Meet Florence and Domingo

Plastic pink flamingos and Airstreams just go together. Everyone knows that. But not everyone knows why. Well, through the miracle of copy and paste technology I can tell you the following from the Smithsonian Magazine.

"First designed in 1957, the fake birds are natives not of Florida but of Leominster, Massachusetts, which bills itself as the Plastics Capital of the World. At a nearby art school, sculptor Don Featherstone was hired by the plastics company Union Products, where his second assignment was to sculpt a pink flamingo. No live models presented themselves, so he unearthed a National Geographic photo spread. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology. A flamingo-friendly trend was the sameness of post-World War II construction. Units in new subdivisions sometimes looked virtually identical. “You had to mark your house somehow,” Featherstone says. “A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house.” Also, “people just thought it was pretty,” adds Featherstone’s wife, Nancy."

That's the basic story. The relationship with Airstreams and flamingos is simply the symbiotic partnership of two examples of Americana that went well together. Sales of the plastic bird slowed for a while but then "Miami Vice" came along with their oh so awesome intro and the rest is history.

We've had LuLu for almost a year now and have made some improvements - tires, interior decorating changes etc., and felt it was time to get us some birds - so we acquired these. You'll have to wait for a future blog post to learn the details of the acquisition but let's just say that Flo and Mingo, plus Mingo's sister CoCo, who is visiting from Miami, decided to come with us. Yes, Margo, who I have mentioned before names EVERYTHING, came up with the monikers for our simulated feathered friends.

Henceforth from today they will travel with us so that we may class up the various RV parks, state parks and national parks we plan to stay at. We'll have to be careful in bear country but otherwise they will maintain station at LuLu's hitch - or thereabouts.

Till next time.