What my mother thinks I should know about

My Berkeley clipping service (aka my 80 year old mother) sent me a thick batch of newspaper articles this week. Among other items I find a piece on Sedaris (that makes sense – he is the hot author of the moment and my clipper wants to make sure I’m up on the new literary icons), an article from the Sunday Times on Warsaw (even though she knows I get the Sunday Times, so how could I have possibly missed it?), a piece on the Bush daughters and Chris Heinz (she is of the generation that loved tracking political families), and then the following two cuttings:


important information 

On the left, you see a new design for a Vodka bottle. On the right is a woman dressed in some youthful garb (it comes with the scribbled note ‘funki clothes from S.F. boutique’). What hint is there in this? That I am too conventional? Or that I live in a part of the country where people would not have the imagination to dress in this way? Or, oh my God, that this is the new style of clothing that she has come to adopt for herself? And the Vodka bottle – I don’t much care for Vodka, but it is Polish after all. Should I buy it? Praise it? Show it off to others? Looks like a perfume bottle to me… What was my mother thinking?