Yesterday’s Zippy has Zippy and Griffy riffing, as they so often do, on some aspect of popular culture — in this case, on clothing these days:
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In general, the diners in these strips have no special relationship — via their names, themes, or locations — to the topic of discussion: they’re just places for Zippy and Griffy to exchange opinions.
This particular place is The Hollywood in Dover DE, and Zippy and Griffy have been there at least twice before.
Today’s Zippy, set in Hyde Park NY:
(#1) At the Eveready Diner in Hyde Park
(This strip has been cropped to remove political content.)
The building is a huge 1995 Paramount diner, a symphony in stainless steel and neon, designed to evoke classic diners of the 1950s.
… in Palo Alto, in yesterday’s Zippy:
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Happy Donuts at 3916 El Camino Real, in the Barron Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, just south of the Stanford Industrial Park, itself just south of the College Terrace neighborhood (on the west) and the California Avenue shopping district (on the east), these being just south of the university (on the west) and downtown Palo Alto and the Professorville and Old Palo Alto neighborhoods (on the east). My neighborhoods.
Two recent Zippy strips: the clowns of death on the 6th and the frogs of Wellsboro PA today:
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Two strips on sad themes of abuse and loss: the clown as death’s head, the commercial folk-art figure as exploited, untended, and decaying. In both: humor as an ultimately failing warding-off of decline and death. But on the way we laugh.
In today’s Zippy, our Pinhead seeks signs … in signs, specifically at the West Motel, on Historic Lincoln Highway, 4040 Columbia Avenue, Columbia PA:
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Lord, give me a sign! he cries. And as Zippy watches the West Motel sign, searching for something to believe in, there comes a sign: the NO of NO VACANCY blinks on; Zippy is no longer vacant.
Plays on the ambiguity of sign and on the ambiguity of vacant.
Yesterday’s Zippy (“The flying bucket on Sepulveda”) took us to Dinah’s Fried Chicken on Sepulveda Blvd. in LA. Today, Zippy continues the narrative with remembrances of diner foods past — rice pudding, creamed spinach, corned beef hash — and their ability to evoke specific moments from times gone by:
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The day when Zippy spilled ketchup on his styrofoam shoes at Dinah’s; the day when Dinah’s ran out of rice pudding and substituted creamed spinach; Marcel Marceau’s recollection of May 14th, 1894 in Fresno CA, a memory triggered by just a whiff of corned beef hash.
All of this is just absurd if you don’t know about Marcel Proust, the madeleines, Remembrance of Things Past, and involuntary memory; in case you’ve forgotten, the title, “Remembrance of Flings Past” is there to nudge your memory. All this Proustian stuff comes from high culture, but like other Great Books, Great Art, and Great Music, it’s worked its way into a pop-culture meme that anyone can use for jokes and that everybody’s supposed to recognize.
Today’s Zippy offers tasty chicken on Sepulveda — no, not sultry young men, but actual fried poultry:
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That would be the orginal Dinah’s Fried Chicken, aka Dinah’s Family Restaurant, at 6521 S Sepulveda Blvd., LA. Where you can get that deep-fried feeling, as a star of movies and tv.
It starts with a Zippy strip from July 1st, featuring the Maple Donuts shop on Historic Lincoln Highway in York PA (and, incredibly, it will end with singings of the Negro National Anthem; in between, there will be firearms):
(#1) Maple Donuts, featured a number of times in Zippy strips
It might not be an accident that the strip appeared a few days before America’s great patriotic holiday, Independence Day / the Fourth of July. To see why, we need to look at the actual Maple Donuts store.
That will take us, on the one hand, to the adjoining coffee shop; and, on the other hand, to proud, unapologetic assertions of identities.
Today’s Zippy takes us to the Schuyler Diner (500 Schuyler Ave.) in Lyndhurst NJ (20 miles west of Manhattan), where Zippy and Griffy debate quilted steel while on the prowl for rice pudding: diner chic. And the diner staff are sore pressed (“Sometimes I think I shall go mad”, one cries out, literarily.)
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Yesterday’s Zippy goes out for sliders:
(#1) Zippy chats with counter man Sid at the Zipworld counterpart of the Little Tavern, 115 Washington Blvd. in Laurel MD, where donuts now roll alongside the sliders
