Re:Freshin' (and Rainier Beer)

After limping through the Weill marathon, my clumsy stumblings in pursuit of his Jazz connections exacerbated by a recalcitrant new computer that keeps refusing to follow orders, well, I’m just bone tired. I feel like the Incredible Shrinking Man’s cousin. Add-in real height loss resulting from Parkinson’s as well as collapsing vertebrae… and it’s no wonder I’ve been having this irritating Mad Men/Pan Am Fifties dream...

My wife and I are out for a walk, and we bump into somebody she knows from business.

“Hey, Jim,” she says to him, “I want you to meet the ‘little man.’

Don’t know what I’d do without him… gets me out the door in the morning and keeps me going. Keeps me on my toes too.”

Not really. These days Sandie can wear flats and still get above my paltry 5’8”. I’ve lost nearly four inches in height, which has all slid down to my waistline. That’s one definition of an “Adult,” of course… someone who’s stopped growing at both ends and started growing in the middle. (I qualify.)

At any rate, no more big essays for a while (a Weill?). In fact, we’ll be gone east to Pennsylvania, New York, and Montreal for part of October, so blogging will be minimal for a… no, won’t say it… for some weeks.

These bleary thoughts have reminded me that back when I wrote and produced Rainier Beer ads (usually working off the buzzword phrase “Mountain Fresh,” clinging to the real tall mountain’s coat-tails), somebody among us on the creative team came up with a two-word bumper snicker that I liked well enough to stick a sample on my own car:

“GONE FRESHIN’.”

This time it’s RE-freshin’ I need, because… as we might have said in some other Rainier ad (but didn’t), with the unused two-word text positioned below photo of an empty sixpack-bottles carton…

Right now I’m “FRESH OUT.”

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Note: One more post coming in a few days, so there’ll be something to think about while we're gone.