We'd thought the gag potential of Philadelphia as a dull town had been exhausted, but a whole slew of newies about the yawn-qualities of the City of Brotherly Love has sprung up. Take, for example, the current yok that goes like so: big contest sponsored by a giant soap company in which the first prize is a one-week, all-expense vacation in Philadelphia; second prize – a twoweek, all-expense vacation in Philadelphia. Or this one: man goes to see his doctor, is informed he only has four months to live. He is told that he can do anything he wants during those four months – smoke, drink, hire a concubine, race D-Jags – anything. But in four months he'll be dead. The man asks the doctor, "Is it OK if I go live in Philadelphia my last four months on this earth?" "Sure," answers the medico, "but why would you want to do a thing like that?" The guy says: "Well, it would seem so much longer that way."
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Shades of the Roaring Twenties. Lord & Taylor has uncovered a cache of "vintage raccoon coats ... in magnificent disrepair" and is unloading them at 25 simoleons each, tax and megaphone not included.
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We have a bedraggled, limp letter from a friend recently returned from what was to have been a glorious vacation on his power cruiser, off the New England Coast. This man claims – with some justice – that he was singled out for hard treatment by the doughty descendants of the Pilgrims. On the day of his departure for Cape Cod a group of towns along the shore pooled their resources to see what might be done about alleviating the fine sunny weather, hired a cloud-seeding rainmaker who knew his job. Our informant concludes: "Don't tell me everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. I'm planning my next vacation in Death Valley."
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Picking up on the rear-window auto sticker bit covered in these columns a couple of months ago, a lissome, light-hearted secretary we know on the Coast pulled a switcheroo and now sports the following sign on her desk: "Made in Hollywood by Almost Everybody." The report is also in about a guy in Gotham who ordered those creaky desk signs, Think and Smile, and was thoroughly shook up when they came back from the printer as – honest to Pete – Think and Smile.
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Add to our accidentally-concocted drink department: a host at whose digs we were wetting our whistle found his stock of olives and cocktail onions depleted, frantically rummaged in his refrigerator for some small vegetable with which to garnish the martinis and was successful. Reposing weirdly but tastily in the round that followed were potent slices of kosher dill pickle. He called the new drink a piccolini.
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We've heard that the principal item in a do-it-yourself gift touted as dandy for The Man Who Has Nothing is a stout-knotted hangman's noose, complete with prefabricated suicide note. Somberly gift-wrapped, it sells for one buck.
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All hands on deck for a salute to our intrepid British cousins, and especially to a certain salty sailorgirl who stuck the following classified ad in the sobersided journal Yachting World: "Deckhand, female, experienced sail, deep sea, now seeking interesting berth – Box 6190."
