In ”The Remembrance of Things Past,” Swann began making love to Odette by rearranging the cattleyas tucked into the low-cut neck of her black velvet gown. The Great Gatsby`s rivals wooed Daisy Buchanan away from him with orchids. And somebody sent Billie Holiday violets for her furs. Corsages were important then.
As recently as the 1950s, a corsage was as necessary to a festive outfit as a hat and little white gloves and shoes that matched your purse. You hardly ever saw a photo of Mamie Eisenhower without one.
What better image of the time is the sight that greeted so many late-night seekers after a glass of milk and a piece of pie on the eve of a big anniversary or a big dance; there, on the top shelf of the fridge, in among the milk bottles and the oleo and the orange juice, aglow in the unearthly light an open refrigerator casts in a dark kitchen-a big purple orchid in an enormous clear-plastic box.
But those orchidacious days are gone forever. The corsage-for which so many innocent flowers have paid the ultimate price over the decades-became extinct slowly, like the dinosaurs, by outgrowing its environment. It got bigger and bigger and bigger while women`s shoulders stayed about the same size.
Like a creature in a horror movie, it started out small and soft and lovely and lovable and grew into a monster. By the end, your classic serious professional corsage was in a weight class with Rocky Marciano: a dozen fat carnations sprayed weird colors and wired together-along with about a bale of itchy fern and a humongous scratchy bow made of stiff fake lace and satin ribbon-into a raft you could float down the Mississippi.
It could eat a silk dress in a matter of seconds. Turn your head too fast in its direction, and it would bash you in the face so fast you wouldn`t know what hit you.
The villain, as in any classic tragedy, turns out to be hubris: foolish human pride, compounded at times by the American male assumption that bigger is better.
”They want everybody to see how generous they are to their wives or girlfriends,” theorizes florist LeRoy LaBold.
Florist Hal Cook, who specializes in ”small, elegant” corsages, remembers a man who returned the wrist corsage he had ordered for his girlfriend because it didn`t go from her wrist to her elbow, the way he wanted it to. What would his friends think?
Oh, well. At least your mother still likes to get a corsage on Mother`s Day. Doesn`t she?
”Your grandmother would like it much more than your mother,” florist Bruce Robertson says tactfully. Younger mothers, he says, even mothers in their 40s and 50s, ”are just not corsage people.” They`d rather have flowers for the house.
This older mother remembers corsages before they developed into lethal weapons. To her-even if she knows they`re out of style-a corsage is still something special. It still means romance and affection and remembrance of times past, a link to anniversary orchids long since faded, and bridal orange blossoms, and gardenias given by handsome young men and worn to dances long ago.
