Recession Watch: At least it's 2010 Edition

"The Shrimp Girl" or "The Saleswoman of Crabs" was on a Yemeni postage stamp in 1969. 

The Lady is a lover of all things beautiful - chief of these is the study of art! I present to you the silliest name in all of art history - "The Shrimp Girl".

I like this Lady - she's buxom, happy to be storing clams and musssls in her giant hat while wearing a joyfully blank expression!  Maybe being a "Shrimp" girl makes me chuckle due to the Lady's own small stature. Maybe I relate to her cheerily vacant look (despite her fishy life) since it takes little more than a cupcake and new lipstick to make the Lady equally as happy?  Or perhaps she's just got a streak of 13 year old boy in her psyche to not giggle like a fool at being a purveyor of crabs (heh).   

The Lady is so grateful to be working again, but it always bears repeating that even at the height of MY frustration that it could always have been worse - at least I wasn't born an 18th Century Fishmonger, even if my space cadet visage would eventually be immortalized by Hogarth. And Domestic Patriarch doesn't even care for fish - even remotely - what a terrible O. Henry story that would have been!

For amusement's sake, let's examine just a few things that make me glad I'm not living in   "The Shrimp Girl's" character building era:

1. Impossible budgeting for feeding of Domestic Patriarch due to his utter disdain for all of the ocean's creatures - how's a Lady to menu plan?!

2. One in five women in 1700s London were prostitutes (see: immature crab reference above)

3. The Jethro Tull in your life wouldn't have been the fun one.

4.  With no requirement for a license to sell gin, it would have been an entrepreneur's dream! With nothing but fish to feed Domestic Patriarch, he might just supplement his diet with lots of Tom Collins main courses.

5. Recreation options for this class level would include Cockfighting, Bull Baiting and Public executions. No Minor League Baseball and $4 Schooner Value Drafts?! But how could either compete with entertainment such as "learned" animals - pigs, mostly - who purportedly could perform arithmetic, play cards and tell fortunes. Pigs telling fortunes? Mayhaps I spoke too soon!

6. Um, but then again: Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), a palatial asylum for lunatics in Finsbury Square, was open to the public until 1770 as a sort of human zoo. Visitors could pay a few pence to enter and gawk at the inmates for as long as they liked. Thousands of sightseers came each year, wandering through the wards and brutally teasing the patients in order to heighten the fun. At one point, Bedlam's governors felt that the sightseers were behaving so badly, they decreed "the doors be locked on public holidays against all visitors."

7. And what's more : your primary care doctor would probably be a  barber-surgeon.

8. Fashion involved wearing whale bone corsets making every day feel something like Winter Formal 1996 every day of the year. Say no more, squire.

9.  Having stared at my neighbor's neon yellow outhouse throughout the duration of their heinous 6 month destruction of the house next door, I'm grateful for indoor plumbing. 


10. The off chance of running into Johnny Depp as Keith Richards on a pirate quest doesn't sound as enticing as you'd think. I'd rather have penicillin.  And not have to wear a hat that stores fish. 


The Lady realizes it's borderline obnoxious to constantly give the "it could always be worse" cliche a run for its money. But considering I don't have a ballcap of mahi mahi to unload in order to afford limes to keep the scury away AND to mix with the gin and tonics, she can easily say she's as happy as our delightful "Saleswoman of Crabs" appears to be.