a bun warmer?”
“You warm buns in it, you idiot!”
Snatches of complex Table Etiquette debates drifted back and forth as the mob went up the aisle, butter dishes clanking.
The Tarzan movie began. The popcorn bags ripped open, and the evening was complete.
As soon as the kitchen light went on, even before my mother had taken off her coat after the movie, she feverishly slammed open the refrigerator door and the butter dish was put into action. Loaded with Oleo, its Pearleen finish lighting up the linoleum for yards around, it rested in the center of the white enamel kitchen table. Dish Night had come to Hohman, Indiana.
The incredible news of Mr. Doppler’s largess spread through the neighborhood almost instantly. Over back fences, through tangled jungles of clotheslines, up alleys, into basements, up front porches, into candy stores and meat markets, the winged word spread. Red, chapped, water-wrinkled hands paused on clothes wringers and washboards; bathrobe-clad figures hunched over sinks nodded in amazement. Neighbors trooped into kitchens all over town to observe firsthand the beautiful works of art that somehow had come into our lives.
The following Friday the Orpheum drew crowds from a three-county area, a jostling throng that stood in long expectant lines to see Blondie Takes a Trip starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake and to receive as compensation for that trial by fire a Pearleen-finish Bun Warmer. Mr. Doppler did not fail his public. Bun Warmers flooded Lake County in a massive deluxe Hollywood Finish tide.