I no longer remember if this was at the Miss America

Pageant, and I’m not even 100% sure it was Bert Parks,

but I do remember that either Bert or someone much

like him decided to show what a regular guy he was by

singing the Elvis anthem “Blue Suede Shoes” on TV. But

because this was American TV in the mid-50s, he had to

clean up the already stupid hyperbolic lyrics (“You can burn my

house, steal my car, drink my liquor from an old fruit jar”) by

replacing the last line with, “Drink my soda from a soda jar”.

 

Who ever heard of a soda jar before that  moment, or since

that moment either? Bert or his lyricist or their censor must

have invented the soda jar in order to make this  Elvis homage

or watered-down Elvis ripoff sound more proper, but even so,

soda jars have been lodged in my brain ever since. [3/26/20]