The World
The first time we saw the World was in a friend’s bathroom in the East Village, and we knew in an instant that we had to have it. It had been some time since we’d thought of ourself as a colonial power, or even a post-isolationist neocolonial power, but once we saw the World, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Strait of Malacca started to look irresistible instead. We wanted the own the World. We wanted hegemony. We hankered to expand our sphere of influence globally. The greatest thing about owning the World, which is a transparent vinyl shower curtain imprinted with a pastel geopolitical world map, is that if you hang it with plastic rings on a good strong rod, you can exercise expansionism at will. Moreover, by applying proper antifungal treatment, you can also control worldwide growth, especially where the curtain hangs against the side of the tub.
Ray Faragher, who makes the World, told us over the phone the other day, from his office in Cincinnati, that he hadn’t expected to sell many copies of the World at all, and certainly hadn’t expected it to become his bestselling shower curtain in New York City. But that is what has happened. The World has supplanted curtains featuring frogs, fish, and parrots as the shower curtain of choice. According to Mr. Faragher, it sells particularly well at the United Nations gift shop.
Mr. Faragher, who is something of an international bath accessories kingpin, grew up in a house in Kentucky that had no indoor plumbing. “I named my shower curtain company Saturday Knight, because Saturday was bath night when I was growing up,” he said. “Plus I’m an Anglophile. Which reminds me: The World is being very well received around the world. It’s quite a conversation piece. After all, how many people have a world map hanging in their bathroom? I’d heard about a survey that showed that most people don’t know where Iran is, and I thought that with the World they’d be able to find it in their shower.” Mr. Faragher went on to say that he’s not always sure what makes one shower curtain work and not another one. This year, for instance, he thought that pigs would be big, but pigs flopped—instead, hippos were a hit. As for the World, he thinks some people like it because it transforms their bathroom into something like the Situation Room of the National Security Council. “I knew it would appeal to people with imagination,” Mr. Faragher said, “and to people with young minds.”
Margo Warnecke Merek, who has an apartment in the East Sixties, originally bought the World just because the colors—creamy pink, yellow, gray, and light green—looked good in her bathroom. Then the real benefit of the World ownership dawned on her. “I had just started doing crossword puzzles,” she told us, “and I realized that the curtain would be a good way to check countries.”
The apartment in the East Village where we first saw the World belongs to Paula Klausner, who first saw the World when she attended a party on Central Park West three years ago. “The minute I saw it, I knew I had to have it,” she told us. “I was enjoying the party, but I spent a lot of time in the bathroom that night just admiring the curtain. I’d never known where Swaziland was. I’d also just heard of Gambia that year, and I liked it that the World had Gambia on it. I even liked the mistakes—the way they spelled ‘Manila’ just like ‘vanilla’ on those early curtains.”
Beth Shulman, who lives in Morningside Heights, bought the World last winter to cure her wanderlust. “My husband and I used to travel a lot, and then we had our son, and we cut back on our traveling, but we missed it,” she said. “We have friends who are on a six-month trip through Asia and Australia, so I’ve been monitoring their trip on my shower curtain.”
Mrs. Shulman, like everyone else we know who owns the World, spends a certain amount of her shower time planning imaginary trips and a certain amount trying to figure our whether there’s a pattern to the way the countries are colored. For example, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and Bolivia are pink; the United States and China are gray; Canada and South Africa are yellow; and Greenland and Kenya are green.
We asked Mr. Faragher to explain the World.
“There’s no pattern at all,” he said, and laughed. “Pastels are very popular in the market these days, and the design just worked out that way.” He then seemed to reconsider and added, “Of course, I thought we should at least do the Soviet Union pink.”
Skymalling
One characteristic of the Skymall customer seems to be an excess of body hair. In fact, as you leaf through the hundred or so pages of the Skymall catalog, you begin to suspect that its customers have luxuriant growth everywhere, sprouting out of their noses, ears, cheeks, legs, underarms, and what is always delicately referred to as “the bikini area.” In the world of Skymall, though, hirsutism is not an obstacle: It is a challenging and market-exploitable opportunity, with exciting products attached to it. Just look at last summer’s issue of the catalog. On page 23, you are offered the Turbo-Groomer 5.0, with superior Swiss surgical stainless-steel blades, for those hard-to-reach nose and ear hairs; on page 42, the immersible long-use travel shaver, for hair removal underwater; on page 74, the Igia Forever Gone Plus, “the permanent solution to hair removal”; on page 81, the Discrette Plus by Epilady, which announces itself as “Always one step ahead in hair removal.” There are also line extension hair-removal-associated products, such as the Chrome-Plated Fog-Free Shower Mirror and the AM/FM Shower Radio with Lighted Mirror, which allows you to listen to traffic reports while you shower and shave, satisfying another Skymall trait, the desire to do more than one thing at a time, especially if one of the things you’re doing is removing hair. I never used to think about hairiness when I flew, but then I began to read Skymall regularly, and as a result, much of my air time is now devoted to wondering if I have too much hair and, if I do, what system I should use to get rid of it. I also wonder, persistently, whether or not I should at last surrender and order myself a solar-powered cascade fountain or a jewelry organizer with sixty-six pockets or a Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker—three Skymall items I have thought about buying time after high-flying time. I have dog-eared enough copies of Skymall to fill a kennel. I fly all the time, and even on those overscheduled days when I fly somewhere in the morning and somewhere else in the afternoon, I always pull Skymall out of the seat pocket and browse through it, savoring each and every brass guest towel holder and hand-painted Russian balalaika and foldaway closet ladder and pocket pepper mill. For me, Skymall is the land of products I never think I want, serving needs I never thought I had, and which I can’t quite bring myself to buy but can’t help considering once they have been brought to my attention.
Skymall is a weird entity. It is a go-between that packages other mail-order companies and offers them in a virtual shopping mall in the virtual megalopolis of the sky. In the trade it is known as a “multichannel specialty retailer.” It actually has no products of its own: It doesn’t produce anything or manufacture anything or even customize anything it offers for sale. Its closest precedent is probably the Yankee peddler. Skymall is offered in some hotel rooms and airport lounges and on some Amtrak trains, but its singular and fundamental microenvironment is the airline seat pocket—that grimy pouch sagging from the seat back, where it is tucked between the evacuation-slide instruction card and the airsickness bag and whatever previous travelers’ rubbish the ground crew failed to clean out. Skymall debuted in 1990. It is now distributed on nineteen airlines, including American, Delta, Southwest, United, Continental, and Alaska. More than five hundred million air travelers see the catalog every year; its sales in 2000 were a whopping sixty-two and a half million dollars—that’s sixty-two and a half million dollars’ worth of garden toad ornaments and FM radio/ballpoint pens and Old Fashioned Nachos & Cheese Makers, ordered, in a few instances, from the Skymall website but in most cases purchased while at the comfortable cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. According to a company spokesperson, the founder of Skymall, Robert Worsley, came up with the concept of the catalog when he was on a flight and noticed how bored passengers were. In the words of the corporate legend, Worsley “decided to start a business that would allevi
ate the boredom factor and give passengers something useful to do with their time.” Skymall gobbled up another in-flight catalog along the way and then was in turn gobbled up by Gemstar–TV Guide International in 2001. The Skymall vision, though, has remained the same from the day the company began. “Passengers tell us they think we have something for everyone,” the spokesperson e-mailed me recently. “Their reaction to products in the catalog range from ‘Wow! That’s something cool that I must have!’ to ‘Who on earth would buy that?’ ”
I began reading Skymall during a period in my life when I had developed a ferocious fear of flying. Because of the itinerant nature of my work, I have to travel all the time, regardless of the state of my nerves. Like all sissy fliers, I gorged compulsively on airplane disaster news, became fluent in traffic controller lingo, and developed a self-taught genius in diagnosing aircraft thumps and rattles. During takeoffs and landings, in particular, I was very busy assisting the pilot. At the same time, of course, I was scared witless and needed to distract myself or I would have jumped out the emergency exit. There were also a few unfortunate episodes of me clawing the arm of the stranger in the next seat when I thought the plane was moments from hurtling out of control. I always carried dozens of magazines and books with me, but honestly, who can concentrate on reading when at any moment she might be called upon to pull a 767-200 jumbo jet out of a nosedive? No, the reading I wanted to do during my flying phobia days was not actual reading: I just wanted to flip through something, the pages sticking slightly to my clammy hands, while running my eyeballs over text. This is how I discovered, and grew to deeply love, Skymall.
My discomfort in the air reached its peak—or was it its nadir?—on a flight between Cleveland and New York some time ago. In addition to pawing through Skymall, I often tried to calm myself by jabbering to my seatmates, and on this particular flight I was next to an older gentleman who told me that he was a magazine publisher. Pay dirt! I was just starting my writing career, so I considered the chance to schmooze a real live publisher a major opportunity—major enough for me to put aside my Skymall completely and focus on cultivating my bit of good fortune. Things were, in fact, going very nicely. The gentleman told me that his magazine was distributed all over the United States and was published in scores of languages as well. He even suggested that I come by the office and meet the staff. I was so excited and so afraid of looking too eager that I didn’t dare ask him the name of the magazine. Then, somewhere over Altoona, we hit what felt like an air trampoline. I say this not as the sissy I was then but as the flying strongman I am now: It was really wild turbulence, with service carts clattering down the aisle, overhead compartments flapping open, flight attendants tumbling like tenpins. In the midst of the commotion, my seatmate/future editor/publisher swiveled to face me. “Susan, are you ready to meet your Maker?” he gasped. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” Well, I wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I twisted away from him, fumbling in the seat pocket to find my lucky Skymall and silently repeating nonsense verse to drown out the sound of his prayers. At last, the plane stopped bucking, and we wafted uneventfully down toward New York and onto the runway. At this point my neck was practically dislocated from craning it away from my seatmate, but he still managed to push his business card into my very sweaty hand before we got off the plane. “I do hope you’ll come visit,” he said sweetly. “I think you’ll find that the Watchtower is a wonderful magazine.”
Right after that ride, I signed up with a hypnotist and got myself bedazzled into thinking airplane rides were fun—or, at the very least, nonlethal. It worked, and I soon abandoned most of my flying anxiety behavior, but my attachment to Skymall endured. What had started as a palliative had become a passion. Mostly I found myself a little obsessed with the idea of the Skymall customer—the person the catalog evoked. Even when catalogs don’t include pictures of people with the products, they do bring to mind a particular individual; they really need to, since there is no salesperson at your elbow giving you the narrative that all retail experiences imply—the story of who you are and who you will be by acquiring a particular item. I can decode a lot of other catalog personas, such as, say, the horny trust funders of Abercrombie & Fitch; the nerd-ball pipe-smoking Levenger guy; the swingers who live and die by Design Within Reach. But Skymall? Who was this person that Skymall described?
Well, there’s the hairiness, as I mentioned previously. In fact, despite those bikini-area shavers, I would say that there is, overall, a distinctly masculine aura in the catalog. Skymall man is a businessperson—maybe a middle-level database administrator or regional field sales trainer. He lives in a house and has a backyard. He is an intrepid traveler but is afraid of fire (for which Skymall provides smoke hoods and fire escape ladders), insects (no problem: he can use the Bug Cap to protect his face and neck or, better still, the Keep Your Distance Insect Vacuum), and germs (besides the Daisy-Lift toilet-seat lifter, Skymall offers vibrating tongue cleaners, ultraminiature personal air purifiers, and bacteria-resistant utensils—“Your old wooden cooking spoon may be teeming with bacteria—replace it with the new-tech ExoGlass Spoon!”). The Skymall man also worries about his privacy (for which Skymall offers wide-screen Caller ID displays, driveway alert systems, and a listening device detector—“Find Out Who’s Eavesdropping on You!”) and mean dogs, who, thank goodness, can be stopped in their tracks up to fifty feet away using Dog Off, “a great gift for joggers, walkers, repairmen, and postal delivery people.” (Just one question: Are we supposed to be giving gifts to repairmen these days? Maybe Skymall men are raising the generosity bar.)
Mean dogs aside, the Skymall man is a pet lover, forking over a fortune for automatic pet dishes, deluxe dog beds, ramps to help older dogs into cars, wheelie bags for pet transportation, and, most touchingly, pet headstones made of Vermont slate. (Skymall also features a garden stone of composite granite, cement, and resin with a prewritten “sentiment” of either “My Beloved Pet” or a four-line farewell that is generic enough to use for either a pet or a human buried in the backyard.) The Skymall man likes a drink. He appreciates the value of having a martini atomizer and a Barmaster Electronic Mixing Assistant (“It’s the PDA of the Cocktail Circuit”) close at hand, as well as, appropriately enough, two different digital Breathalyzers. He likes to barbecue (see the array of tools and grills and even the personal steak branding iron with up to three initials, “to show your guests the pride you take in a great barbecue!”). But, as much as he likes to be the boss of the backyard grill, he likes to relax while doing it, which he can do once he orders the Remote Cooking Thermometer, which allows him to sit inside and, say, practice his golf game on the amazing DivotMat until the remote alarm beeps to let him know that his personally branded steaks are ready.
Commitment to utter laziness is another signature Skymall attribute. The Skymall man may make gestures of activity by purchasing the appurtenances of the sporting life (digital golf scopes, electronic fish finders, and a luxuriously padded, synthetic leather, motorcycle-seat bar stool, which is particularly desirable, since it is both a sport-related item and a drinking accessory), but the quintessential Skymall sport product may be the ExerCHIzer. “If regular aerobic exercise is too strenuous, try the ExerCHIzer for health, fitness and stress reduction!” the catalog suggests, explaining that the device “helps you perform vital aerobic exercises with minimal effort.”
Skymall does celebrate items that perform more than one task at a time—for example, the binoculars that are also a camera, or the Fire & Ice Grill, which is both a barbecue and a cooler, or the world’s first digital camera/recorder/PDA stylus pen—but it really exalts in the single-function product, the thing that does one thing and one thing only and is wholly useless otherwise. It’s a bold move to tout products like battery-operated automatic eyeglass cleaners and five-foot-tall popcorn poppers when doctrines like voluntary simplicity, arguing that we could live very well with one blanket, one frying pan, and a knife, are in vogue. What kind
of house could accommodate not only a five-foot-tall popcorn popper, but also a carnival-style snow cone maker and a soft-serve ice-cream maker, and the Old Fashioned Carnival Cotton Candy Maker, and the Nachos & Cheese Maker, and the plastic salad-bar set (“The Mother of All Salad Bars!”)? Is it the biggest house in the known universe? Does it have a storage room just for makers of specific foods? Does Skymall represent the ultimate in human ingenuity—the ability to devise a machine that makes cotton candy—or is it addressing our lack of ingenuity in not being able to figure out a way to make cotton candy ourselves?
I am not totally immune to Skymall’s beckonings. I once bought a little handheld scanner after seeing it in the catalog, and fell for not one but two sets of vacuum-sealed storage bags that were going to banish forever—or at least compress—the clutter in my closets. And this Christmas, at last, my husband got me a Pop-Up Hot-Dog Cooker. I used the scanner approximately once; the vacuum bags just added to my closet clutter. The hot-dog cooker will probably get a brief workout and then be retired, first to my even more cluttered closet and then to my neighborhood Goodwill collection center. This is perhaps proof that the ultimate, best product of Skymall is Skymall itself—this document of the misbegotten inventiveness of humankind; the magical thinking that leads us to believe that some material item, however nutty it is, will improve our existence; and the heartwarming, affirming fact that we humans are the only life force that would—or could—conceive of, market, and purchase goods such as French Maid toilet paper holders, talking Christmas ornaments, dryer vent brushes, Tan Thru bathing suits, CD shredders, World’s Largest Write-on Map Murals, and personal neck-mounted cooling systems. In the words of another Skymall product—those framed instructional thought inducers, known in Skymallese as Inspirational Artwork That Shares Your Values—this takes CHARACTER (aluminum or wood framed), EXCELLENCE (double matted), and the ESSENCE OF LEADERSHIP. Or you can just—wood framed and double matted—DREAM.
My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Page 24
