Dear Future Generations:

It’s just a matter of minutes before we’ve never met and as far as you’re concerned I’m a dusty relic in some old green pictures. It is impossible for you to know me as anything but a two-dimensional object. A very wise person once told me that all of history before one’s birth might as well have never happened for most people, and even people who care can’t really imagine it. He went on to say it was all some sepia-toned movie, then a person’s born and things that can really be considered start happening. Turns out he also smoked a brand of cigarettes I never saw anywhere else and may have leafletted Havana eight months after I was born, but that doesn’t help you any, does it, pumpkins? Of course not. So let’s talk about this.

When my friends’ grandmas kicked the buckets, my friends turned up at my place with puzzled expressions and suitcases of clothing my friends could barely contemplate. We were younger, vintage was my thing, I was much smaller than most adult mammals and the grandmas’ clothing was too small for their beef-fed progeny. Somehow, grandmas could never let go of silk stockings or wild bras or lacy things – and the idea of Abuela as a hot tamale – ¡Ay, caramba! For many of my friends, that was too much.

Recently, I made a perfectly innocent request of my friends. You remember my friends: they’re the mostly puzzled people. I asked them to clean out their stashes of knitting yarn, toss the scraps my way and I’d knit blankets for stray cats. Yes, it’s hard to believe we still have problems like knitting, scrap yarn and stray cats, but stay with me here. One of my friends has been cleaning out a house belonging to the elderly mom of a friend of hers, and apparently that mom is full of surprises. My friend has delivered two large garbage bags – yes, we still have garbage, it’s so EMBARRASSING TO BE ANCIENT HISTORY – and the second one contained the style-bucking apron above and this eye-opener to boot:

See, until fairly recently, I was – and I can say this without fear of contradiction – smokin’ hot, at least in geologic time, but though I was born when my father’s mother was 44 I did not know until after she died that she had been an unmitigated beauty. I found some photographs, one of her posed casually in a kitchen, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. And you, who see me as an old person or a name on a family tree or a speck of dust you breathe now and then, you should know that this apron is a horrible affront to good taste that might be very funny on a skinny teenage boy, and doing things because they’re funny is the only way to go. But if you find something frightful like this in my possession posthumously, you must consider another possibility: that these dreadful items are being passed from silly person to silly person to mortify grandchildren. Perhaps this is not about us old folks being secretly super-sexay. Perhaps we sing along and sing along, and when the music stops, we wish we could watch one more mesmerizing, hilarious dance.

No really. I was hot,

Princess Ta