Hello!
Last night I dropped by the Rose City Book Pub to catch Bill Oakley giving a reading and promoting a pale, summer-ish beer which he says is “perfect with hamburgers,” aka Steamed Hams Lager. I enjoyed a tall pint, complete with beads of condensation gathering on the outside of the glass, a damp ring left on the old wooden table, a long sip as the sun reached toward the horizon, still so close to the solstice, that longest, brightest day of the year, here in an area where winters are dark and sometimes night lasts forever. We can shake all that darkness off now…mmmmm…..Steamed Hams Lager….Ha!
It’s regional, brewed for Oregon and Washington, but it’s both canned and on tap and the cans are sold out! So…who knows where they’ve gone…Albany…New York, perhaps?
Here’s what really interests me—the original “Steamed Hams” Simpsons sketch ran in the mid 1990’s, in an episode called “22 Short Films About Springfield.” The title is a takeoff on the 1993 films, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. But you probably all know this! It’s a ubiquitous bit, by now.
The moment of “steamed hams” is just minutes long, seconds really, depending on how you count it. Oakley said that for some reason, in about 2014 people in Australia picked the phrase up as a way to make prank phone calls to their local grocery stores…which I guess they do in Australia?
It landed on the internet, then was looped into memes, analyzed, discussed and annotated. This all birthed a wiki, fandom, discussion groups and book clubs and…anyway, it was shared, rewritten and made into the basis for the work of others. Any way a person might imagine reworking something, from old school to AI, it’s been done with “Steamed Hams.”
The internet barely existed when the sketch was written, at least not as we know it, only in its virtual infancy, its digital diaper days, with AOL pushing dial-up and email capabilities, and just before Nora Ephron’s rom-com You’ve Got Mail made it to the big screen, selling the idea of love online, luring the masses in…
From there, the sketch hung around quietly until all the various forms of social media made room for horsing around, sharing work, and tech paved the way for all the variations, for all eternity, energized and morphing and with us and rocking it. We used to just…watch…TV?
That’s some crazy staying power!
Oakley read a short piece about “all dressed” potato chips—chips that aren’t available pretty much anywhere other than Canada and a prison, if I was tracking right. His descriptions were thorough. This morning, I feel like I sat down last night with a bag of Everything Bagels in potato chip form, where “everything” means acetic acid, vinegar, barbeque sauce and I don’t know what all, the list was long. Ketchup chips tanked in product testing, and Americans have statistically showed their love of “plain”.
But the highlight?
Bill Oakley and Elise Schumock, of Rose City Book Pub, read the script of the original Steamed Hams sketch. It was awesome.
Thank you, Bill, Elise and others who put this together! A lovely time.
What are you all writing? What readings are you hittin’ up? Dropping in? Picking up? Paperbacks, hardbacks, audio?
Cheers,
M
I wish I could have made it! I've been thinking about Steamed Hams all day; I am stuck on the precipice of watching it again, but I'm worried that instead of satisfying that itch, it will only burrow the ear worm deeper.