I’ve long said that everything about and around a person is a vehicle for self-expression. I mean the way you dress, how you decorate your living space, your hair, the plaster frog family on your front lawn, everything in your personal, physical and virtual environments is a canvas on and through which you show the world who you are. The driveway at The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch at AWMOK.com is packed with cars, campers and trucks that scream the personality of the person behind the wheel. Here are but a few examples of some such “I Am” vehicles.  Click any of them for more info.

Were I to drive a truck it would most certainly look something like this:

If I were taking a summer road trip, here’s what I’d be steering:

Were I of that persuasion and super friendly with God I’d  be pullin this down the highway:

If I were a butcher I might drive this. Then again, as far as “chick magnets” goes, this is the ultimate cock car:

If you were Angelyne you’d be tooling around the streets of LA in this living monument to cheesedom in stardom car. If you were lucky enough to be friends with Angeline you’d be tooling around with her.

If you like peas this vehicle is for you:

If you don’t like vegetables perhaps you like fruit:

Harry And David made a whole business of fruit. Here’s what they commissioned to have made in 1960:

If you’re a crafter, this muffler car might be more your speed:

If you’re really bad at directions this 1940′s coupe is for you:

Here’s a nice Sunday car:

If you need a tuneup or your teeth cleaned you might want to stop here:

And, of course,  if you don’t want to take the highway you can always fly.

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Long before Mr. Clean and Magic Sponge promised fewer steps and happy housewives came Harwood’s Sponge Cloth, one of many modern miracle kitchen products offered for the first time in history in the post-war Atomic Age to ladies of the kitchen.  As chemicals developed for warfare or space travel like Teflon were trickling down to pots and pans, linoleum floors and kitchen counters, the Sponge Cloth promised to be a “Sponge and Dishcloth in One!” that “Cleans and Dries in One Stroke!” “Wet•squeeze•use” and for 35¢ lives were changed because now there was more time to run into the next room and enjoy the revolution happening in the living room, television.

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Cheap jewelry is always a popular breeding ground for Kitsch. Kitsch glitz  shines especially bright when designs are made to capitalize on popular trends such as the streaking craze that began in the 1960′s and attained astronomical heights when a peace signing streaker crashed the 1974 Academy Awards blazing behind actor David Niven. From that point on, streaking was  as glorified in all forms of design, from T-shirts to decals to plaster figurines to the kind of tacky finery you see here.

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Last night was the closing of The First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple.  I had never written a musical before, hardly ever went to see them.  I’m an all-the-way Pop Culture gal and for me this was a medium from ancient times with way too histrionic sounding songs and singers frozen in time.  I was the least likely person in the world to write a musical but write one I did, with Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray and Marsha Norman. We were nominated for 11 Tony’s.  How we even won one, the brilliant LaChanze for Best Actress, was a miracle in the climate on Broadway. (Don’t get me started on that one…). Beyond being eternally proud of the work, especially the uplifting and joyous effect it had on audiences night after night, the most stunning part of the journey was the family of friends I made through the Broadway run and the ensuing national tour.  Right from the beginning when we started writing Purple in 2001 I always heard that  there’s constant bickering among everyone but we were all really friends.  And I mean everyone, from Alice Walker, the Pulitzer prize winning author of the novel, down through us authors, the cast, director, producers, hair, makeup, wigs, production managers, everyone.  I was always being told by other friends who had written for Broadway that by the end no one would ever talk to each other and that so many writers of so many shows, because the experience takes years and is so intense, never end up  speaking unless they write another show and then it’s just about work. Our case always was and remains different. This is a family that will be together forever, bound by an experience where the piece itself was bigger than any one part. Everyone felt chosen and blessed to be a part of The Color Purple. Fantasia WAS Celie.  Watching that journey of her finding herself through this character was a joy and a privilege. Every cast member, starting with the staggering Felicia P. Fields, Tony nominated for Sofia and the first actor we ever cast in 2003, was not only a triple threat – brilliant singers, actors AND dancers, a rare enough find in one person let alone an entire cast – they were a gift for any artist to have interpret their work.

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I’ll be waving one of these  all day and night today as these are the final two performances of the First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple. The  whole 4-1/2 years I was writing this with Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray we waved these church fans and others from my collection of 60 from the 1950′s and ’60′s daily. I’ve been stuck on songs before but being stuck on a song for a musical when one has to consider way more then the singer or the content of the song like the plot, which we were writing at the same time as the songs, the dialogue, whether something should be musicalized or spoken, is there dancing to it or not, does the wig guy have enough time to make the wig changes, on and ever-increasingly on…, let me tell you the sweat pours down and these church fans, totally organic to what we were writing other than a couple decades too late, came in mighty handy.

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Fantasia as Celie. Fantastic cast, many from the original Broadway production. Five years of my life into the making of this baby. I’m very proud of it. If you’re in LA come to the Pantages.

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A day late but Happy belated Martin Luther King Day! This bulging butterscotch keychain goes with me everywhere I go.

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A black power statuette raising his fist in pride but when you pull him outta the box he’s a white man…! This is one of the greatest examples of Soul Kitsch in my collection. So perfect a product in the late 60′s for a market that had long been under-served in terms of ubiquitous pop culture memorabilia. But like The Supremes White Bread and Touch O’ Soul “Off-Black” pantyhose featured earlier in this blog, and boasting on the box that it’s a “Equality- Justice statuette”, couldn’t the product manager have spent a few more minutes thinking about his target audience and poured a little tan tint into the resin before locking down the molds?

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Popular causes have always been prime breeding ground for Kitsch but none so powerful as the first wave of products that spin out of these Pop Culture phenomenon. Both Libby The Lovely Liberated Lady and the Do-It-Yourself Coloring Kit Black Power Statuette are two such statements from burgeoning Civil Rights movements in the 1960s and ’70s when these folks were expressing themselves freely among the masses for the first time.

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I have tons of MLK memorabilia – busts, rugs, pens, cufflinks, ashtrays – but this book of matches is one of my favorites. Comes in a matching set with Jackie Robinson, Mahalia Jackson, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Bill Pickett.

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