The Bouche

Why MacFrugal's was changed to Big Lots I'll never understand. A better name might be Ugliest Available Everything. I didn't know I had a certain taste in alarm clocks, laundry hampers and slop rags until I went into this store and found all of their offerings to be unsuitable/hideous. I wanted to take a picture of the object that best symbolized what I felt to be the prevailing aesthetic at Big Lots-- an oversized, clear plastic, lumpy, guitar-shaped container filled with neon orange cheddar cheese flavored popcorn with a highly stylized airbrush rendering of Elvis on the front-- but I wanted to leave more.

This was not my first brush with Big Lots, nor will it be my last, as my memory will lapse and I'll go there to look for an affordable coffee grinder again someday. In 7th Grade, Kim Danko's mom took us to MacFrugal's and we bought a plastic comb with orange wax heaped onto the base. The idea was that you drag it through your hair and it leaves an "edgy" looking orange streak that I'm sure would have looked really great offset by about 12 butterfly clips, a zig-zag part, and body glitter (the chunky kind). What in fact happened was the wax ripped our hair out and so what we had then was a plastic comb with clumps of hair embedded in a wax chunk. We called it The Bouche and tormented each other with it on weekends. I'd like to think that this relic of our tween years is buried deep in a Caboodle filled with Wet n' Wild nail polishes, ready to ruin some upholstery or melt in the backseat of a minivan when the mood takes us.