Reminds Me Of Sarah Palin

I totally remember kitschy retro bathroom decor -- and being embarrassed by it whenever some friend's mom had put 'potty people' on display in her bathroom. Mainly it was wall plaques of folks taking baths, little boys with bums sticking out of drop-bottom pjs, and lots of things with toilet paper themes. I did not find them cute, but wildly inappropriate. I remember on more than occasion pondering just how badly I had to pee -- and was it worth going into that bathroom with the 'potty people'.

I still cringe and say Eeeeiiwwww. Which is why when I spotted a pair of such wall plaques at the thrift store, I did not buy them.



I was both brave enough & amused enough to take photos of the girl applying lipstick to the family dog tho. (Even if she has exposed her bare bottom.) For some reason both the little girl applying lipstick to her dog -- and wildly inappropriate bathroom decor -- remind me of Sarah Palin.

Hoidy Toidy

My, how toilet seat technology has improved: today, you can get barbed wire embedded in them, or get ones that add unimaginable degrees of functionality of your regular toilet, but in the sixties you just had appliques:

Realize: this ad is a full-page in the Home Modernizing Guide, full-color, towards the beginning...it cost a lot of scratch to get your fractal fleur-de-lis in front of someone just dying to replace their already uncomfortable hard toilet seat with something exactly the same -- except for a little image on the cover. This, in 1965, was "a step up to a new high in bathroom elegance" -- which leads me to believe that American Standard thought the previous level of bathroom elegance was simply having a toilet seat to cover the hole.



Yup, that's all of them -- "delicate sea horses...gay bouquets...golden fleur-de-lis...handsome arabesque arrangements" -- molded into the cover with raised detail, so that as you're scrubbing the seat down you won't rub off the sea horses. I don't think I've ever lived used a potty with pictures on the seats; any sort of brownish, greenish details are off-putting to me, but those seem to be the key colors here. In the sixties and seventies, harvest gold and olive green were de rigeur home interior colors, but I can't imagine why anyone thought they'd be good toilet colors. I guess I shouldn't talk; our toilet seat is a plain-old white model...if only I could rub my bare butt on one of these fine examples of bathroom elegance, I'd change my tune.