Friday, October 23, 2009

An Ancestor Talks Trash

My lovely Canadian pal K-Line alerted me to one of my ancestors talking trash:

"I don't know if I should, but I judge people by their picnics"
--Lady Moyra Cavendish (1876-1942)

And speaking of picnics and trash, did anyone see the episode of Mad Men when the Draper family had a bucolic afternoon on a picnic blanket with lots of food and drink? To clean up, Don threw his drink container away (somewhere in the landscape, not in a garbage can) and Betty simply shook the garbage off the picnic blanket, leaving it to litter the grass.


Judgements, anyone?

In case you don't click on the link above, Lady Cavendish's quote appeared in the blog An Aesthete's Lament.

You can also make a Mad Men picnic avatar. This one is from a writer on Jezebel.com:



And I know that the photo far above isn't from MM. Hollister Hovey posted it on her blog in a series of vintage picnic shots. It's an idealized Draper family . . .

7 comments:

K.Line said...

Ha! I thought you'd appreciate that...

WendyB said...

From now on, I'm TOTALLY judging people by their picnics. TAKE THAT, WORLD!

Belle de Ville said...

Well, no one said that Mad Men hasn't gone all out for period authenticity.
I just rented the first season so I'm excited to get in on the Mad Men thing.

Liberty London Girl said...

Gosh how times have changed. Bad Betty & Don!

I definitely would regard the owners of a picnic of cheese spread Wonderbread sandwiches in a different light than the owners of ones made from say Poilane and some lovely cheese...LLGxx

Caroline, No. said...

Have you read 'Of Pageants and Picnics' by Elizabeth David? It's a truly lovely book. I love her obsessive detail. She describes planning a picnic in a central London square after a business meeting and, before the meeting, ties string to a bottle of wine and puts it into a decorative pond to cool. Utter madness. But lovely :)

And Mad Men - that scene was fantastic! The sheer wilfulness of how they left that mess!

Love the blog, btw. I came via Passementerie.

Della said...

Oh, what a feeling in the first photo. I always lke 50-style images, they make me feel safe. Sounds funny :) But it seems like world was a different place then.

Anyway as I´m writing now, I would also like to tell you about my friends new blog

www.mrcoolpool.blogspot.com

He is a photographer who is in to style. Now he is publishing photos from eg. Paris fashionweek :)

Jen said...

I was pretty horrified by the picnic scene, but those were the times, I suppose.