Fels-Naptha

I am pretty busy, but as you people need all the help you can get, here I am, taking time out of my impossible schedule (next up: couch vacuuming) to save your sorry asses.

You see that soap? That's your Fels-Naptha heavy duty laundry bar soap. And no, I don't do my laundry by scrubbing it on a washboard, which is the natural intention of your Fels Naptha, but I always have a bar of this on hand.

You tangle with poison ivy? You're allergic to poison ivy? Let me guess, you go and get some candy-ass tube of Ivy Dry or (christ awmighty) calamine lotion.

You're kidding me, right?

What you need is your Fels-Naptha.

Directions: Scrub the living shit out of the poison-ivied area with a bar of Fels-Naptha as soon as possible or when those little effing blisters show up. Repeat two or three times a day for a few days until the shit clears up.

This is hands-down the best poison ivy advice you ever got in your whole sorry miserable life and you are welcome.

That is all.

* * *

The Life of O'Brien

So I'm on my regular five-mile walk, mumbling to myself and thinking my usual moronic and disconnected thoughts.

Don't be an asshole.

Yeah, but Robin Meade IS a lot younger than you.

You either left it in your purse or it's on the dresser.

I come upon a stack of boxes in a garbage pile. (Regular readers of this blog know that I pay close attention to all detritus on the road. Why, just the other day, I found a personal check, which I picked up, inspected, and then called the number in the left hand corner and arranged to return said check to the relieved checking account owner before he was obliged to make a stop payment, which is exactly the type of pro-karma activity that was about to pay off.)

The boxes were full of vintage print. Oh darling joy of life!


There were tons of booklets from county and state fairs and kitschy decorating guides from the 50's and 60's. I pulled out beekeeping guides, the 1966 Sears Business Equipment and Supply Catalog and home handyman booklets such as the 1957 Sherwin-Williams Home Decorator and How-to-Paint Book.


Rabbit books. The Chevrolet Story from 1961.


I'll bet Lucy will get me a few bucks on eBay and dig that old Montgomery Ward catalog.


They had chickens for sale in there!

Then lookie lookie lookie what else was in the piles:


Vintage porn! This Raw Flix is denoted as Volume One/Number One/Summer 1967. It features stills from skin flicks of the day. No ads, published quarterly by Health Knowlege, Inc. NY, NY.


But this is definitely my fave--a May 1967 copy of DUDE (60¢). It was neatly ripped in two, perhaps the work of a furious wife or girlfriend.

I don't know about you, but I was smoldering with curiosity over "The Erotic Power of Hypnosis."


I loved the ad copy in the back. Oh? And that hypnosis article? Here's an excerpt:

But what about the amateur who wants neither to cure anyone of nervous disorders or to put on a show for a large audience? Suppose he just wants to put someone--say, a big-bosomed blonde--UNDER HIS CONTROL--in private.

Well, it may come as a surprise to some of the doubting Thomases, but his chances are pretty good. Now here comes the if. IF he knows what he's doing.

Fortunately for the big-bosomed blonde contingent of 1967, I think that "IF" was a fairly prohibitive stumbling block for DUDE clientele.


The classies are a riot, but oddly familiar to anyone who's perused a 2010 spam folder:

YOUNG ENGLISH GIRL wants to hear from any gentleman interested in obtaining photos, slides, negs or films of an unusual nature. Send no money, just write to ...

See what I mean? There's an ad for teeth whitener in here. What are the chances it's exactly the same stuff advertised on my Yahoo inbox page?

RAM enterprises had a Sandy doll for sale, "You'll like her," says the copy, "everyone does in the end!" The address lists Mentor, Ohio, which is east of Cleveland. I wonder if they're still in business.



There is one big difference. Save for these hand-draw boobs in the lingerie ads, all the boobs in these rags are real.

* * *

Goodbye Miss Jones

The Devil in Miss Jones was the first skin flick I ever saw and the only one I remember with any tenacity. The star of the film was Marilyn Chambers**, who was a breakthrough 70's porn star. I don't remember much of the sex, but I do remember the people I was watching it with, college buddies I was visiting up at Ohio State. I wondered what the guys were thinking. I remember waiting for something to happen. I remember the ending shot of Miss Jones anguished face as she's condemned to the verge of climax for all eternity.

Marilyn Chambers died on Sunday.

In this 1977 interview, Marilyn's best moments bloom at around the 5 minute mark. She's cute and sexy and impish as well as articulate about sexuality and I daresay ahead of her time (although the interviewer Al Goldstein is beautiful to watch throughout). She strikes me as the sort of woman men want to go to bed with. There is also a timelessness about her.

I've written droves about Porn 2.0, but it doesn't interest me much. After watching this interview, however, I've got to get my hands on some of the vintage stuff. I want to revisit Miss Jones, maybe take a peek Behind the Green Door. I want to listen raptly to the Story of O.

Ciao Marilyn. Viva la blindfolds and ropes.



**Your humble hostess has been duly corrected. One Ms. Georgina Spelvin played Miss Jones, not Marilyn Chambers. Please excuse Miss O'Brien. She's stuck on low tide.

In bed on line

Randy sent me a link to Naomi Wolf's thoughts on porn.

She talks about her interviews with college kids and how Internet porn is dragging all the mystery out of sex and the libido out of young men, that women now have to be buff and trimmed and acrobatic in order to compete with the cyberspace lovelies.

Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars.

When a woman coils herself around a man for whom she is burning and whispers, I want you inside of me, with throaty desperation, trimmed or not, hers is the only one in the world to him at that moment. Missionary will likely be the position of choice; and when she cries out as tears squeeze from her eyes, the Internet will never be more irrelevant.

I don't buy Wolf's assertions. So college kids are immature about sex. They always were. And the online porn junkie is the same guy as yesteryear's Hustler fanatic.

If two people have profound desire for one another, it trumps everything and it never goes out of style.

More from me on sex and porn:

What is sexy?

Porn 2.0

The way you move