New Years Celebration 2018... One More Year!

Remember: We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day. - Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Did You Know? - In the late 18th century, people wore rubber soled shoes called plimsolls, but they were pretty crude—for one thing, there was no right foot or left foot.

Around 1892, the U.S. Rubber Company came up with more comfortable rubber sneakers with canvas tops, called Keds. By 1917, these sneakers began to be mass produced.

Did You Know? - Oysters are good for the environment: they each filter between 30 and 50 gallons of water a day.

Did You Know? - Cigarette girl in European and American context generally refers to a person that sells or provides cigarettes from a tray held by a neck strap. They may also carry cigars, and many novelty items like lighted roses, candy, snacks, chewing gum, lighted jewelry, and lighted yo-yo's on their trays.

The modern image of cigarette girl developed in the 1920s with the urbanization of America. Though largely not seen outside of speakeasies and supper clubs, cigarettes girls were frequently shown in Hollywood films and soon became well-established among the general public. ] The cigarette girl of the night club became a staple figure of film and theatre.

With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, speakeasies across America closed and cigarettes girls soon found employment in more popular business destinations.

Cigarette girls were a common sight in restaurants, clubs, bars, airports and casinos during the 1930s and 1940s in the United States. From the end of World War II into the 1950s, cigarette girls further expanded into sporting events and in the lobbies of theaters and music halls during intermissions.

With the rise of cigarette machines in the mid-1950s, however, venue owners no longer needed to seek out cigarettes girls who worked for a paycheck and the girls largely vanished from the public eye. There were still some casinos and other night club establishments that still use cigarette girls today, especially in Las Vegas.

Circa 1945

Did You Know? - Cherries jubilee is a dessert dish made with cherries and liqueur (typically Kirschwasser), which is subsequently flambéed, and commonly served as a sauce over vanilla ice cream.

The recipe is generally credited to Auguste Escoffier, who prepared the dish for one of Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations, widely thought to be the Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Other flambéed fruit dishes include bananas Foster, mangos diablo (mangos flambéed in tequila) and pêches Louis (peaches flamed in whiskey).