NOSTALGIA

In the ‘50s, Tupperware was an event. Homemakers would go to Tupperware parties, play games for gifts, eat a dainty lunch (a molded Jell-O salad was customary) and learn to “burp the seal.”

Very unhip. Very un-’90s. Very un-L.A., right? Wrong.

“Look, I’m totally Tupperized,” says Mar Vista resident Cheryl Eastman, opening her kitchen cupboards and freezer to show off perfectly organized shelves of well-marked, neatly stacked, color-coordinated containers.

Eastman, 41, is L.A.’s numero uno Tupperware saleswoman: Last year, she raked in more than $113,000 in sales. Tupperware is still sold mostly at home parties--she organizes about six a week, including a brunch each weekend--and 40 years after its inception, a Tupperware party is still an event. Women, mostly homemakers with children, gather in one another’s homes and eat lunch (sans Jell-O mold) and talk containers. “You wouldn’t believe how thrilled my women get when a piece comes out,” she says. “Women who live in $3-million homes in north Santa Monica. They’re Tupperware junkies.”

As she dashed out to a Tuesday Tupperware Pep Rally (for salespeople and managers), she looked back at her two-story Spanish house. “My friends call it ‘the house that Tupperware built.’ ”