‘sugar overload’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

If you’ve been anywhere near any source of media in the last 24 hours you’ve seen or heard some coverage of the new Peeps store in National Harbor. Who knew you could support a whole store based on one marshmallow creation?

Anyway, gift bags went out to muckity-mucks during the grand opening yesterday and the National Confectioner’s Association snagged one and is giving it away. Go take a guess at how long a peep took to make back in 1953 and you might win “a Mike and Ike mug, a plush stuffed Peep Bunny and plenty of candy.”

Puttin’ on the Ritz, from Young Frankenstein, click to embiggen.

Being raised in a home where Mel Brooks is regarded as a National Treasure, one of my earliest media memories is of watching Young Frankenstein, particularly the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” scene. So I’m pretty excited that Young Frankenstein has been made into a stage musical, and will be coming to the Kennedy Center starting December 15th and running all the way to January 10th.

But I’m even MORE excited that we’ve got two pairs of tickets to give away. But it won’t be through blog comments this time… this is a Twitter contest.

Here’s the deal: Between now and December 28th, you need to follow both @welovedc and @YFTour, and tweet about the musical, mentioning both @welovedc, @YFTour, and the hashtag #ItsALIVE. The mentions and the hashtag make sure all the DC tweets get entered in the DC contest, and following both twitter accounts means we’ll be able to notify the winner by Twitter direct message, so all those steps are important. So for example:

I want @YFTour & @welovedc to send me to see ‘Young Frankenstein’ at the Kennedy Center! #ItsALIVE http://bit.ly/7zyfqN

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‘Suffrage Hay wagon (LOC)’
courtesy of ‘The Library of Congress’

Remember Karl’s post about DC’s “culture of single-ism?” Well, some things never change it seems. Nikolas Schiller, man of many talents, posted up a scan and transcription of a 1908 Washington Times article about unmarried women in the District.  It’s fantastic reading, both for its content and as a window into another time.

The overgrown country village by the Potomac lays claim to a possession of a higher percentage of women of marriageable age with a lower per cent of opportunity than any community over which floats the Stars and Stripes, not excepting the man-deserted sitting rooms of the high-browed and austere dame of the hub of the universe nor rural Virginia where the coy and clinging lass of the Southland has been left in solitude while her possible mate sought elsewhere realms of greater activity. To substantiate which claim, though she likes them not, the burg of the broad avenue and the bouqueted beauty quotes the figures.

A recently completed police census reveals the fact that there are 17,000 more women in the city than men, which is rather startling majority out of a total of less than 330,000. It signifies that for each 100 men there are 111 women in the running. These discouraging figures, however, are but a shadow of the real plight in which a woman in Washington finds herself, for the social conditions that surround men in the Government service who largely make up the lists of possible matrimonial candidates are such as to discourage marriage and where there is a tendency shown to fly in the face of this restraint the victim is picked so soon that the rank and file have little chance at him.

As an aside, the 1908 Times is not, in fact, the same times of Today – Rev Moon may have revived the name when he started the Times in the early 80s, but they have not been in continuous operation since that time the way the Washington Post has been.