Looking the L.A. Gift Show in the Mouth
Eat your heart out, Connie Consumer.
Christmas in July, and they won’t even let you take a peek under the bough.
Go ahead, beg, plead, sob, bribe, feign a fit. They still won’t let you in there. This one’s for the pros.
A pity, too. For undiluted Americana, you can’t beat the California Gift Show, a microcosm of everything that’s made America what it is today. Ingenuity all over the place. Avarice. Vitality. Overkill. Invention. At the Los Angeles Convention Center, a perfect Einsteinian equation: mass x speed = energy.
Not for Consumers
But they won’t let you in, Connie, because if they did, Betty Buyer would stay home, and then where would we all be come December?
At the Gift Show--this one is Los Angeles’ 101st--manufacturers or their reps sell wholesale to the buyers, who turn around and sell retail to you, marking up at every step. It’s the American Way.
They won’t let Connie Consumer in because when she sees that a hand-carved “designer” candle she’ll be paying $1 for wholesales at 30 cents, there goes the whole ball of wax.
The buyers know these things. Before the week is out, 50,000 of them will have worn their Hush Puppies to the bone tramping through acres of products, new or improved, exquisite or tawdry. Acres of . . .
. . . Silk kimonos, canned venison chili, cloth kites, antlers fashioned into sword racks, fresh-water pearls, Hulk Hogan key rings, feather dusters. . . .
Through the crowd, taking five from Booth 27, strolls Marcia Reed, vice president of Benjor Inc. Reed seems to be on a snack break. In her right hand she holds what appears to be multicolored cotton candy. With eyes.
“Feather dusters,” she explains. “I got the idea while I was traveling in Taiwan. Then I added eyes. Cute?”
Cute.
“Hey,” Reed says, “the world’s getting dustier. Maybe it’s Halley’s Comet. Maybe it’s the weeds. Weeds are great dust catchers. Whatever it is, you have to dust, right? Why not enjoy yourself. These little lovelies are fuzzy, washable. No two exactly alike. . . .”
Neither are the buyers, whose invasion of this semi-annual orgy make it the world’s biggest gift show, deposing a similar bash in New York.
Neither are the products . . .
. . . Tree ornaments, creches, diapers bearing the caveat “Don’t Pinch My Tushie,” life-sized velvet geese, personalized beer steins, scrimshaw, updated Cabbage Patch kids . . .
. . . “Sorry,” reads a sign on the booth. “Our Show Babies Are Not Up for Adoption.” They take their dollies seriously in the cabbage patch, even dress like them. Mark Hall, assistant national sales manager all the way in from Cleveland, hands one of his wards to one of his assistants with the uncertain touch of a first-time father. “Take him for a minute,” he says, then squints at his protege and adds, “Sorry. Her.”
Hall points out the top of the line, he in dinner jacket with diamond cuff links, she in evening gown, fur wrap, diamond earrings. “We made 500 sets,” he says. “and we’ve adopted more than half of them. We’re very proud.” Love is blind. Even at $1,000, the “he” looks like a pig in a tux.
“Dolls are very hot,” says Stella Roach, the show’s deceptively crusty press director who’s foam rubber underneath. “The kinds of dolls I played with are now collectors’ items. I paid 79 cents, they sell ‘em now for $200. Would I part with mine? Hell no!
“Listen, I can’t wait to get out of this office and go buy me a Dolly Dimple . . .”
. . . Or a grandfather clock. A Lucite pretzel jar. A fudge-making machine. An “amazing washcloth that changes colors before your very eyes.” A parasol. A survival kit for the newly divorced. . . .
Sharing Booth 990, Jacquie Lieb and Susan Goldstein, two sisters from Los Angeles, attempt to take the sting out of the split. Divorcee Lieb shows a bumper sticker that reads “Smile, I Might Be Dating Your Ex” and says, “We want to turn something unhappy into something positive.” True enough, one of her greeting cards says, “In spite of all our problems, we did make wonderful children.” Another one, though, has all the charm of a post-prandial black widow: “Sorry to hear you are still lonely after our divorce. You never had any trouble getting dates while we were married.”
Several booths away, there is succor for the scorched male in the form of a full-sized football helmet with RAMS stenciled on its shiny sides. The helmet is upside down. The space where the noggin ordinary goes is now filled with corn chips. The face mask is ingeniously outfitted with dip and relish trays.
“Great for TV,” a prospective buyer says. “You know what you oughta fill it with, though?”
“I’ll bite” says a bored sales rep.
“Head cheese,” the buyer says.
The seller doesn’t even look up from his newspaper. The buyer moves on to . . .
. . . Loving cups. “MASH” vodka dispensers in the shape of intravenous feeders. Thimbles in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. Pewter chess pieces in the shape of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty. Confederate flags. Duck decoys. Gold-plated bunny pellets. . . .
A sign at the rear of one booth proclaims “Save the Rabbit,” and Sandy Davies is delighted to explain.
“We used to raise rabbits,” says Davies, who lives on Maui, “and one day my daughter asked me, ‘Do they really kill them for the lucky feet?’ We were in the electroplating business and I got to thinking, ‘What do rabbits do most?’ The answer was soon obvious, and we began coating what we call the ‘recycled carrots’ with 24-karat gold. Good business, it turned out, and great fun.
“Yeah, we electroplate just about anything we can dream up. Mistletoe is a nice item. Then there’s the cockroaches.”
Cockroaches?
“Oh, they’re huge in Maui. If you inject them with formaldehyde, they’re very pliable. You can twist ‘em into any shape at all. How do you like this one, with the tiny tennis racket? We call it Mack-N-Roach.”
So anyway, sorry about that, Connie. You’d have loved it, but they probably couldn’t have accommodated you anyway. The show is now so big that it’s burst the bounds of the Convention Center proper, spilling over into temporary bubble buildings just popping over with skull-headed canes, ceramic cacti, adult kaleidoscopes on five-foot stands, ornamental eggs, genuine carpetbags, hip flasks. . . .
And you’d have loved those little snatches of buyer talk that drift like cigar smoke through the aisles and out into the parking lot:
“So I told him, I sez ‘Sixty-five cents? I could make it myself for a quarter.’ And he sez ‘That’s my business; your business is you can sell it for a buck-and-a-half, easy.’ And you know, he’s right. . . .”
Eat your heart out, Connie Consumer.
