Noel accompanied me to Austin where I gave a paper at the University of Texas Graduate Student American Studies Annual Conference. The conference was not-so-great, but Austin certainly lived up to its billing of being very, very weird.

We wandered along South Congress, popping at will into stores that existed solely to disseminate kitsch to the masses. One of the stores, Uncommon Objects, was essentially a collection of grandmother’s attics, just organized by color. There were old ratty hats, alphabet rubber stamps, photographs of now-anonymous people, cloisonne canisters, antique typewriters, vintage umbrellas, yellowed books, weathered shoe horns, battered chests, beaded evening bags, creepy stuffed dolls and, yes, this hat:

And that is my husband’s hair, all mad-scientist-cowboy, crystal-ball-meets-rodeo, afro-wig-inside-a-hat. Now, only slightly more frightening than the fact that this exists and that we decided to put it on Noel’s impertinently curly head, is the realization that more than one of these exists.

It’s not too late to get him a birthday present.