Ah, memory. Often selective and almost always corrupted. Run with it. Even Jack Kerouac, the "memory babe" himself, sometimes got it wrong.
At times, you will see a city's population get agitated over the impending destruction of some old billboard. Here in Charlotte, the old JFG Coffee billboard along the Brookshire Freeway was going to come down--so many people whined about it that a compromise was settled and it was merely nudged aside. The old Coca-Cola neon billboard along the interstate in Atlanta was going to go the way of a Las Vegas hotel, but so many Hotlantans screamed bloody murder that it, too, was saved. (At least for a while--some citizen of Atlanta will probably remind me that the sign is probably gone, now.)
While I was back home with my mom I got to talking over various memories with my brother and with others. Few of them were the same. At best memory is a reconstructive process. At worst we all just make it up and don't even know that we have.
Thank God you got that straightened out; I always remembered it being on the Eisenhower on our way into the city, but when i saw your earlier post I thought I'd slipped into an alternate universe again, one disturbingly like our own but with subtle alterations. The last time that happened, I found myself in a world where the Beatles never broke up, and instead flew around the planet on a secret jet, disrupting business districts like they did in "Let It Be". My sister was married to Steve Yzerman but instead of playing hockey, he ran a muffler shop in Paw Paw and they had 10 kids. I was married to Nicole deBoer and you were a gigolo who inherited a luxury home on Beaver Island from "King" Strang's third wife (don't task), BUT the MagiKist sign was, in that world at least, on Roosevelt Road.
I'm a relative newcomer to Chicago (although I now have lived here for a year longer than I lived in San Francisco), and I remember the lips. They were just the thing for a magpie like me: glittering and garish. I thought for a long time that Magikist must be some kind of lipstick of long ago (kind of like "Sta-Put" lipstick in "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter." But Jeff put me right on that score!
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Ah, memory. Often selective and almost always corrupted. Run with it. Even Jack Kerouac, the "memory babe" himself, sometimes got it wrong.
At times, you will see a city's population get agitated over the impending destruction of some old billboard. Here in Charlotte, the old JFG Coffee billboard along the Brookshire Freeway was going to come down--so many people whined about it that a compromise was settled and it was merely nudged aside. The old Coca-Cola neon billboard along the interstate in Atlanta was going to go the way of a Las Vegas hotel, but so many Hotlantans screamed bloody murder that it, too, was saved. (At least for a while--some citizen of Atlanta will probably remind me that the sign is probably gone, now.)
I once slept in a giant bottle of Absolute. But that's another story.
While I was back home with my mom I got to talking over various memories with my brother and with others. Few of them were the same. At best memory is a reconstructive process. At worst we all just make it up and don't even know that we have.
Thank God you got that straightened out; I always remembered it being on the Eisenhower on our way into the city, but when i saw your earlier post I thought I'd slipped into an alternate universe again, one disturbingly like our own but with subtle alterations. The last time that happened, I found myself in a world where the Beatles never broke up, and instead flew around the planet on a secret jet, disrupting business districts like they did in "Let It Be". My sister was married to Steve Yzerman but instead of playing hockey, he ran a muffler shop in Paw Paw and they had 10 kids. I was married to Nicole deBoer and you were a gigolo who inherited a luxury home on Beaver Island from "King" Strang's third wife (don't task), BUT the MagiKist sign was, in that world at least, on Roosevelt Road.
I'm a relative newcomer to Chicago (although I now have lived here for a year longer than I lived in San Francisco), and I remember the lips. They were just the thing for a magpie like me: glittering and garish. I thought for a long time that Magikist must be some kind of lipstick of long ago (kind of like "Sta-Put" lipstick in "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter." But Jeff put me right on that score!
I miss the lips too.
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