The coupe is the most glamorous glass from which to drink champagne. Think Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot carrying two full to the rim to Tony Curtis on a softly lit yacht. ‘Don’t fight it,’ she says to him breathily, ‘relaaaaxxxx.’
When I was a child this was one of three films I had on video recorded from the TV, along with You’ll Never Get Rich starring Rita Hayworth, and Hitch featuring Will Smith. I would watch these films over and over, and that scene on the yacht seemed to me the pinnacle of glamour, sex and adulthood.
Curtis, with his Cary Grant voice – ‘Where did you learn to kiss like that?’
Monroe, the original sexy baby – ‘I used to sell kisses for the Milk Fund.’
I’m still not exactly sure what the ‘Milk Fund’ is. Back then I thought it was the sexiest thing one could say after a kiss. It’s funny how these small fragments of adult culture can lodge in your brain as a child and remain there, detached from their context, masquerading as knowledge.
When I was a teenager, my parents – appalled to hear that my school was allowing a group called Ambassadors for Christ to teach sex education – gave me an informative illustrated Dorling Kindersley book on the subject. Good parenting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be bothered to read it, and instead just flicked through the illustrations. One page showed a cartoon of a party with teenagers drinking and dancing, and two boys in the corner blowing up condoms like balloons. I hold this image entirely responsible for an early sexual encounter I had with a boy I really fancied. He handed me the condom, and I, armed only with this distant scrap of ‘information’, put it to my lips and blew.
Where I grew up in Cornwall, most parties were in the woods, on the beach, up a hill, or else in a village hall. Not so much fur stole and coupes overflowing with champagne; more neat Pimm’s smuggled out of the house in a plastic water bottle. For a while I had a boyfriend whose friends would play a game called the Yellow Pages of Death. They’d take it in turns to stand very still holding a phonebook against a part of their body, while someone else ran at them, plunging a long knife into the book as hard as they could. Bonus points were awarded for holding it against your face or crotch. Not a coupe in sight.
There was one night of the year, though, that felt truly glamorous. New year’s eve in St Ives is phenomenal. I say that with complete objectivity. Every year the town fills with thousands of people – locals and visitors – all in fancy dress. It’s said to be the third biggest street party after London and Edinburgh. I grew up unaware of the collective cultural disappointment that new year’s eve elicits; I’d never even heard of Jools Holland.
In St Ives people commit to fancy dress – packs of crustaceans, monks, nuns, a bobsleigh team with working bobsleigh, vikings, teachers with mortarboards and canes, the whole cast of nearly any film you can think of, pirates, synchronised swimmers, Greek gods, animals, athletes… Where’s Wally? Everywhere. There are so many people that you are certain to bump into your doppelgänger, no matter what or who you’ve come dressed as. If you’re not dressed up, expect lots of ‘Who have you come as? A loser?’ The influx of people you haven’t gone to school with was almost too much. One year dressed as a sailor, fireworks illuminating the harbour behind me, I joyfully kissed a cowboy, a mermaid, the 118 man and Chewbacca.
Where did you learn to kiss like that?
It wasn’t until I moved to London that I began to experience the kind of glamour I’d seen in those films. For a while I worked as a hostess at [redacted] on the 39th floor of a skyscraper and was therefore glamour-adjacent. We were hired and trained through a catering agency. On our first day, a man in a yellow suit that was far too shiny taught us how to carry trays and open bottles, and then gave a lengthy PowerPoint presentation outlining the ethos of the brand, which included images of packets of tights with big red crosses over anything higher than 20-denier, and a list of duties. On the final slide, there was an inspirational quote from Confucius Photoshopped over a photo of a dandelion:
Worry not that no one knows you; seek to be worth knowing.
The man nodded sagely. ‘Here, you should be led,’ he said, ‘by the teachings of confusion.’ [sic] Everyone was given a fancy jacket with a high neck, and a golden name tag that was weighty and engraved. We were told that because of the high turnover of staff, they’d given up getting name tags made for new employees. And so each of us was given a new name, or rather given the name of a previous hostess. I became Frankie.
There were difficult things about the job – long shifts in heels (before that was made illegal); the ‘meal’ we were provided on a double shift was often just one big orange; poor pay; and they weren’t very nice to us. But there were things that I loved. In the staff lift, I’d pin my ‘name’ to my chest, ears popping as I flew up the 39 floors and I’d sense a subtle shift – just a trace amount of the feeling I used to get stepping into my costume on new year’s eve.
The lighting was always good and soft, the guests were gorgeously dressed, and I found that I was indeed led by confusion. It was the delicious confusion of weaving gracefully through a party, tray in hand, doubly invisible – unknowable – delivering a cocktail to a handsome man who, glancing at my chest, winks and says: ‘Thanks, Frankie’; or discreetly handing a woman in the ladies a tampon, and her looking into my eyes in the mirror with so much drunken, sisterly love then saying: ‘Frankie, you’ve saved my life.’ Even our boss called us by our name-tag names. ‘Time to touch up that lipstick, Frankie.’ The staff bathroom was tucked away in a corner of the glass-fronted building. The loo looked into the apex of two tall, sleek window panes and the small room seemed to slope towards the view. Sitting there, you could see the tiny people, cars, buses far below – it was as though you were peeing on London itself. Frankie felt risqué, and very empowering.
This wasn’t the only time I was embroiled in nominative confusion. Having returned home to St Ives one Christmas, I found myself on the deserted cobbled streets at three in the morning. I was walking back from a party. Coming towards me up the street was a boy who’d been a few years older than me in school. We’d never spoken before. Without saying a word he walked right up to me and kissed me. As we went our separate ways he said: ‘I’ve always fancied you, Molly.’
I used to sell kisses for the Milk Fund.
Before I moved to London, when I was doing an art foundation in Falmouth, I had a best friend with the same name as me. Though arbitrary, it bound us together – twinned us, and affected the way we interacted with others when together. There are only a few pubs in Falmouth and there was a guy we’d see sometimes when we were out who would buy us drinks. He was very much in love with my friend. She wasn’t interested. At this time, I was very much in love with a local builder. One night, the builder stood me up. Dejected, I walked to a bar and there I found the guy who was in love with my friend, alone at a table, equally dejected having seen her earlier in the night dancing with a film student in a beanie. We kissed. It wasn’t good.
Wrong Ella. I said.
Wrong Ella. He said.
Yesterday I was walking through Deptford and an elderly man smiled and threw open his arms. Greeting me like an old friend he said: ‘Big Foot! It’s been years! Where have you been, Big Foot?’ I shook my head, confused, and carried on walking. ‘What’s wrong, Big Foot?’ He shouted after me. ‘You don’t recognise me?’ Part of me did want to stop and chat, to see who I was, or might be as Big Foot. It could’ve been my George Kaplan moment; it might have changed the course of my life entirely.
The glasses pictured here are 1920s, they belong to my granny and were her mum’s (a wedding present, I think). Granny is my favourite person to drink champagne with. Mostly because if you suggest opening a bottle she will always say yes, and it will always feel appropriately festive. She’s the kind of person who has a cupboard with a range of beautiful glasses in different shapes to choose from. These coupes are my choice. It’s like a classy lava lamp, or the adult equivalent of drinking through a swirly straw. The stems are hollow and hold the bubbles like a lovely secret.
Apparently, the famous story about Marie Antoinette’s left breast being the inspiration for the coupe is a myth, although there is a porcelain bosom-shaped cup designed for drinking milk that she was involved with (see jattes tetons). Less glamorous than a coupe, but not not hot…
I used to sell kisses for the Pleasure Dairy.
I think I love these glasses because they feel a little like a prop. When I lift one to my lips I’m me, but I’m also Sugar Kane Kowalczyk from Some Like it Hot. I recently taught a poetry workshop in Deptford Creek that involved us wearing waders. The waders were tight and thigh-high, unexpectedly sexy, and everyone – men, women, non-binary participants – walked differently than they had in their shoes. Mudlarking meets femme fatale – the creek down, boots. A similar transformation happens when you smoke a Sobranie, or speak another language, or put on any kind of hat. In 2017 I made a collaborative installation for Tate St Ives that involved a large, hand-cut Modernist carpet. At the private view our carpet became the dance floor and people were asked to remove their shoes. Dancing barefoot, everyone, even the most severe-looking curators and company directors, moved like hippies at a festival.
In a poem the self or the ‘I’ can be called ‘the lyric I’. I find it exciting that in poetry we’re not pinned to genre in the same ways as other forms – is it fiction? Memoir? fantasy…? Yes. And no. Truth doesn’t matter in the same way as it does elsewhere. In her lecture on Poetry and the Metaphysical ‘I’, the poet Dorothea Lasky says that ‘the best gift a poet can give his or her I’, is to allow it to be ‘its own cool animal’. I love this idea. I’m drawn to writing the self, but within that self there are many selves – Frankie, Molly, Big Foot and countless others. In a poem I can be the sailor, the nun and the 118 man. In a poem I’m courted by confusion, those things that – separated from their context – can masquerade as knowledge. The coupe works this same kind of magic the moment you lift it. Glamour – raised, brimming… A toast, then. To those objects that allow us to be our own cool animal.
Illustration by Lawrence Mynott
.jpg)
