© 2013 - Julie Sherman


Goodbye to the Monopoly Iron
…and to So Many Others

I hope they won’t pick the ship, I thought, when reading of Hasbro's plans to retire a playing piece from the game of Monopoly and replace it with a new one.  I'm not sure I could play without the ship. Still, if online voters had jettisoned the ship, the millions of existing Monopoly games with ship intact would last many more years.  My monopoly set is a little like a cookie sheet – I simply don't replace it.  Anyway, lovers of a discontinued token could always bequeath it to someone (especially if, like many people these days, one will have nothing else to leave).

In any event my low-slung little vessel was spared and allowed to continue plying the cardboard waters of the Monopoly board.  What interests me here is the piece that got the axe – the little iron.  To be fair, little is the operative word for the Monopoly iron.  Routinely passed over whenever Monopoly fans rummaged in the baggie for their playing pieces of choice, it probably won’t be missed.

What should be missed are real irons, although I’m gratified that they haven’t entirely gone the way of the Miss Rheingold contest.  Just the other day I saw one on a client’s kitchen counter.  It seems that she, a busy professional, apparently has not found permanent press to be a solution to all sartorial problems.  One clue to the true greatness of the iron may be the many times women have said “Oh, how I hate ironing!”  Why in all these years have I never heard, “oh, how I hate scrubbing the bathtub,” or “I hate having to touch that rotten produce I left in the hydrator last fall.”  Surely those tasks are more repugnant than applying a comfortingly hot iron to fabric and seeing wrinkles miraculously disappear.  The alleged hatred for ironing is, I think, an artifact of obligatory feminism.  Unlike a rag and scouring powder, an iron created beauty.  Helped along by a little spray starch, it made a plain cotton shirt look like fine lawn.  A domestic appliance that created, of all things, beauty, the iron’s contribution to home-based refinement was singled out for abuse. 

However, we all have our own personal histories, and doubtless the formative experiences of many women never gave them any special opportunity to bond with an iron.  Lingering incandescently in my own mind is a memory of ironing as a kid and having my ironing skill praised.  My aunt was clever at assigning chores that our individual tastes enabled us to enjoy or, at least, not mind.  She noticed that I was in my element balanced on a stool as the iron and I swung and swayed in accompaniment to Elvis Presley on the radio.  Not too much time would elapse before I had emptied the basket of tumbled shirts and trousers and proudly transformed them into handsome garments hanging from a basement pipe.  Such a girl was never going to grow up declaring abhorrence for ironing.  In subsequent years I never got tired of the prettiness conferred by pressing, perhaps especially when I had no steam iron and had to use one of those little bottles with holes in the top for “sprinkling.” 

The Monopoly iron almost survived, finishing up in a near-tie with the wheelbarrow and the shoe.  Interestingly, the thimble didn’t get as close to the chopping block, but perhaps that’s not such a mystery.  For one thing, the wheelbarrow and shoe, like the iron, are too utilitarian for our culture, the defining characteristic of which is obsession with whatever is completely unnecessary and, if possible, puerile.  Secondly, there is undoubtedly a very high correlation between Facebook users and people who haven’t the foggiest notion what a thimble is -- or was.  Not knowing anything about it, they couldn’t identify it as uncool or otherwise worthy of extinction.  They simply skipped over it as their eyes fell upon objects they associated with menial work and plain old usefulness.  Still, the young always appreciate more than the old give them credit for, and the mere fact that the poll received significant participation means that people of all ages still cherish a game that was invented in 1935.

The shiny new token replacing the humble Monopoly iron is a cat -- a standing, rather strident-looking little creature unlike the lovably dozing, kitty-by-the-hearth pet one might have expected.  About cats something should be said.  There is no animal on the face of the earth whose ubiquity exists in such astoundingly inverse proportion to its beauty.  Cats are gorgeous.  If they were rare, they would be beyond price.  This fascinating fact – one that few people seem to care about – seems reason enough to give Monopoly players a chance to prowl around the board in the temporary persona of fantastic feline.

Other mini-figurines were in the running for elevation to semi-immortality as Monopoly game pieces, including a diamond ring -- perfect for the homage to capitalism that Monopoly unashamedly is, but too small.  If I had played Monopoly more seriously over the years I might have picked up some tips for profitably wheeling and dealing in the real world.  As it is, I can settle for looking better than many people do thanks to my willingness to continue wielding an iron.  Being at least marginally a member of my own culture,  I do realize that I am in constant danger of contracting a need to spend 18 hours a day flicking my finger up and down the screen of a smartphone, in which case I would have to give up ironing.  It wouldn’t be all bad.  In wrinkled raiment from head to toe, I might achieve my long-thwarted dream of being popular.

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