Jan 03 2008
After You’ve Popped the Cork…
After you’ve popped the cork…
And finished all the champagne,
And sung “Auld Lang Syne” off-key, making up lyrics as you went along…
You feel both sad and hopeful as one year has ended and a new one begun.
You’re with friends and you don’t want the party to end just yet.
You want to linger and ease into the New Year. You all want to linger.
So you might make some coffee, perhaps add a splash of brandy and you talk about nothing much at all.
You look around at the party debris and pick up the little wire thing that held down the cork to the bottle.
“What is this thing called?” you ask.
“I dunno. I just called it ‘that wire thing’,” someone says.
“Let’s Google it!” someone else says.
“I don’t want to move,†another friend says.
You laze on your chairs pondering what the “champagne wire thing” is called.
“Didja know that the tip of a shoelace, that plastic thingy, is called an ‘aglet’?” the boyfriend of one friend says.
“Huh. But that has nothing to do with the champagne thingy,” you say.
Well…it’s a thingy, is what I was thinking,” the boyfriend says.
This statement is given a moment of silence.
You start to play with the wire thingy and you notice that it resembles a French Bistro chair. Or it would resemble one if you removed the bottom wire and twisted it this way and bent it that way…
You end up scratching your fingers a bit but you hold up your creation.
“Check this out!”
Everyone squints at what is in your hand and the friend closest to you gestures for you to hand it to her.
“This is cool, ” she says. “Let me make one.”
Soon everyone is hunting for more of those champagne wire things. Fingers are poked by wires, brows are furrowed. The confetti-strewn coffee table has 3 tiny bistro chairs surrounding a tiny bistro table.
The above was purely imaginary. But this miniscule Bistro Chair was made from the wire cage by carefully removing the wire that connected the 4 “legs” and then forming the wire for the chair back. The ends were looped around the chair legs.
A bistro table requires nothing more than removing the wire that looped through the legs. I spent my New Year’s Eve with a friend and his family and we didn’t have champagne - we opened up a bottle of Prosecco to toast the new year.
The name of the “wire thing” is the wire cage. In French it is called the Muselet, from the French term “to muzzle.”
I love this fact I came across:
The whispering noise made while opening a champagne bottle is sometimes named “le soupir amoureux” (loving whisper).
Doesn’t that sound nice? Loving whisper…
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That is so random and yet…so interesting! I, too, get those random moments where I wonder at a particular thing. Good thing the Internet is there to help cure one’s curiosity. I can’t imagine how much time I would have otherwise expended if I had lived a few decades ago and had to look up everything through the encyclopedia, etc!
That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!!
A muselet, huh? Interesting!
Great post, Ms. Q.!
Derek: Yes, there is much power to the Internet! I saw these tiny chairs at a friend’s house post-New Year’s Eve. His engineering design friends made them. On December 31, 2006 I was in Cape Town and I made a wire cage chair there. When I was googling to double-check on the name of the wire cage (I thought it was wire cage but wasn’t quite sure) I saw that someone had actually asked, “How do you make those chairs out of a wire cage?” or something like that so I guess it’s some know thing to do. I had no idea. I thought my friend’s friends had came up with it.
Sue: It sure is fun to make and so easy! I found them charming when saw them at friend’s place (see my comment above).
Glad you liked the post and thanks!
Wow… Nice description and pictures too. I like the little factiods that come up about random stuff when figuring out a thingy’s name really is (i.e. “the ends of a shoelace”).
The chairs are great.
We weren’t allowed to sing our own made-up words to Auld Lang Syne—the party host passed out little slips of paper with the lyrics on them, at 10 minutes to midnight.
I think we all start as wire cage things, capable of becoming something of worth, something artistic, and and something beautiful. The le soupir amoureux is spoken kindness.
UT: I’m glad you enjoyed the post! I like factoids which is why I enjoy speaking with people - people know so many random fact and see the world in their own way.
Christine: The chairs are fun. Your party host was prepared .. cool! I have to Google the lyrics and I have never sang it in its entirety. I think of “Auld Lang Syne” lyrics like “Hey Jude” lyrics - I pipe in at the chorus only and then blah-blah guess at the rest!
Speedy! That’s a very beautiful metaphor! Nice!
Ohh thanks! (Hey MsQ, stopping by to check for a new post)
Happy week
Speedy!! Thanks for the happy week wishes. Things have been a bit busy (not hectic, just one thing after another) and I have become so behind on reading blogs and heck, writing for my own blog!