Peachy Keen: Dirty Pictures?

Here’s a shocker, found right in the pages of the June Vanity Fair and why don’t I say here that the column I wrote about it appears at the top of the Home Page (I will do this at the start of every weekend from now on: post a little more here at Exit Only about whatever topic the week’s column deals with.) This week’s is about things going in and out of style in general and about a new elderflower drink called Delice Du Sureau by Maison St. Germain in particular – it’s also about absinthe, such a kick-ass drink it was outlawed all over the place for decades and decades and also blamed for being practically psychotropic, which basically means you think your shoes are talking to you.

This picture just stuns you when you come upon it, which the folks brewing happily away at Maison St. Germain very well know it will do since they made the ad an actual postcard that you can tear out send in the mail to anyone at all except maybe your old teacher and your clergyman because look how shocking:

Or maybe it’s not shocking so much as it compelling, because it so thoroughly hijacks your attention in just the way the dark center of the flower does with the bee; in just the manner the dark nipple on its paler field of breast summons the infant.

It compels us because it's familiar. The  bottom looks framed in this way looks like a perfect peach, like aswelling, bifurcated, which when you think about it is a design repeated all over the body and in both genders. In the womb, you grow a bud and you grow two pillows. Nature has already tossed the dice to make you male or female and after a while the differentiation begins: If you’re a girl, the bud stays small and the pillows rise to cover it. If you’re a boy the bud grows and the pillows flank it.

So here’s to our common roots. God made us male and female. Male and female created he us. Now as Rodney King said,  WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!