When the catalog arrived in the day’s mail, its cover instantly made me think of Steve and chuckle.
Now, by “the catalog,” I mean the glossy 72-page 2010 holiday preview from Signals, the northeastern Ohio–based retailer devoted to “Supporting Public Television since 1986” (as its cover copy states) by tempting consumers with impish and idiosyncratic “Gifts That Inform, Enlighten & Entertain” (ditto).
By “Steve,” meanwhile, I mean Stephen Schenkenberg, who recently resigned as editor-in-chief of St. Louis Magazine, AT HOME’s parent publication, to relocate to Berlin, where his lovely, charming, and dauntingly intelligent wife, Tamara, had landed a Fulbright.
The connection? Well, as anyone who even glancingly knows him fast recognizes, Steve ranks as an oenophile—for the September 2009 St. Louis Magazine, in fact, he wrote a glitzy seven-page feature on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Wine”*—and the cover to the Signals catalog sports a photo of a stool shaped like the cork from a bottle of bubbly. A Signals exclusive, the 19.5-inch-tall product almost perforce bears a fleur-de-lis and (quoth the catalog copy) is “[c]rafted of real cork from Portugal…printed with CHAMPAGNE FRANCE.” Naturellement!
“Lightweight, sturdy extra seating,” Signals notes of the $199 whimsy, “it also serves as a footstool and a witty decorative accent.” Despite my delight with it, of course, the stool soon prompted an obvious reservation. That is, all whimsy aside, any oenophile worth his or her “swirl, sniff, sip, and spit” would almost certainly prefer that the two C-notes intended for the stool’s potential purchase instead go toward something equally amusant…but liquid.
*At the time, Steve tried to convince his friends that researching that piece almost killed him. Uh-huh. If so, he would have died with a smile on his face.
