What’s a Romantic Huckster?
In case you were wondering what’s up with that name and/or what is a huckster.
I really like naming things. From fake bands I’m going to start one day, bakeries I’ll run, and to dogs I’ll own (and pass on the street), nothing is safe from the powers of my naming abilities. So when I was going to start a blog, I actually had zero idea what I was going to name the site.
Fun fact, did you know that the founder of Spanx thought of “spanks” because she knew she wanted a K sound? She had friends in comedy who said K sounds were good on stage, possibly because annunciation. She actually was going to register “Spanks” before changing it to the last minute to “Spanx” when she submitted it online.
Cliff bars were named after the founder’s father Clifford.
Can you tell I’ve been listening to a lot of the How I Built This podcast?
Rocketboom. Cherry Bombe. The Tidalist. Equifax. I kept thinking through content brands that had really amazing names, and I kept drawing a blank— which is usually the case when I’m trying to be productive. Also I lie on the floor.
I did know what my site was going to be about at least: adult life as a woman.
I imagine someone in a room is going, “aaaaaaand?” And is looking at me with impatience and raise eyebrows.
So growing up, I had romcoms, magazines, bloggers, books, songs, and Facebook telling me what life as a twenty-something woman would look like. And that stark, sad, uncomfortable, funny realization that those things were dead wrong was what I wanted to write about. I’d laugh with friends over romcom life: the meet-cutes, the shoes, the unbelievably priced apartment by yourself. And we’d simultaneously bemoan it: the lack of good guys, how hard it was to make friends, struggling to get a career, the uncertainty of it all. I kept going back to how I would romanticize the idea of establishing myself. That romantic life was crap, but we all pretended so hard that it existed.
For instance, I don’t believe that Holly Golightly fell asleep in that tuxedo shirt and looked not the least bit bedraggled or wrinkly. Each hair was in place despite being half up and wearing an eye mask? And don’t get me started on the amount of bagels she ate in front of Tiffany’s while also fitting into those Givenchy dresses.
Now, Huckster isn’t a word you’d normally hear in your day-to-day lexicon, unless you’re living in a 1950’s gangster film. I delightfully fell upon it while listening to Arctic Monkeys’ Temptation Greets You Like Your Naughty Friend. Rapper Dizzee Rascal makes an appearance right at the end where he reels off, “reckless hucksters? No direction.” I paused the track right when I heard that. Hucksters is a tasty word. And like the Spanx lady told me it had a nice K sound. And the song lyric felt right. When I looked it up later a huckster meant a trickster or a peddler of some sort. It was it exactly.
So if you ever listened to a song while looking outside a rainy window to pretend you were a music video, or if you ever tried to dress up for the possibility of a grand gesture at the airport . . . despite not having a significant other who foiled security to chase you to the gate, and even if you weren’t going to Paris to exit a love triangle because you chose yourself, then The Romantic Huckster is for you. Because, inevitably, you just have yourself, those school loans to pay back, and something to laugh at, right? Right.
And if not that, then I guess we could eat bagels in front of jewelry stores for fun. That’s what twenty-something-year-old women do for fun in New York, right? I think I saw it in a movie somewhere . . .
