It was a ball at the Peter Pan

We’ve got a new gizmo at our place – something that converts old 35mm slides and negatives to digital format.
Genius! For years I’ve kept looking at dusty boxes of slides lurking in wardrobes and told myself to throw them out. Keeping them was pointless because who has a clunky slide projector any more?
But we never did chuck them.
I’m glad now because I’ve been having such fun finding treasure. Sure, 80% of the shots do need to be dumped – all those many nameless lakes and mountains and party scenes full of people you can barely remember. Out they go.
But there are delicious images as well. I’ve found ancient holiday snaps that bring back so many memories. And shots of my now grown-up daughters that remind me of their baby years.
And pictures of me, too, that reveal an utterly different time. Take this one. I’m the girl in the middle, looking a bit tipsy in my black lace. I’m 18 or 19. I’ve gone mad for scarlet lipstick. The black eye-liner was the sort that went on shiny and could be peeled off in a tissue-thin strip. My hair: roller-set and sprayed stiff with lacquer.
I marvel now that I was once so good at sewing I could whip up this tricky ball gown with ease. It’s backless, as I recall, and has a long, white, bell-shaped skirt of something silky, possibly a fabric called sharkskin.
I may have gone shopping in the ground-floor fabric department at Smith and Caughey’s. It had everything from chunky tweeds to fine satins and there was a long wooden bench where you could perch on stools to graze the pattern books from Vogue, Butterick, Simplicity and McCall’s. I once had boxes full of paper patterns.
We’re at the Peter Pan Cabaret at the top of Queen Street, Auckland. It has a big dance floor. There’s a live band, with blokes in tuxedos playing saxophones.
I have a small glass of something sweet. Gin and lemonade? Can’t remember. Possibly Pimm’s. Light shines on the neck of a tall brown beer bottle in the foreground. Booze packaging is pretty basic in the early 1960s.
That’s my friend Sue. Note her long kid gloves, unbuttoned at the wrists, the fingers tucked away to expose her hands. That’s how girls do it, all the better to hold your cigarette. Almost everyone smokes.
Sue and I are junior reporters at the Auckland Star, the city’s daily afternoon newspaper. Handsome Bill (nice guy, but we’re just friends) works in sales for BOAC – short for British Overseas Airways Corporation.
The Peter Pan, the Star and BOAC are long gone from Auckland’s business scene, though the airline lives on as British Airways.
Do you have old slides? Rescue the fun ones. Digitise them. Print them. And, most importantly, caption them.
As future mementos they’ll only work if people know the context – and get to understand there was a long-ago time when young women wore gloves almost to their armpits, thought that smoking did no harm, and could make just about everything in their wardrobes.

* Lindsey hosts Let’s Talk on Triangle TV in Auckland, airing 7pm Fridays. This year’s season kicks off on Jan 27 and focuses on books, media and arts - all about what's hot on paper and on screen.

Take up your oars

As we settle into the first week of 2012 I’m thinking about rowboats.

Tidying up some old stuff I came across notes I made at a ‘Business and Consciousness’ conference in Mexico. It was a long time ago – 1999, I think, the year in which we were all worried about how Y2K might shred our lives, just as now there’s a heap of fretting about the arrival of the fabled 2012.

Not that we should worry overmuch – I can still remember people being nervous of 1984 because of George Orwell’s bleak novel of that name. It's interesting how we've always stayed afloat despite all the angst.

I heard lots of high-impact speakers in my 1999 week in Acapulco, and one guy (whose name I can’t remember) did a whole session on that folk song we all know so well and probably sang in rounds at school or around campfires: Row, row your boat, gently down the stream…

He made me think of it in a whole new way, pointing out that every line is worth considering in terms of being good advice for living life well.

Here’s the guts of what he said:

Row, row, row your boat – Do what you’re good at. And keep doing it until you reach your desired destinations, whatever they may be.

Gently down the stream – Go with the flow. Do not flail, panic or mess about. Seek out smooth water. Avoid getting sidetracked by exploring minor side streams. Don’t get caught up in overhanging trees or submerged obstacles. Be wary of whirlpools and scary rapids. All can impede your progress.

Merrily, merrily, merrily – keep a sense of humour at all times. Laughter makes everything better and eases all your dealings with other people.

Life is but a dream – don’t take everything so seriously. Much of the stuff we think is important, such as ambition and success, is just an illusion.

It’s hard to argue with any of that. Basic rowboat philosophy works.

I looked into a rowboat often in 2011. Twin grandsons arrived and for a few weeks, while they were still small enough, they slept together in a beautiful cradle boat hand-made by my husband. Sailing ship carpenters used to make little boats like this for times when an infant arrived during long sea voyages. The boat would be slung from ceiling rafters to rock the baby with the movement of the ship.

Our grandbabies are pictured here at two weeks old, frowning and sleepy. Nine months later, they have of course graduated to individual cots. The cradle boat is empty again, waiting for a next small body to be soothed to sleep inside it.

Then, as the year turned over, I was nudged by yet another rowboat reminder. Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of a long-ago much admired book, Women Who Run With the Wolves) is a prolific Facebook updater who has 25,000 followers, including me.

She wrote a lovely New Year’s Eve piece about what she calls ‘the little red rowboat of the heart’ and of how important it is to choose what to row toward, and to do so diligently and daily.

She went on: “I love that the word 'diligently' has the word 'gently' in it. For though sometimes the rowing must be fierce to pierce the riptides or to row up the downside of the escarpment of a huge green wave, even then, often the gentle insistence of the heart 'to keep going' is what allows us to continue in any weathers.”

Dr Estes writes so well. Let’s hope all our rowboats carry us serenely and strongly through whatever 2012 will bring. Propelled, of course, by our own strong arms and a keener than ever sense of direction.

Snow White - armed and dangerous

How many little girls must have grown up on those old Disney cartoons starring pretty ladies in danger – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Well it’s time to forget all that sweetness, for new movies are demolishing the dreamy myths.
Epic action-adventure story Snow white and the Huntsman is due out next year. About all that remains from the old story is that Snow White is far too beautiful and the evil queen is out to destroy her. But what the queen, played with blonde menace by Charlize Theron, does not know is that the pretty one has been getting martial-arts training from the very man who’s supposed to be killing her.
So forget Disney’s heroine in puffy sleeves with the perky red bow in her bobbed black hair. Here’s the new Snow White, all grimly armoured up with sharp sword like some latter-day Joan of Arc, ready to hack her enemies to pieces. The archetypal sweet and helpless girl has gone, swept up in the new admiration for Kill Bill-style heroines. You could say, of course, that it was time those dippy Disney heroines toughened up a bit, but I'm kind of uneasy about easily we've got used to girls adept at shooting, stabbing and kung fu kicking.
There is still a prince in the new Snow White movie, though now that the girl herself is so lethal it’s hard to know what purpose he'll serve. Small men are in the cast too, but undoubtedly they won't have cozy names like Happy, Sleepy and Dopy.
The movie's bound to be technically brilliant but the trailer looks oh so dark and certainly not anything you’ll want your five-year-old to see. But given that the movie stars Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series, it's clear the movie's made for teenagers.
What's next, I wonder – a version of Cinderella where she’s water-boarded by the stepsisters, or a Sleeping Beauty being raped by aliens? Tell you what, audiences would probably lap it up. Especially if the heroine gets to wreak bloody vengeance in the end. And meanwhile we keep on wondering why schoolgirls are so ready today to start fights and punch people.

Eleven eleven eleven

Friday! Here it comes - 11-11-11. It's a date some people are slightly nervous about, and even ecstatic about if they're seeing it as a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind, as is the case for lots of Mayan Calendar watchers.
Numerologists are excited about it too - check out this article by Christine deLorey for instance. She says, "we are at an important moment in time and there is more to it than meets the eye."
11:11 of course famously marked a huge moment in 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was when the Armistice was signed, thus ending the terrible Great War.
Why does a gaggle of elevens have the power to grab us? Maybe it's a hangover from the past. The number eleven was apparently regarded with some dread in medieval times, when numbers were often held to have mystical significance. There's even a new horror movie called 11-11-11, based on a widely reported 11:11 phenomenon, which is all about people constantly noticing that time on digital clocks.
Behavioural scientists say that rather than feeling something special is going on we should put our 11:11 alertness down to something called apophenia, which is the brain’s tendency to look for meaningful patterns in the world around us. Example: When women are dying to get pregnant they notice other women pushing baby buggies in the street and think they're everywhere, when in fact there are no more than there ever were. Or, anyone thinking about buying a red Honda will be noticing them all over the place too.
There are positive aspects for the date. Because some people really like the idea of 11-11-11 there are lots of weddings planned for the big day (almost 4000 scheduled in Las Vegas). And in New York they've poured extra effort into organizing Friday's Corduroy Appreciation Day, that being of course the date that most resembles the parallel lines in corduroy fabric. At one big party the required dress code is anything in corduroy... and course there's an 11-piece band.
Once Friday's over we can, hopefully, relax for another hundred years until 11-11-11 comes round again. That’s assuming of course we get through 2012.

Flying in 1950s style

I wrote about Pan Am (the airline) in a recent blog, which prompted my brother to send me some great pics of old planes that he found on the website of Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. I love this one, showing the dining set-up in a Solent flying boat. The aircraft - currently under restoration at Motat and the only surviving Mark IV Solent in the world - represented "the pinnacle of luxury flying boat airliners".
We all aspire to fly business Class today but back in the 1950s when the Solent took tourists over the Tasman to Australia and on the Coral Route to Tahiti, the whole plane was business class.
Check out the decor in soft lemon and dove grey, the tables spread with white linen, fine china and glassware. Look closely and you can see the TEAL logo on the glasses (TEAL being the forerunner of Air New Zealand - short for Tasman Empire Airways Ltd).
Elaborate meals were apparently cooked on board and it all looks like the 45 passengers enjoyed an elegance that's hard to find today.
Mind you, you'd have needed something to pass the time. There was, after all, no inflight entertainment, so if you forgot to take a good book there was nothing to do but wait to get there. They weren't quick, cruising at around 400kmh; the Auckland-Sydney flight took five and a half hours. And the planes could go no higher than 17,000 feet which must have meant they had to batter their way through some hefty weather systems. There must, at times, have been a whole lotta rattling of that china going on.
When I was a kid I lived at the foot of Upland Road in Remuera, quite a long way from Auckland harbour but still close enough to be able to hear the flying boats on their lumbering take-off runs, those four 2000 horsepower engines roaring like fury as the pilots pushed them to maximum power to lift the plane off the water. I can still hear them now.

Why world class?

You might have noticed, if you’ve read anything recently about plans for Auckland’s future, that our leaders yearn for us to be a world-class city. Over and over we hear about our world-class art gallery, world-class food, world-class coffee, world-class design, world-class just about anything you can think of. It’s the highest accolade we have. Who started this world-class talk? They need a good smack. World class sounds like a category of aircraft seating. It also makes us sound like a bunch of wanna-be’s. No-one in a major city like Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin or San Francisco, would ever use a tag like that because they already know who they are. They know they are indeed somewhere in the world. Do we think we are somehow not of the world? It reveals in us such a lack of self confidence. It’s like the old bragging we used to hear in New Zealand about things here being the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. It smacks of small-country cringe. Enough already! Time to stop being so try-hard. “World-class” needs to be banned.

A woman's heart explained

I have to thank Maria Popova, curator of the wonderfully curious site, brainpickings.org, for this lovely Victorian illustration. Popova scours the web constantly looking for interesting things. This "Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart" is the work of one DW Kellogg and was drawn some time around the 1830s. You can find more beautiful maps here.

But this map - how intriguing it is to me, especially after spending so much time lately in old newspaper archives as I researched social life in my home town, Auckland, in the 1880s. It was so much a man's world then. At least by the 1880s activism was starting to show its face. By then a few lady doctors were touring the world giving lectures on health to female audiences who were probably completely ignorant of the workings of their own bodies. Some women were beginning to call for the abolition of smoking. There was even an Anti Plumage League, whose members were outraged at the killing of birds so their feathers could be used as hat adornments.
But 40 years earlier, a woman's heart - at least according to this fanciful map - was a morass of sentiment and vanity. The largest font sizes are reserved for her vanities - love of dress, love of display and love of admiration. There are lands labelled Coquetry, Selfishness, Sentimentality, Affectation and Fickleness.
The lower right quadrant goes give the woman's heart a little praise. It contains (if in small letters) Hope, Enthusiasm, Good Sense, Discrimination and Prudence, close to the border of the Country of Solid Worth. It does tend to balance up the opposing border marking the Land of Oblivion. Too much laudanum, perhaps?