Andy Chase

This is a rant a couple of days warmed over, so it will probably be quick and whiny as opposed to long and forehead-vein-bulging.



What's the deal with "Swap Meets"? They're almost like flea markets, but all the ones we've been to around SoCal tend to be made up of people selling marked-up 99-Cent Store merchandise as opposed to people selling old (and considerably more interesting) junk.



The Saugus Swap Meet was probably the best so far, but even then the ratio of new cheap crap to cool old junk was probably 80:20. And most of the old crap wasn't actually that cool; unimaginably garish 1970's dining room sets and bedframes galore.



I don't think there was a single booth at the Woodland Hills Indoor Swap Meet selling used junk. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, I guess, but it's disappointing when the last big indoor swap meet you went to was Superflea in Cheektowaga, New York.



I know there's the monthly antique show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, but with an admission price of $6.00 I have to wonder if there's going to be anything in there I can even afford.



Yard Sales have been more fruitful... and one of the cool things about Los Angeles is that people have them year round. I've scored some pretty neat 1950's kitchenware around the neighborhood. Even at yard sales, though, there seems to be a predilection towards offloading ugly 1970's crap more than anything, along with used copies of Valley of the Dolls and early 1980's microwave cookbooks.



I'm sure a big part of it is that there just isn't that much old stuff to go around in southern California... and what old stuff there is seems to stay in concentrated pockets like the cities of Orange and Ventura, which have been around a lot longer than most of the area where we live.



I think I sense trips to Orange and Ventura in the future.