To have a case of the cutes was to be cuter than the damn dickens, oozing cute from every pore, the veritable personification of Brady-Bunch CUTENESS. When rude boys made fun of cute, my grandmother-the-gender-cop snorted her approval, thereby sending me mixed messages. Cute was bad, but one could be nauseatingly sentimental, particularly if talking about Jesus or anyone He may have known personally or been distant kin to. In fact, my grandmother's sentimentality annoyed the hell out of me, and I was as dogged in making fun of it as she was in lambasting my periodic Cases of the Cutes.
The Sentimental Epoch of her life was the Silver Bridge Collapse, which had been fairly close to her family home. (We'd all been across it many times.) This event prompted her to purchase awful collector dinner plates, bad country/western records and unreadable books cobbled together by local historians. I now realize the bridge was not simply the bridge connecting West Virginia and Ohio, but the bridge connecting North and South. It's collapse obviously signified something very personal to her, possibly symbolizing the psychological break she made with the South. (If you saw The Mothman Prophecies, you saw the dramatization of this collapse. Some of the film's terrifying rural sequences were set near my grandmother's family home, where I had always refused to stay overnight as a spooked, spoiled city kid!)
Thus, I always feel I need to apologize for cute, because the fact is--(deep breath) I often like cute things. I suppress it, and it therefore bubbles up, blossoms forth, bursts into waking life, unbidden.... a MASSIVE CASE OF THE CUTES! My cup runneth over, and when I was surfing ye olde net today (trying to get into that Currier and Ives Seasonal spirit, and everything, particularly since I am in RETAIL) I saw something SO CUTE, well, I had to haul it over here. Just had to. I am helpless to resist.
Cute Overload!
2 Sweet
2 B
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4 Gotten
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Listening to: The Kinks - See My Friends
via FoxyTunes