 Michaela prefers slow fashion and vintage clothes to the cookie-cutter disposables flogged by corporations. I say amen to that! “Don’t tell me life doesn’t begin at eighty,” said the octogenarian who had just returned from her honeymoon. She looked jaunty and radiant, and her equally venerable new husband had a distinct twinkle in his eye as he nodded in agreement. I always love seeing newlyweds embracing the future with such visible joy. True, they don’t know how many years they might have ahead of them. But then, does anyone? Living in a society obsessed with youth, novelty, and cutting-edge technology, I take tremendous pleasure in people, places, and things with a very long past. It’s one of the reasons I can never resist vintage shops, flea markets, and garage sales; for me, they’re treasure hunts, not just because I find cool and unusual stuff at bargain prices, but because they evoke so many memories and constantly tickle my funny bone. A decorator friend who has puzzled over my house for years recently had an epiphany. “I know what your style is,” she announced triumphantly. “It’s whimsical!” Yep, she's right. They say your home reflects your innermost being, so apparently my quirkiness isn’t skin deep but goes to the very depths of my soul.  Practically everything in my living room has a long and colorful history. My collection of pre-owned, pre-loved stuff includes some vintage clothes I’ll wear until they fall to pieces. The pace of modern life is so rapid, with such constant change, it’s nice to slow something down, if only the turnover in my closet. Luckily I’m not alone in this attitude. Thrifting (as it’s now called) has become a $28 billion industry, and some second-hand clothing retailers predict that by 2029 it’s going to eclipse fast fashion — although that may be more aspirational than realistic. Still, I’m delighted to know that lots of young people are choosing clothes with a past over the cookie-cutter disposables flogged by corporations. I met one young enthusiast last Thursday when we were both browsing through vintage clothes at Shoffeitt’s Off the Square Collective in Healdsburg. Michaela told me she’d been hooked from early childhood, when her mother used to take her on expeditions to second-hand shops, searching for stand-out clothes. “The quality is so much better. They’ve already lasted a long time. If you’re wearing fast fashion everyone’s already seen it before. It’s fun to be unique. I definitely get the most compliments when I thrift it.” She added, “Fast fashion is always a little behind on trends. Fashion goes in circles, and I like to predict what's coming and get ahead of it. When [a style] is everywhere, that’s when fast fashion starts to put it out there.” Just how fast is fashion these days? A few years ago everyone was dazzled by the Spanish chain Zara; their designers could see something on a high-end runway and get cheap knock-offs into shops in just three weeks. Now they’ve been blown out of the water by the Chinese juggernaut, SHEIN (pronounced she-in), which does it all in just three days. SHEIN produces small batches — only 50 to 100 pieces per new product — and goes for volume, delivering up to a million new products a day via online sales. No wonder it became a $100 billion company in just 14 years. Of course, SHEIN has pesky little issues with quality control, trademark disputes, and allegations of human rights violations, slippery tax practices, and health and safety issues. And there was a lot of blowback when people noticed they were selling a necklace with a swastika on it, which SHIEN insisted was a Buddhist religious symbol that had nothing to do with Nazis. (Yeah, right.) The necklace was pulled offline, the controversy died down, and everyone went on shopping. Because cheap, trendy clothes are irresistible to most consumers.  At the Atelier Constance, an artisanal cobbler in Montmartre, Jerôme Voisin repairs footwear the old fashioned way, as his father taught him. The French — long time leaders of the fashion industry — have come up with their own novel solution: subsidizing the repair of clothing and shoes. The idea is to encourage citizens to hold on to decent stuff rather than replace it with junk. A private company is spearheading the project, offering reductions on repair bills of $7 to $28 per item in an effort to stem the flood of discards. With 92 million tons of garments winding up in the world’s landfills each year, the UN is predicting fashion will soon become the second most polluting industry in the world. While there’s clearly some moral satisfaction to be gained by shopping for second-hand goods, for me it’s mostly about fun. Rich and I have spent countless hours at the monthly Alameda flea market (officially it’s the Alameda Point Antiques Faire, but nobody calls it that). There are more than 800 stalls, each quirkier than the last. Outrageous furniture. Eccentric art. Gorgeous clothes you can try on and imagine yourself wearing in another life or parallel universe. Casts of footprints they claim are Bigfoot’s. And countless other oddities you won’t find anywhere else. Including laughter. A kid once set up a chair at the Alameda flea market and offered snippets of humor for 25 cents. Yes, of course, I immediately dug out a quarter and handed it to him. This was many years ago, and I can no longer quite recall which of my favorite puns came from him that day. It might have been “I checked out a book on anti-gravity. I can’t put it down.” Or maybe he said, “I thought about putting an observatory in my house, but the cost was astronomical.” Possibly it was something else altogether. Whatever it was, Rich and I spent the rest of the day chuckling over it. Best quarter I’d spent in a long time. “What’s past is prologue,” William Shakespeare famously wrote in 1611, and (underscoring his point) those words remain equally true today. Everything that has ever taken place, from the Big Bang onward, has been the run-up to this very moment. It all provides the context in which we understand our lives and make decisions, large and small, that will define our collective future. We have much to learn from the past. “The best qualification of a prophet,” the Marquis of Halifax once remarked, “is to have a good memory.” Being around ancient objects helps me keep that in perspective. The oldest thing in my home is the fossil of a seven-inch mollusk called a cephalopod; I found it one day on the edge of the creek that ran through the woods beside our house in Ohio. The fossil is around 300 to 400 million years old. It’s small, flat rock that somehow remained intact through the appearance of amphibians, mammals, and birds, the disappearance of the last dinosaurs, and the rise of humans. Eventually it drifted out of a drying lakebed, tumbled about in various rivers and streams, and finally wedged itself into a pile of rocks, where I happened to spot it on a walk. The improbability of its survival is breathtaking. And I take comfort from that. That fossil, and all the other venerable people, places, and things I encounter, make it clear that life is unpredictable, and that sometimes, we’re just lucky enough to beat the odds.  As an added bonus, every time I look at this 400 million year old cephalopod, I feel so youthful! JUST JOINING US? THE NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR SO FAR IN PROGRESS: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF CALIFORNIA It's Only a Movie. Or Is It? (Bodega Bay) Why I Spray-Painted My Shoes (Theme Weddings) Please, Please, Please Don't Ask Me to Sing Karaoke (San Anselmo) Keeping It Strange & Wonderful for Future Generations (Fairfax Festival) Why Isn't Anyone Banning My Books (Alameda) When Pigs Fly (Yes, They Can!) (Sacramento Pig Races) Do You Believe in Magic? (Alameda's Macabre Market) My Close Encounter with the Skeptic Society (Outer Space) The Nutters' Guide to Modern Comfort Food (My Kitchen) Relationships: Do Humans Stand a Ghost of a Chance? (Hangtown) For Nutters, There's No Place Like California (Petaluma Chicken & Egg Day) Can Artificial Intelligence Help Me Plan the Next Nutters Tour? SPRING 2023: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF SPAIN Spain Never Runs Out of Offbeat Curiosities (Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona) I Travel Deep into the Heart of Nuttiness (Palencia & Pamplona) Road Warriors: Let the Good Times Roar (Léon & Oviedo) Travel Alert: You Can't Always Get What You Want... (Madrid & Burgos) Gobsmacked at Every Turn but Embracing the Chaos (Jaén & Valdepeñas) All Aboard for the Nutters Tour of Spain (Packing & Organizing) WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? Subscribe to receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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What can we learn from Hitchcock's The Birds and other films that make us shiver? Photo: Jamie Farrell, staff writer, Secret San Francisco
So tell me, what’s the scariest movie you ever saw? Rich still talks about Alien. “I had no idea what the movie was about,” he says. “I bought a box of Milk Duds and never ate a single one. I clutched that candy so hard that by the end it was just a mangled lump.” For me, it’s The Exorcist; just hearing the theme music makes me start hyperventilating. Everybody has a movie memory that makes them shiver and wonder whether they should sleep with the lights on tonight. Alfred Hitchcock gleefully claimed he gave audiences pleasure — “The same pleasure they get when waking up from a nightmare.” When a moviegoer complained to him that Janet Leigh’s death scene in Psycho left her daughter too traumatized to use a shower, he was unrepentant, saying, “Then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned.” 
When Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho came out in 1960, its "no late admissions" policy heightened the sense of drama.
Like that moviegoer's daughter, I grew up traumatized by Hitchcock classics. So you can imagine my sentiments when Rich and I began discussing a birdwatching expedition to Bodega Bay, where Hitchcock filmed The Birds. Yes, the one where our feathered friends mass for an attack on humanity, and Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor have to take time out from their mating dance to fight back. Not very successfully. Bodega Bay is a famous spot for birdwatching — Rich’s latest hobby — so I wanted to be a good sport about the outing. And after all, The Birds was just a movie. Pure fiction. Right? Wrong. 
This week, I discovered the movie was based on actual events. Yes, it was partly inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s fantasy about avian mayhem, but it was also based on the very real sooty shearwaters incident in Capitola, 100 miles south of Bodega Bay. There, on August 18, 1961, at 3:00 in the morning, thousands of shrieking birds began raining down from the sky. “Struggling to the door, I was awed at the sight of hundreds of birds — all with the cry of a baby,” recalled Edna Messini, proprietor of Capitola’s Venetian Court Motel. “They were heavy with sardines unable to fly and lost in the dense fog as they came in from the sea attracted by our lights. They slammed against the building, [regurgitating] fish blood and knocking themselves out. Our manager phoned me, asked what to do? She knew it was the end of the world, panic set in, sure it was germ warfare.” Hitchcock immediately phoned the newspaper to get details of the story so he could work them into his plot. The reason the birds — known as sooty shearwaters — went so nuts remained a mystery until the 1990s, when tests revealed they had gorged on shellfish that had eaten a microalgae producing a toxin causing confusion, disorientation, seizures, and death. Yikes! Note to self: avoid eating shellfish in areas where birds are falling out of the sky or flying down your chimney. Luckily Rich and I never encountered any crazed sooty shearwaters on our birdwatching hike — that we know of. Frankly, as rank amateurs, we were rarely sure what we were seeing. Arriving in Bodega Bay, we ambled along the path — called, with more accuracy than originality, “Bird Walk” — enjoying the brisk air, colorful saltwater marsh, and glimpses of deer, rabbits, and various birds. Rich brought binoculars, a field guide, and an app that identifies all known avian species. Unfortunately, unless you’re fairly close, the app has difficulty distinguishing a perching bird from a clump of leaves, so it kept coming up blank. “But I can see the damn thing right there,” Rich growled at his iPhone, which wisely refused to engage further in the conversation. 
Rich and his bird-identification app didn't always see eye to eye.
Falling back on binoculars and his guide book, Rich identified a Vaux’s swift, a turkey vulture, a Brandt’s cormorant, some great blue herons, American white pelicans, snowy egrets, and western gulls. There might have been terns. There was definitely a row of grayish lumps standing on the far side of a distant pond. “I’m almost positive those are turkey vultures,” he said. “No, wait, I think they’re condors. Could be buzzards. Oh, I know, they’re pelicans. Yes, they’re pelicans for sure.” Later he positively identified them as herons. But hey, as long as they weren’t sooty shearwaters under the influence. One of the bird walk’s most charming features was a series of rustic wooden benches, each bearing a heartfelt tribute such as, “In loving memory to Jane Bidinger, better known as Mrs. B. This is her happy place.” There was also kind advice: “Rest your legs. Ease your mind. Celebrate this moment.” Was there an implied “because it could be your last if the birds come back” somewhere in there? I like to think not. Later we ate chowder on a breezy wharf, and as I wandered over to check out a wooden carving of a whale’s tail, Rich said, “Don’t look now, but I think the birds are massing behind you.” Glancing back I saw a dozen or so feathery forms silhouetted against the sun-flecked water. “Not that many,” I said. “I think we could take them on.” All the same, we left soon after. No point in tempting fate. 
Birds gather behind me on a wharf in Bodega Bay. What, me worry?
Why do scary stories claim such a firm grip on our imagination? For a start, they’re exciting, getting our adrenaline pumping while we’re safely ensconced in the comfort of our living room sofa. We know zombies aren’t really about to break down the door, so many of us — especially young people — enjoy the fizzing nerves and heightened awareness. Also, spooky films serve as dress rehearsals, teaching us the ropes so we feel better equipped to deal with actual emergencies that might arise someday. I often find myself calling out good advice to the clueless characters onscreen. When Taylor and Hedren finish boarding up the windows and gather everyone in the kitchen, I couldn’t believe they didn’t think to equip themselves with defensive weapons. “Grab a broom, you idiots! Don’t you have frying pan? A baseball bat? Anything?” When real life becomes as scary as Hitchcock’s imagination, these stories help us formulate a survival strategy. In 2020 Contagion became one of the most-watched films in America. Millions thought, “Oh, so that’s how you cope with this stuff.” One survey showed horror fans had less anxiety and greater resilience, finding enjoyment in life despite the catastrophe playing out across the globe. After reading the latest headlines, it helped to be able to turn to your lockdown companion and remark, “Hey, it could be worse. At least we haven't been kidnapped by aliens today!” 
In 1961 Betty and Barney Hill were (allegedly) kidnapped by aliens and taken to a space ship. Theirs was the first widely reported alien abduction story to hit the media. The rest is conspiracy-theory history.
Not all horror movies end with the good guys vanquishing evil and restoring order throughout the land. Like real life, these tales can leave us scratching our heads uneasily. At the end of The Birds, the survivors drive away surrounded by feathered hostiles; many view it as an allegory for humans' uneasy relationship with nature. If so, I’ve learned my lesson. Rich and I drove out of Bodega Bay and went directly home to fill our bird feeders. If the avian apocalypse ever comes, at least we'll have a few backyard songbirds on our side. 
Rich provides our songbirds with the high-priced sunflower seeds they really love. Buying their affection? Sure, why not? It may save our skins someday.
Postscript After I posted this, my friend and long-time reader Alicia Bay Laurel wrote a comment about living in Bodega Bay and designing a t-shirt for The Big Event with a theme of The Birds. She just sent me this delightful photo of her artwork: 
What a gem! She also sent this wonderful photo of a child's kite from the same event, with a Birds theme.
Thanks so much, Alicia, for sharing your memories and these great images!
JUST JOINING US? THE NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR SO FAR IN PROGRESS: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF CALIFORNIA Why I Spray-Painted My Shoes (Theme Weddings) Please, Please, Please Don't Ask Me to Sing Karaoke (San Anselmo) Keeping It Strange & Wonderful for Future Generations (Fairfax Festival) Why Isn't Anyone Banning My Books (Alameda) When Pigs Fly (Yes, They Can!) (Sacramento Pig Races) Do You Believe in Magic? (Alameda's Macabre Market) My Close Encounter with the Skeptic Society (Outer Space) The Nutters' Guide to Modern Comfort Food (My Kitchen) Relationships: Do Humans Stand a Ghost of a Chance? (Hangtown) For Nutters, There's No Place Like California (Petaluma Chicken & Egg Day) Can Artificial Intelligence Help Me Plan the Next Nutters Tour? SPRING 2023: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF SPAIN Spain Never Runs Out of Offbeat Curiosities (Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona) I Travel Deep into the Heart of Nuttiness (Palencia & Pamplona) Road Warriors: Let the Good Times Roar (Léon & Oviedo) Travel Alert: You Can't Always Get What You Want... (Madrid & Burgos) Gobsmacked at Every Turn but Embracing the Chaos (Jaén & Valdepeñas) All Aboard for the Nutters Tour of Spain (Packing & Organizing) WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? Subscribe to receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Necessity was the mother of a Google search that inspired this shoe makeover. Would you dress up as a comic book superhero to attend a wedding? Some friends of mine recently turned down a chance to do just that, and it got me thinking about all the loony ways modern couples try to give their Big Day an extra jolt of pizazz. Wearing zombie costumes. Getting married where they met, even if it’s the Costco frozen food aisle. Or (my personal favorite) having the bridesmaids hold puppies instead of bouquets. With two family weddings this summer, I was braced for anything: an alien abduction theme, instructions to dress like a StarWars storm trooper, or gathering at the new Taco Bell wedding chapel in Vegas. The invitations we got were somewhat less exotic. For the April wedding, held in the Sierras, Rich and I were to don “mountain formal” attire. “No problem,” I told Rich. “Just buy a buffalo plaid suit!”  Rich wasn't convinced this look was for him. The late June wedding involved a posh country club ceremony combining Jewish and Catholic traditions. One Irish grandmother was very keen to include the traditional "Ave Maria" but the kids balked. Incredibly, everyone ignored my suggestion to sing "Ave Maria" to the tune of "Hava Nagila." Go figure. I managed to pull together an outfit swanky enough for the country club, but it required silver shoes, and here’s where I hit a snag. I no longer wear high heels, which in my view is the most welcome perk of aging. But my collection of dressy flats included nothing in a color that was remotely suitable. Running around to shoe stores, I found every style so uncomfortable I could hardly kick them off fast enough. I kept staring into my closet hoping for a miracle. The best flats I owned were maroon — super comfy but hardly worn because the color was so awkward to work with. Why couldn’t they be silver? And that’s when it hit me. Why couldn’t they be silver?  After watching half a dozen video tutorials, I was sure I could do this! Consulting Google, I learned people spray-paint their shoes all the time. It’s fast, cheap, and no, the paint isn’t going to flake off onto the floor like the cloud following Pig Pen in the Peanuts cartoons. Consulting the crafts store staff, I bought specialty fabric spray paint they were confident would do the job. Unfortunately, these particular shoes had apparently been treated with some sort of stain repellant that resisted the spray color with all the vigor of a Victorian maiden spurning the unwanted advances of a drunken lecher. After six coats requiring three $16 cans, my shoes were a ghastly mottled grey-maroon. Time to employ the nuclear option. From the start, several bloggers had recommended Rust-Oleum, and a single $7 can turned my shoes a sparkling silver with plenty of paint left over. I offered to do Rich’s shoes as well, but for some reason he declined. As Rich, my silver shoes, and I headed to the wedding, our flight was delayed, and hanging around San Francisco's Terminal 2 we stumbled on an exhibition called Reflections … from the Unknown Museum. Back in the 1970s, a couple of screwball local artists, Mickey McGowan and Dickens “44” Bascom, started collecting iconic domestic objects, such as toys and lunchboxes, that reflected post-WWII American culture. The collection grew into the Unknown Museum, an ironic name as most people (at least of my generation) will instantly recognize practically everything displayed. Rich and I were having so much fun exploring the Unknown Museum that we almost missed our flight. I’m so glad we didn’t, as the wedding was tremendous fun. No, I’m not going to provide a lot of details or photos; amazingly enough, I’ve discovered not all my relatives, friends, and casual acquaintances are keen to have their personal lives laid bare in this blog. Like me, many of them didn’t grow up with Instagram and still retain quaint notions of privacy. But I will say that I love my new in-laws, laughed a lot, and thankfully did not leave a trail of Rust-Oleum flakes behind me on the dance floor. Afterwards, Rich and I talked a lot about connections — the ones that last a life time and those that come along seemingly at random, often leading to unexpected friendships and surprising outcomes. In fact, life is like one of those classic Rube Goldberg devices, the kind where one small move — such as lifting a spoon — pulls a string that jerks a ladle, which throws a cracker, making the toucan spring off its perch, sending seeds tumbling into a bucket, and after the cord, lighter, skyrocket, sickle, and string have all come into play, the pendulum eases the napkin across your chin to wipe up any dribbles. And you are ready for another sip of from the soup of life.  Rich, channeling the ghost of Rube Goldberg I took this picture of Rich at a Rube Goldberg exhibition we visited during our road trip. Goldberg was a Pulitzer-prize winning American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. He’s most famous for his cartoons, launched in the 1920s, depicting complicated gadgets designed to accomplish simple tasks in a series of indirect, impossibly convoluted moves. Today, some seem almost like premonitions of modern technology. As Rich and I attempted to operate some of the exhibition’s hands-on contraptions, I was struck all over again by the astonishing inventiveness of the human mind. Look at all the useful stuff we’ve come up with over the years: fire, the wheel, the Internet, duct tape. To say nothing of spray paint. Not everything has worked out so well for us (yes, climate change, I’m thinking of you). But even such time-wasting foolishness as Silly Putty, pet rocks, and Rube Goldberg’s gadgets have provided us with chuckles to lift our spirits and remind us it's fun to be alive. I chuckled a lot at the wedding, especially during the vows written by the young couple. Heartfelt, funny, moving; one minute they had us roaring, and then the bride and half the guests dissolved in tears. Afterwards, when I congratulated them on their beautiful words, the groom said, “Yeah, I kind of ran out of ideas at the end. So I used ChatGPT to finish it.” And the bride laughed and said, “Me too!”  We all take shortcuts that seem sensible at the time. “Things that look like shortcuts,” says author and tech guru Seth Godin, “are actually detours.” And as every traveler knows, detours are when things tend to get more interesting, taking us off the beaten path and down side streets filled with fresh possibilities. Sometimes the best way to get somewhere isn't to follow a straight line. Looking back, I’m so glad I was desperate enough to spray-paint those shoes. It's comforting to know that from now on I can always have perfectly color-coordinated footwear in the time it takes paint to dry. Would it have been easier just to buy a new pair of flats? Maybe. But then, this wouldn’t have been much of a blog post, would it?  OK, I have to admit, theme weddings do make the photos a bit more lively! JUST JOINING US? THE NUTTERS' WORLD TOUR SO FAR IN PROGRESS: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF CALIFORNIA Please, Please, Please Don't Ask Me to Sing Karaoke (San Anselmo) Keeping It Strange & Wonderful for Future Generations (Fairfax Festival) Why Isn't Anyone Banning My Books (Alameda) When Pigs Fly (Yes, They Can!) (Sacramento Pig Races) Do You Believe in Magic? (Alameda's Macabre Market) My Close Encounter with the Skeptic Society (Outer Space) The Nutters' Guide to Modern Comfort Food (My Kitchen) Relationships: Do Humans Stand a Ghost of a Chance? (Hangtown) For Nutters, There's No Place Like California (Petaluma Chicken & Egg Day) Can Artificial Intelligence Help Me Plan the Next Nutters Tour? RECENTLY COMPLETED: THE NUTTERS' TOUR OF SPAIN Spain Never Runs Out of Offbeat Curiosities (Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona) I Travel Deep into the Heart of Nuttiness (Palencia & Pamplona) Road Warriors: Let the Good Times Roar (Léon & Oviedo) Travel Alert: You Can't Always Get What You Want... (Madrid & Burgos) Gobsmacked at Every Turn but Embracing the Chaos (Jaén & Valdepeñas) All Aboard for the Nutters Tour of Spain (Packing & Organizing) WANT TO STAY IN THE LOOP? Subscribe to receive notices when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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Karen McCann
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