Joan of Acadia

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,

and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
— Wislawa Szymborska

For a corporate ad promoting an acceptable and affordable brand of coffee, this Folgers ad is pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIB-mWsFq1c

Folgers recognizes that their brand of coffee is not perceived as cool. So their new ad campaign focuses on the company’s New Orleans roots because New Orleans is, indisputably, cool. And they recruit very cool NOLA icon Trombone Shorty to place their brand in proximity to coolness. The next step, we might guess, would be to have Trombone Shorty’s band record a raucous New Orleans jazz rendition of Folgers’ classic “Best part of waking up” jingle. But they go another way with this and it’s kind of delightful.

This ad campaign is apparently a response to brand surveys revealing that Folgers coffee has a bad reputation. So they’ve chosen to address that directly by replacing their old jingle with Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” — a defiant pop-punk middle finger to all the haters. That’s shrewd. It avoids the cringe-inducing mistake of a thousand “Pepsi Generation” ad campaigns that attempt to assert brand coolness and, thereby, awkwardly reinforce the very uncoolness they were attempting to challenge.

The actually cool part of the ad comes at the end, when cool meets cool as Trombone Shorty and his crew, having finished their coffee, launch into their brassy take on Joan Jett’s classic. Alas, we only get a brief, tantalizing taste of that — making this the rare TV commercial that I wished had continued for another two minutes. That’s frustrating. I want to hear the whole song.

But anyway, here’s the really cool part for me, personally. This ad came on while younger daughter and I were watching the game and I said that it was odd that an ad stressing the brand’s New Orleans roots didn’t stick to New Orleans musicians. “Don’t get me wrong, Joan Jett is always a Good Thing, but there’s a million great musicians from New Orleans, so it’s weird they went with one from here instead.”

“She’s from here?”

“Yeah, Joan Jett was born in Wynnewood.”

“I was born in Wynnewood,” she said, realizing that this fact now seemed cooler than it had previously.

I met the girls a few months after I’d started dating their mom. They were 9 and 10 at the time. Over the next couple of years I became their sometime babysitter and chauffeur, then eventually their mom’s fiancé and then eventually their step-dad. In the many years since then, I’d heard the stories of their births many times — tales of frantic trips to the hospital and of labor and chaos and heroically patient nurses. But in all the times I’d heard those stories, I’d never heard which hospital.

“Wait … you were born in Wynnewood?”

See, back in the ’90s I worked in Wynnewood, for a nonprofit in the basement of the Baptist seminary that was then located across the street from the big Catholic seminary. It was also at the bottom of the hill from the only hospital in town.

So we did the math and figured out that as each of the girls was being born at the top of that hill, I was just next door, at the bottom of that same hill, arguing with Dwight over the galleys of our magazine.

“Huh,” I said.

“Huh,” she agreed.

What does that mean? Well, like most of this post, it doesn’t really mean anything.

Or maybe it does. Maybe it suggests, as Szymborska said in that poem up top, how we’d all be “amazed to hear / that Chance has been toying with [us] / now for years.” Or maybe it’s a reminder of the wisdom of that Iroquois principle of the “Seventh Generation” — the idea that, right now, there are 128 (or more) strangers whose lives don’t seem to matter to you at all but who, unbeknownst to you, are part of your family. Or …

Yeah, OK, no. It probably doesn’t actually mean anything. But still, I think it’s kind of, you know, cool.