Advice from 1925 courtesy of The Typewriter's Collage Time Machine, Doris Blake, and whatareyoulookin'at, huh?
One week into 2025 and it's official: this year sucks right out of the gate. We searched for answers to today's troubles via timeless wisdom of the past. Things didn't go quite as expected..
Welcome, 2025!
Remember how giddy we felt when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2025? Andy and Andy on CNN, camping it up between shots of tequila. Ryan Seacrest introducing the latest pop superstars, most of whom only need a single surname for recognition (Dasha, Ernest, HARDY, Kesha, Laufey, and Meshuggeneh, albeit one of those names actually sums up all the others). Their musical stylings, breaking all barriers on the cutting edge of earworm jejuneosity, certainly are worthy of each muso’s surname jettisonation.
Ah, yes. With such brilliance as the A&A tequilathon and the latest trillings of—as the French say—musicien sans talent et désaccordé, we were ready to take delight in the bonny badinage of 2025, bestrideing into the New Year via—as the sage philosopher Robin Leach would say in his efferevesnt voice as channeled with an authoratative superciliousness through ostentatious schnozzle orifices—a wave of champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
All of which serves us right for believing in unmitigated joy from a year which begins with the initials W-T-F.
As the sun slowly set into the twilight hours of January 1, 2025, one question was on our collective minds: “umm…can we have a do-over? Pretty please, with sugar on top?”
To which we, the brainstrust that is The Typewriter’s Collage, unequivocally sallied back: “Of course! This calls for another voyage in the past via The Typewriter’s Collage Time Machine.”
We fired up the gizmos, battened down the hatches, weezened the widgets, and set our destination to January 1925. Surely the lessons of the past proffered wisdom as only the conveyance of one century prior can enlighten.
We arrived in 1925, where we immediately sought out the advice of that era’s arrant epistemologist, newspaper advice columnist Doris Blake. You say you don’t know of the erudite opinings of Doris Blake? We are gobsmacked. Fetch the smelling salts!
Doris Blake—the nom de plume of writer Antoinette Donnelly—was nothing less than a lightening rod of wisdom for copious correspondents nationwide. Both fair young ladies and fine young gentlemen penned their deepest desires and sent them posthaste via the post office to Doris Blake, beseeching her for profundities per proprieties prim and proper.
Her worldly wisdom was often coallated into pamphlet form. Here is one fine example:
Alas, this insightful treatise on preternatural positions, is lost to time, try though we may to find any scrap of a tome that indubitably scuppered a plentitude of preventable passionate petting. Probably.
And now, back to our travel in time.
Armed with the winsome wisdom of Doris Blake, we returned to 2025, ready to impart lessons from a century past to our troubled world of today. However, there was an unforseen glitch. As fortune would have it, Doris Blake enlightened readers of The Chicago Tribune and other fine dispensers of newsly offerings during same epoch in which racketeering ruffians ruthlessly roamed. Inadvertently, we experienced what the wisest minds of science refer to as “a time-space screwup.”
The correspondences to Doris Blake were preserved. However, her wholesome advice was replaced—ironically, of course—with the doings of henious hoodlums and merciless miscreants of the Roaring Twenties. We belive this malignant mash-up happened sometime during our return voyage, probably in late 1952, when we had to stop for a potty break. That will teach us not to relieve our respective colons and bladders before embarkment. You would be astonished at how few reststops there are on the highways and byways within the wormholes linking our past and present.
We are ashamed of this misrepresentation of Doris Blake’s pulchritudinous1 positions. Surely the pure and tender hearts of the lovelorn (circa 1925) would be torn asunder should they discover that dirty dealings of despiciable desperados would impinge on amatory assiliations2.
Regardless, solely for educational edification and not ignoble indignations, we now present you with these quixotic queries and their mismatched maxims of muddles .
Q: Can a girl find eternal happiness with a man she has known for three short months?
A: ‘Tis not our problem what this young man has in mind.
Q. Would a man not a bit unattractive, pay heed to tempting opportunity?
A. Trust him? Not if he’s a powerful octopus who aligns with the most illiterate, disreputable characters of the Chicago underworld.
Q. Can a girl make good after a quarrel with the young man she loves, particularly when mutual friends insist that said young man is willing to speak with her?
A. It all depends on the nature of his “friends.”
Q. Shall I ask for a brother for the hand of her sister, at least for going out purposes?
A. Don’t ask him. He don’t know nothing.
Story Links:
A biography of Antoinette Donnelly AKA “Doris Blake” on Wikipedia
Sadly, no copy of What About Petting? could be found anywhere on the interwebs. Fortunately, you can read another of Doris Blake’s cum Antoinette Donnelly’s other advicely tomes: How To Reduce: New Waistlines For Old
Learn more about the 1920s from one of my all-time favorite books: The Lawless Decade: A Pictorial History Of A Great American Transition, From The World War I Armistice And Prohibition To Repeal And The New Deal
Al Brown has two graves? Is one for Brown and one for Scarface Tony? Here’s the story behind the story at Gravely Speaking
Thanks for reading The Typewriter's Collage. Connect with me on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram at the handle @RealArnieB. I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook under my real name. While you’re at it, click your mouse or trackpad over to my website, www.arniebernstein.com.
Provide Doris Blake’s readers with more realistic answers or say what you will. That’s why we have a comment section.
And because you made it this far, here’s your bonus content:
The story of another newspaper advice columnist, Eppie Lederer—better known under her pen name “Ann Landers.”
Yes, “pulchritudinous” is a real word. Look it up.
I made up the word “assiliations”, but it sure sounds real in context, doesn’t it?
This was a fun one!!! Knowing what at s*^t show we are in for in the next four years almost makes me wish I had a Time Machine!