{"id":85713,"date":"2015-05-13T16:28:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T20:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85713"},"modified":"2015-05-13T16:28:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T20:28:26","slug":"like-rain-on-your-wedding-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/like-rain-on-your-wedding-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Rain on Your Wedding Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"kimanderson\"<\/a>

An archetypal Kim Anderson greeting card.<\/p><\/div>\n

In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. I don\u2019t mean those pre-snark Shoebox greetings full of foul-mouthed grandmas; that would have been tantamount to buying into the earnest Hallmark industrial complex. Instead, we\u2019d look for cards for nephews and stepfathers and babies, and then present them with the hand-knitted scarves and mixtapes we\u2019d made each other. It doesn\u2019t sound funny now. But it was a different time\u2014and I don\u2019t just mean junior high.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my day, we made our own irony. Without wishing to invoke the proverbial snow-walking grandparent, it\u2019s still important to remember that greeting-card window between Spy<\/em> magazine and Gawker, between Andy Warhol and someecards, between SNL and the Internet. The time, in short, when people dealt in the currency of subversion, but it wasn\u2019t our gold standard.There\u2019s a reason that the mom humor of fifties commercial art juxtaposed with louche captions seemed deliciously wicked then, and why it feels tame now\u2014we were used to doing all that in our heads<\/em>. <\/p>\n

I was particularly hipped on those Kim Anderson photos we\u2019ve all seen a million times: black-and-white art shots of adorable little kids, sometimes dressed in oversize grown-up garb, and sometimes kissing. Oftentimes, these images featured a Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>\u2013style splash of color.<\/p>\n

I found these pictures troubling. Sometimes I would rant about it in the manner of waggish thirteen-year-olds, invoking the words \u201cchild abuse,\u201d but my aversion was real. For a small child, merely having to hold hands<\/em> with the wrong kindergartener during buddy-system caterpillar walks can be galling. Imagine having to smooch! Even if you found one of those Pep\u00e9 Le Pew\u00ad\u00ad\u2013ish little boys who goes around kissing people, what were the odds, realistically, of finding two<\/em>?\u00a0<\/p>\n

For some reason, the local stationery store had a wide selection of these cards. I experimented with different ones: two kids smooching on a dock in front of a steamer ship (the boy in some kind of oversize captain\u2019s getup), a small hobo going a-courtin\u2019, a tiny couple eating ice-cream cones in what look like reject costumes from Fried Green Tomatoes<\/em>. Eventually, I settled on one that seemed perfect in its horrifying simplicity: a four-year-old swain extending a pink-shaded rose to a female tot of similar age. The text inside the card read, \u201cForgive Me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gave the \u201cForgive Me\u201d card to Marissa three times, once leaving it in her locker for no reason. Then I started giving them to everyone: my other friends, my brother, my parents. I stockpiled them. It became an all-purpose, anytime joke.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What an innocent time! What gentle irony! JonBenet Ramsey was still alive. We didn\u2019t even have tweens yet. Kim Anderson still doesn\u2019t have a Wikipedia page, but her pictures retain their creepy factor, I think. They\u2019ve lost none of their impact. Yes, their irony isn\u2019t as potent as it once was\u2014but irony has a short shelf life.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. I don\u2019t mean those pre-snark Shoebox greetings full of foul-mouthed grandmas; that would have been tantamount to buying into the earnest Hallmark industrial complex. Instead, we\u2019d look for cards for nephews […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[18109,16201,512,18108,10938,14349,10401],"class_list":["post-85713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-cards","tag-greeting-cards","tag-irony","tag-kim-anderson","tag-kitsch","tag-middle-school","tag-the-nineties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering Irony\u2019s Awkward In-Between Stage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on a new kind of kitsch that\u2019s arisen as the Internet makes more and more forms of comedy obsolete.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/like-rain-on-your-wedding-day\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Like Rain on Your Wedding Day by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 13, 2015 \u2013 In middle school, my friend Marissa and I thought it was pretty darn hilarious to give each other the most inappropriate birthday cards possible. 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