York Corner
Do you know that a Tupperware party is held somewhere in the world once every three seconds?
Oh, the information that's available at flea markets!
Last Saturday at about noon, we swung into the multi-dealer flea market that's held every Saturday during the summer in the St. Aspinquid Masonic Lodge parking lot on Long Sands Road, and there we met, among other people, Vicki Cormiea, who sells Tupperware there.
She's been selling Tupperware generally, she told us, since 1993, and at this particular flea market for 11 years - though, she said, the flea market isn't the best place for sales for her. Those Tupperware parties are, and she tries to stage three of them a week, most of them within an hour's drive from Kittery, where she lives, but some as distant as two hours away.
The function of the flea market for her, she said, is to "get the word out that I'm here" - though she does have on hand there for sale items no longer available in Tupperware's current catalog. And customers, of course, can order items that are in the catalog.
Vicki told us more, both about herself and about Tupperware, and we'll get back to it all, but we want to report, first, on some background about this flea market that we picked up when we bumped into Doug Blaisdell, who helps run the place.
It was begun by lodge member Bill Kurtz in 1992, Doug said, and has proved a chief moneymaker for the lodge ever since.
"It keeps the heat on so we don't freeze," he quipped.
Other moneymakers there: public dinners held regularly all winter and beyond - and reporting that to us gave Doug reason to hand us a flyer promoting the very latest, a spaghetti feed coming up from 5 to 7 p.m. this Saturday, June 3, featuring homemade meat, sausage, and marinara sauce over spaghetti/ziti noodles, homemade garlic bread, homemade desserts and salad with what are billed as "a host of Italian ingredients."
The price for all this: $6 for adults and $4 for kids.
Doug identified "Steve T." as the lodge's spaghetti-dinner cook. He's shy, Doug said, about being fully identified, a man with "a good Italian cook" for a mother, with his own recipe for garlic butter that makes his garlic bread really good.
"Dennis will tell you it's awful good," Doug said, gesturing to York contractor Dennis Marquis, who was standing nearby, and the two men engaged in a little good-natured ribbing about relative belly size as Doug patted his and said, "I'm on maintenance," leaving it ambiguous as to whether that meant holding at the status quo or cutting back.
Back on the subject of the flea market, Doug reported that the lodge makes available a total of 49 spaces outside each Saturday, starting on the first Saturday in May and ending with the last in September, charging $12 and providing one table with each space.
Some 15 more spaces with tables are also available inside the lodge at $18 each. Breakfast and lunch are also available inside, cooked by Steve Zimmerman and Julia Ramsdell.
At this time of year, space-rentals average 22 in number, Doug said, reporting that last week 20 spaces were taken, but this week only 16, a result, he guessed, of weather that looked iffy.
"Rain is a killer," he said, "and cold days are a killer."
In any case, he added, he doesn't expect a full house until schools begin to let out. Then, he said, in July and for the first couple of weeks in August, the place will be "packed."
Some renters, however, reserve spaces no matter what, and they come no matter what, he said - and Vicki Cormiea is one of them.
When we asked Vicki what else was new in the Tupperware world, she told us about "A Taste of Tupperware," parties in which foods cooked in Tupperware goods are made and served, such as three-minute microwave fudge.
When we asked about the dangers of cooking with plastics in a microwave, she reported that Tupperware microwavable goods are made of Lexan, a tough compound used in bullet-proof vests and jetliner glass, rather than from commoner polyvinyl chlorides, and are therefore promoted as safe - and she showed us a deep maroon container which can be taken from a freezer and placed immediately in a microwave. It comes equipped with a hinged vent in its top allowing it to be open or closed.
Tupperware, Vicki also said, has an exclusive line of goods with its own small catalog that fundraisers can use to earn 40 percent for charities of their choice.
"And we're always hiring, too," Vicki said. For $79.99, she explained, entrepreneurs can buy a kit introducing them to the Tupperware business.
As for Vicki herself, we learned that she'd been born and brought up in Kittery, lived in Saco for a time, then returned in 1993.
And we were amazed to learn that she also manages to find time to drive the York Schools Bus 18, making two runs in the morning - from 6:50 to 7:30 a.m. for middle-schoolers and high-schoolers and from 7:50 to 8:30 a.m. for kindergarteners through fourth-graders - reversing those trips from 2 to 3 p.m. and from 3 to 4 p.m., and making another run for kindergarteners at mid-day, from 11:15 to noon.
One other story Vick told us intrigued us perhaps more than the Tupperware lore. It concerned her name.
Four generations ago, she said, it had been Cormier. But when her husband's grandfather, one Joseph Cormier, went to enlist in the military, he discovered the name written on his birth certificate read Cormiea.
He was told he'd have to live with that spelling or pay 50 cents to get it changed.
Joseph Cormier reasoned that he hadn't been the one to make the mistake so he wasn't going to be the one to pay to get it fixed - especially at a time when 50 cents counted for more than it does now.
And so he, and all his descendents after him, became Cormeias.
Incredibly, MaryLou Ward, who regularly rents the lodge flea-market space next to Vicki, had a story about her husband's middle name that precisely paralleled that one.
We'll tell that story and more here next week.
