The Scout Report

Substantial Fascinators, a Muse, and the 60-Year Queue: 11.14.08

The ears of TSR's editorial board members are still ringing from standing too close to the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery in Hyde Park, when it released its 41 Gun Royal Salute honoring the 60th birthday of HRH Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Duke of Rothesay, Duke of Cornwall, and Prince Charles of Edinburgh. The board accompanied Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain IV, TSR chief of protocol enforcement and defenestration, to the birthday party hosted by one of The Prince's initiatives, the Mutton Renaissance. Mrs. IV sits regally on its board. She presented The Prince with a mincemeat pie made with mutton from her ancestral Hamptons barony and prepared according to her family's traditional Tudor recipe:

Pyes of mutton or beif must be fyne mynced and ceasoned wyth pepper and salte, and a lyttle saffron to coloure it, suet or marrow a good quantite, a lyttle vyneger, prumes, greate raysins and dates, take thefattest of the broathe of powdred beyfe, and yf you wyll have paest royall, take butter and yolkes of egges and so tempre the flowre to make the paeste.—A Proper newe Booke of Cokerye (1545)

Controlled tangent. The Prince of Wales passes time in dog years. He's still queued up, albeit at the front, for the Orb and Scepter handoff, and he's waited 35 years to marry Mrs. Parker Bowles. Their wedding, which Mrs. IV attended on the arm of Hamish Bowles (no relation), created a lot of chirping in the fashion press about head gear. For the civil ceremony (pictured below), Londoner Philip Treacy, inimitable milliner to the royal and rich, topped off the bride with an "intensely feminine straw hat, overlaid with ivory French lace and trimmed with a fountain of feathers." For the more formal blessing ceremony in the Gothic St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, the newly minted Duchess of Cornwall switched to a substantial fascinator of feathers (below, far right), tipped with crystals. Upon her return to the 13 Original Colonies, Mrs. IV adopted the Royal Ascot Dress Code and revised the Rules of Protocol to require board members to don substantial fascinators at all public functions, including defenestrations.

    

Jarring juxtaposition. Lid-artist Treacy inhabits parallel universes—one white (above), one black (below). He can sew an Ascot bonnet, preferred by the Queen, for the afternoon, and crown his well-heeled devotees with outlandish head art for night crawling. His beloved muse, the late Isabella Blow (below), discovered him, as she did Alexander McQueen.

 

"'If I feel really low, I go to see Philip, cover my face [with his hats] and feel fantastic... Wearing a hat is like cosmetic surgery.' Isabella habitually flaunted herself in Treacy's most improbable creations, giving the impression to the outside world that she was full of brazen confidence: hats fashioned like crocodiles' teeth, lobsters, flying saucers, a mourning hat with 100 veils designed to absorb the tears, and a hat like a pheasant, which she liked so much she always said she planned to be buried in it."—The Daily Mail.

She had Diana Vreeland's flamboyance and unusual looks and Dorothy Parker's penchant for attempting suicide. Izzy was 48 years old, when she apparently succeeded on May 7, 2007. She became TSR's official Muse Posthumous on that day, as the board prefers its muses to govern and inspire from the Other Side. There she Blows!

The Vapors, Fiat Currency, and Wolves: 10.26.08

TSR's editorial board members are heirloom rich and cash poor, as mandated by company bylaws. Members exude a snarky gentility and have impeccable manners. During recent weeks, however, when the board witnessed the value of its meager assets morph into Confederate dollars, it assumed the wartime position: Contract the vapors. Second, follow emergency procedures for Continuity of Government (CoG). Convert to modest suppers of root vegetables and kidney-bean rabbit (left) or mutton. Dignify meals with great-grandmama's discontinued Haviland and unnecessarily ornate Chantilly. Third, maintain a stiff upper lip and stiffer drinks until fortunes reverse.

Revealing digression. Mrs. James Peregrine Leger-Demain, IV, TSR's chief of protocol enforcement and defenestration, was reading her favorite Charlotte Perkins Gilman poem, "The Wolf at the Door" (left), to her children—Driveway, Pee Dee, Waxhaw, Chigger, and 雞尾酒—as she does every night at bedtime. "Children are more malleable in the morning, if they lay awake all night trembling." Suddenly, she realized that being torn apart my a pack of rabid wolves was an apt analogy for TSR's current economic downturn. Mrs. IV pulled out her signed copy of M.F.K. Fisher's wartime classic, How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and began planning supper.

Jarring juxtaposition. TSR invited Joe the Aerial Wolf Hunter (right) for cocktails last night. (He preferred the six-pack the board happened to have stored in the bunker its members sometimes share with Dick Cheney, another talented marksman.) Joe argued eloquently that shooting wolves protects the moose and caribou herds, and the bounty he receives pays the legal fees to fight Joe Junior's meth-lab conviction. Mrs. IV, always nonpartisan, commented, "I don't imagine that makes the moose feel any safer, since the governor herself is quite the moose slayer. On the other hand, killing wolves does reduce the competition. I dunno, though, sounds a little like socialism to me."

...The 180 volunteer pilots and aerial gunners who are the backbone of the program can get $150 in cash for turning in legs of freshly killed wolves, Gov. Sarah Palin's office announced Tuesday. Previously, the only reward was a wolf pelt they could sell, usually for somewhere between $200 and $300, said Bruce Bartley, Department of Fish and Game spokesman.—Anchorage Daily News

Greenwashing the Democratic Convention: 7.15.08

No one's more eco-conscientious than the good editors at TSR. We recycle, reuse, and whatever that third "R" stands for. We're even somewhat alert politically, which means we have an interoffice pool for betting on how the Democrats will blow the presidential election in November. Today, the cringe-o-meter points at the convention. Leave it to the Democrats to bring the food police up the mountain in solar-powered gondolas to mile-high Denver.
    Our beloved nattering nabob of negativism, that silky pugilist Maureen Dowd sounds the warning. "[Obama's] already in danger of seeming too prissy about food—a perception heightened when The Wall Street Journal reported that the planners for Obama’s convention have hired the first-ever Director of Greening, the environmental activist Andrea Robinson. She in turn hired an Official Carbon Adviser to “measure the greenhouse-gas emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared and every coffee cup tossed.”
    The “lean ‘n’ green” catering guidelines, The Journal said, bar fried food (right) and instruct that, “on the theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include ‘at least three of the following color s: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.’ (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70 percent of the ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions from fuel during transportation.” 

Controlled tangent. Will the proceedings begin each day with mandatory jazzercise? We think that instead of a flag lapel pin, everyone should wear a pin that lists his/her Body Mass Index (BMI). Delegates with a BMI over 25 will have to attend humiliation seminars. Of course, if you're a limousine liberal, you can purchase indulgences, uh, we mean, carbon offsets, and drive your SUV to the convention guilt-free. Those East Coast delegates who are riding bicycles to Denver had better get on the road.

Revealing digression. According to The New York Times, local caterers are reluctant "to participate because of stringent rules on what delegates will be eating, down to the color of the food..." TSR wonders what those struggling, middle-class Denver vendors think about all this high-mindedness. Might they be more interested in the color of money during this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
    The WSJ goes on to report: Joanne Katz, who runs the Denver caterer Three Tomatoes, will take one for the green team by removing her fried goat-cheese wontons with chipotle pepper caramel sauce from the menu. But she questions whether some of the guidelines will have the desired earth-saving effects.
    Compostable utensils, she says, are often shipped from Asia on fuel-guzzling cargo ships. As for the plates: "Is it better to drive across town to have china delivered to an event and then use hot water to wash it, or is it better to use petroleum-based disposables?" she asks.
    The convention's greening gurus say they're doing the best they can with the most current information available. Hmm. Wasn't that the rationale used to explain the Iraqi War?