!!! Come dressed as your favorite punctuation mark !!!
!!! Sip on "Exclamation" cocktails, wine and brews !!!
!!! Belly up to the delicious Tacolicious bar !!!
and celebrate the 20th Anniversary of San Francisco Center for the Book.
Since book people know how to party it up and they do know their fonts and fun I knew that there would be many creative costumes in keeping with the punctuation theme. I knew I had to come up with an appropriate beach plastic something to make my point, be it a comma, question mark, exclamation point, apostrophe, ampersand, hyphen, period.
Period That's it. I will go as a period. Maybe a bit clichéd to wear a necklace ring of tampon applicators and call it "Period." But the response was both puzzled and enthusiastic.
Several women of my generation did not recognize the source of the materials for my necklace, thought it was intended to represent exclamation points or maybe a ring of bullets or bombs. When I explained "period" there was a moments pause, then great sighs of relief as they expressed how grateful they were to be post -menopausal. 65 is definitely the new 50.
Back in my (and their) day the tampon was composed of compressed paper, cotton batting and cardboard. Now the tampon, for so-called ease of use and comfort of insertion, is encased in a bullet shaped hard shell plastic cover. Yet another example of how plastic has literally and figuratively inserted itself into our lives.
Younger women recognized the source immediately and were astonished to learn that this feminine hygiene product is washing up onto beaches everywhere. From Kehoe Beach alone, over the years, we have collected hundreds of applicators in a variety of styles and in an array of "feminine" colors: pink, green, pearlescent. Wikipedia reports that the average woman uses approximately 11,400 tampons in her lifetime. Mama mia, that is a lot of plastic.
My necklace, as punctuation, did make a point — about the problem of plastic pollution. Period.
Mary Austin, co-founder of SFCB asked Richard AKA The Poetry Jukebox, to be an auction item for the fund- raising party. Richard is a crowd pleaser as he moves through the party offering poems, free for the asking, to encourage revelers to bid big $$$ for the chance to have the Jukebox at their own special event. In the old-fashioned Wurlitzer jukebox or as an iPod with greater memory, the PJB is a great way to spread the word.
