A container of stories

If you want to build a business, build the people

– Brownie Wise, 1913-1992,  Tupperware saleswoman

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Me and Tupperware. We seal tight — nothing’s getting out,” my wife Jillian said, grinning, right after I found out she was pregnant.

When I heard Tupperware Corporation was circling the drain, the whole conversation came flooding back, along with my little run-ins with the brand.

Funny how something so ordinary can carry so many stories.

So, here’s one for today. I’ll keep the rest sealed tight for next week’s business column.

A Tupperware lady from a nearby apartment was giving instructions to ten people gathered in our living room.

“Say your name,” Tina Marie Engel said.

“Then pick a word that describes yourself using the first letter of your name.”

“My name is John. I’m judgemental.”

“I’m Hallie. I’m generally hysterical.”

“I’m Jillian, and … can I use judgemental also? No? All right, then, I’ll be judicious.”

This was not your average Tupperware party. It had been my wife Jillian’s idea — a side hustle we picked up whiles we were students in New York.

The US scholarships only took care of tuition, but daily expenses? Those were another story.

Let me start with the guest list: three painters (one a professor); an artist’s agent; a curator; an up-market weaver; an artist who four years ago did a project in which he used retro Tupperware pieces as molds for translucent beeswax forms; an actor (a man of impeccable taste); a food writer; and a single mom whose ex-husband had insisted she dress their first child in nothing but black-and-white baby clothes.

Unlike Jillian, I had asked these people into our home not to buy (though they did), nor to help me rack up commissions, but to assess the design of a product they all remembered but no longer knew.

What had once been frosted and pastel, brown and orange was now deep yellow, blue, and white.

What had been familiar, utilitarian, sensible, even tacky, was surprising, contemporary, quirky – in a word, designed.

The very language of Tupperware had changed — soft, pleasant to hold, with each curve almost mathematically inspiring me.

Before my party, George Stoll, the artist who’d once worked with Tupperware, had explained to me why the old forms held poignancy for him.

“They were like a field of flowers. I wanted to make people stop and pay attention.”

But he had seen pictures of the new designs and wanted to like them too. He did.

As the group began examining the mountains of plastic Tina had laid out, George got things rolling: “The purple Winnie the Pooh plate has real integrity – it couldn’t be produced in any other material but plastic.”

The weaver disagreed: “I like the deep blue precisely because it looks the least like plastic.”

“But what’s the story with that cranberry stuff?” one of the painters wanted to know.

“The blue-and-green steamer, with that white cover and the Mickey Mouse ear handles, is very Italian, very Michael Graves. Where’s the consciousness that creates both these objects?”

This was a tough crowd.

They were confounded by the decision to offer a nifty hand blender (very childlike and dangerous at the same time, another painter observed) only in mint green, and a handsome knife set only with dark-blue-and-white handles.

“Why don’t they just make it all in white?” they wailed, sounding, well, exactly like who they are.

My party was heating up. The crowd had its favourites: measuring spoons with flat bottoms; measuring cups with rounded handles; an ice-cream scoop that means business; a garlic press; salt and pepper shakers which everyone found fun yet practical.

Though only three of them own microwaves, they were drawn to Tupperware’s best-selling Rock ‘N Serve containers (clear bottoms, cinnamon tops, yellow vents), which are intended for winging leftovers directly from the freezer to the microwave.

Their attraction to a product most of them couldn’t use was curious but understandable.

Designers admire good design – even if they find it derivative, as they occasionally did here (Umbra, Graves, Alessi, Good Grips) – but they love design that is both good and clever.

Meaning? The piece works: neither form nor function takes precedence.

So while my group admired a JFK airport terminal of a strainer, with aspheric bottom and Saarinen-esque top – they didn’t love it.

They didn’t need it for pasta draining and thought they wouldn’t use it for salad drying (wouldn’t water be flying all over the kitchen?) or straining liquids from a pot (why not use the lid?).

On the other hand, they remembered Tupperware’s retro lettuce crisper with affection.

Okay, it was a wee bit ugly, but that perfectly removable spike that impaled the iceberg lettuce just right, fitting so perfectly in the crisper—the same colour as the lettuce itself!

We were in agreement. It was … perfect.

People balked at Tina’s description of the TupperWave Stack Cooker, a three-tiered gizmo that allows you to cook a three-course meal in your microwave in less than 30 minutes.

The food writer, much too polite to say anything, stared open-mouthed as Tina described dipping chicken cutlets in salad dressing and then tossing in a package of frozen vegetables.

But our guests revolted when Tina brought out Modular Mates, stackable storage units that are the building blocks of Tupperware.

The idea is that everything in your pantry should be decanted into an appropriately sized, virtually airtight container.

“I can’t tell you how compelling I find this,” the professor of painting said.

“I look at this and think; this will improve me. But the modular system deindividualises products and produces a singular skin for existence, something I have spent my whole life avoiding. I mean, I didn’t get a nose job.”

The crowd went wild.

“I love my Quaker’s oatmeal carton,” Jillian said, holding it up proudly.

“And what’s as beautiful as a baking soda tin?” another asked, nearly reducing the gang to tears.

“The question is,” said the professor with all the seriousness in the world, “do you want to see the detritus of your life or not?”

I couldn’t help it—I slapped my forehead.

Detritus – and how you store it – is what Tupperware comes down to.

For them, the real meaning of Tupperware lies not in upscale housewares but in food storage — really good-looking food storage.

A few weeks after the party, I was doing Halloween candy triage, wondering where to put the junk.

My eyes landed on the Stack Cooker. Not just one bowl, but three.  Each with its lid.

Sure, the thing was in the dread cranberry colour, but who cared? It worked.

Frutiger, originally designed for the classifieds, the clean lines of Adrian Frutiger’s 1976 typeface are now used for everything from airport signs to small print.

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.