Philadelphia is home to the oldest and finest flower show in the US of A, so I’m going with some friends this Saturday.  I’ve never been to a flower show so I’m not sure what to expect.  Like is it a real show?  Are these multi-talented flowers?  Singing?  Dancing?  A chorus of carnations? Can’t wait to find out.

Now this particular flower show isn’t cheap. Maybe the ticket price is victim of a trickle down effect from importing exotic types from all over the world.  And then there’s those damn tariffs. Are flower tariffs driving ticket prices?  Do you get special gifts along with your ticket like two free drinks and a pretzel? Maybe a complimentary tulip to ready yourself for Easter.  They gotta give ya something other than a mere appreciation of one of nature’s key players.  I can always call 1-800-FLOWERS for that.  

I grew up around flowers, some indoors and some outdoors.  Some real and some plastic.  Like the one my mother once bought for her mother in law.  Grandma Namian didn’t have a green thumb.  It was actually white as she always donned white cotton gloves thanks to a nasty case of excema.  She was never without ’em.  Hell, she’d mix a meat loaf with them on. Give that gal a Whitman’s chocolate sampler and step back when she squeezed the fruity ones.  But back to the plastic plant.

My mother thought it was a practical gesture and it was the 60’s.  Practically everything came in plastic.  Every morning my grandmother called my mother to ask if she should water the plant. The plant was a red poinsettia.  It survived the winter.  Just needed occasional dusting.  When spring sprung, Grandma took the plant outside and soaked and spritzed it into oblivion then left it in the sun to dry.  Well by the next morning the darned thing had melted into a pile of goo. Grandma was beside herself.  She killed a plant, an act which held extra demons for a surviver of the genocide.  Turks killed.  Armenians did not.

My mother assured it wasn’t her fault and finally had to break it to her that it was fake. Grandma didn’t get it.  English no so good.  There weren’t flower shows in Armenia.  In fact there weren’t any flowers.  Desert dirt.  The melted poinsettia was replaced with a pot of plastic tulips. They didn’t fare much better.  Pretty sure the plastic plant is an idea whose time has come and gone.  

So I’m excited to see real life flowers this Saturday, not plastic replicas.  You should get what you pay for, right?  And if a cuppula free drinks hit the lips, it’s all good.  Us spectators need to be watered too.