Mannequins

My first job? That would be shop-window mannequin. In the Christmas display at Thompson’s. Old man Thompson owned the department store and twice every year, Fall and Christmas, he hired high school kids to be in his window displays. We would model the kind of clothes he hoped to sell to his regular customers. A bit more upscale than the kind of clothes his customers wanted to buy. And it worked pretty well. Everyone’s friends and families would come to see them in the shop windows and some of them, I guess, bought some of the stuff we were modelling. We didn’t have to stand still or anything like that. Old man Thompson gave us transistor radios and food and drinks and it was like we were at a party every evening and all day Saturdays. Strictly soda though. No beer. But it was pretty fun. The pay wasn’t much but we didn’t do anything that we wouldn’t have been doing anyway, for free. And, at the end, we got to keep the clothes we had been wearing.

It was a long time ago but both my kids did the same thing a few years back. And my oldest grandson will be taking his turn this Fall.