Word: floristers
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...effect. It is, among other things, the shriek of children scooting in the streets, the clamor of crowded living; the neighborhood butcher's, where the housewife can leave her door key, and the corner delicatessen that stays open past midnight; the locksmith and the cobbler, and the florist's potted sidewalk garden; the front-stoop squads with time and chitchat on their hands; the old man gazing like a mute portrait from the frame of his second-story window; and the strangely silent Sunday morning, sweet with the smell of freshly washed streets...
Because "a rectory with 16 priests is no place for banjo practice," Father Dustin warms up in a flower shop across the street - an arrangement so mutually satisfactory that the florist has sold 300 of the Father's albums since July. Father Dustin humbly attributes this success to an order of cloistered nuns who, "when they get the time, say a prayer for the success of the album. Not many records have that help going for them...
Christmastime lovers nuzzle under plastic mistletoe, and brides are pelted with polyethylene orange blossoms. "It's got so that a girl only gets real flowers for her first corsage and at her funeral," says a Wichita florist. Some cemeteries forbid the use of fake flowers, not so much for reasons of taste as because they make it difficult to cut the grass. Other cemeteries have given in, allow plastic wreaths and sprays...
Fresh-flower partisans deplore the trend. "Plastic flowers don't have a soul," says Chicago Florist Audie Staup. "Real flowers have a message; plastic ones don't." Adds Edward Goeppner, managing partner of San Francisco's huge Podesta-Baldocchi florist firm: "I sometimes ask a friend who has artificial flowers in his home if he has a stuffed dog, too." Paradoxically, the bogus-blossom boom has not yet cut severely into fresh-flower sales. Explains Goeppner: "Artificial flowers remind one to buy fresh flowers." Nevertheless, most flower shops hedge their bets by stocking the phonies. "We never...
...greeted ambassadors and their wives as they sipped champagne and nibbled at small cakes. There were fires in all the fireplaces, and the flowers, said Mme. Hervé Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, "looked as if they have been arranged by a human hand instead of by a florist." It was a warm and friendly gathering. President Kennedy in his new club coat and striped trousers managed to talk to almost every guest except Russian Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov. (Attorney General Bobby Kennedy did the family honors. Smiling Bobby invited Smiling Mike down to the Justice Department, "where we check...