Cool Beauty Stuff And A History From My Mother

 One of the fun things about going along on a business trip where you aren't actually the one doing any business, is entertaining yourself in a strange city.  Even if you sometimes entertain yourself by spending a couple hours in a store you could have shopped in back home.  I found this little pink scrubbie thing at Sephora - and it is amazing.  In a test against my Clarisonic, this one won.  It got more make up out of the pores and my face felt softer afterwards.  And it was only $6 - instead of spending $20 every other month for a new Clarisonic brush.

 On while on the subject of softer skin, I was ambushed by the "oil lady" immediately upon entering the store.  She spread drops of 7 different brands of oil on my hands and arms.  All felt nice, but none of them wowed me.  But the next morning, I had this one very soft patch of skin on my left hand.  (I mean very soft.)  So I stopped back in Sephora and rubbed a little more of this one particular oil and a few hours later asked John if he could figure out where.  And he could!  So I have added Ole Henriksen Oil to my wish list for Valentine's Day.  Not that I couldn't afford to buy it for myself, but my local Sephora is too small to carry it, so I have to hint to have it brought back when John goes out of town next.   

My mother emails me her comments and lets me post them for her.  After all the talk about the days of elegant shopping, she put together her little history of Southern California's upscale retail:

Each little town had a major department store--Rankin's in Santa Ana, SQR Store in Anaheim, etc.  The sales ladies (my spellcheck won't let me make that one word, which it was in those days). They all wore black dresses and didn't handle the money.  They wrote a sales slip and put it and your money or charge card in a little capsule and sent it on  an apparatus up to the mezzanine, where the offices were.  There somebody made the change and sent the slip back.  Then, most small towns had a Penney's and a Kress or Woolworth.  (J. C. Penney himself had a house on Balboa Island.).   If my ninety-year old brain is still functioning, they had four big stores in Los Angeles, because it had almost two million people.  There was J.J.Haggarty, J. W. Robinson, I. Magnin, and Bullocks.    Then there were two less elegant ones called The May Company and The Broadway Department Store.   I don't remember when the malls started, but the Broadway was one of the first to get into the malls.   I remember when Haggarty and Magnin had their close out sales.   Robinson and Bullock's were still at Fashion Island in the Newport area when I was sixty. 
Norman Marcus and Buffum's (the Long Beach elegant store) were there, too.   It must have been in the nineties that Robinson and May combined.  I was so disappointed.  It's like getting a wonderful croissant and putting a weenie and mustard on it.   I cut up my Robinson charge card.   The May Company was okay if you needed to pick up some towels or something, but it just was not in the same class as Robinson's.   Looking back, I see my spellcheck changed the name of that Texas store, so I guess it is time for me to quit reminiscing.  Maman

Next time any of us want to skip our workout, think about how sharp my mother still is at 90+, which might just have been helped by her regular exercise.