Merchants of Casual Sin

When I was in high school, some ladies who lived in the neighborhood sold Tupperware. The Tupperware Ladies had meetings every so often, some of which were held at my friend’s house. Tupperware is not a subject near and dear to a high-school boy’s heart, so when my friend’s mom’s turn to host a Tupperware party came around, my friend and I would politely excuse ourselves and go kick the soccer ball around outside. We gladly scarfed down leftovers stored in Tupperware, but we had no interest in the procurement or development of such items. Let the Tupperware Ladies twitter away in the drawing room — we had better things to do.

Our ears perked up, however, when we accidentally overheard a remark my friend’s mom made over the phone about a recent meeting of the Tupperware minds. One of the ladies, a younger married woman if I recall, had brought along an assortment of sex toys to liven up the party. Not content with hawking dishes and lids, the saucy sex-toy monger was trying to interest her food-storage cronies in some goods guaranteed to enliven any high-school boy’s imagination.

My friend’s mom described the scene at the Tupperware-turned-sex-toy party with palpable embarrassment, whispering in hushed tones into the receiver. It seems most of the other ladies in attendance that night were equally betizzied, to hear my friend’s mom retell it. Some of them, though, had responded to the provocation with much less shame than their matronly stations would have led one to expect. A few seemed to have felt liberated by this sudden interruption of their bourgeois lives. They met the X-rated paraphernalia with blushes and nervous laughter, but also, we surmised, with a great deal of enthusiasm.