No. 906 – La Dolly Vita

Performer: Smashing Pumpkins

Songwriter: Billy Corgan

Original Release: Tristessa single

Year: 1990

Definitive Version: None

One of the last things I got for my apartment in German Village was a dining set. I don’t know why that took so long, other than I was looking for “just the right thing,” and I couldn’t seem to find it.

I didn’t really have a pressing need for a dining table and chairs, because I didn’t eat many dinners at home. I was working the evening shift at The Dispatch, and invariably on my nights off, I’d have dinner elsewhere most of the time. Of course, I couldn’t host any poker parties till I had a table and chairs.

I finally found what I wanted at a funky department store called The Andersons General Store. It was a green country-style table that had a faux mahogany top and a drawer at one end and came with four chairs that had high, hoopy backs. I must have gone to six or seven furniture stores first with no success. I’m also pretty sure that I didn’t go The Andersons to look for a dining set.

Finding the set was great, but what was better was finding The Andersons. I called it a funky department store, and there’s a reason for that. It has clothes and tools and housewares and all that, but it’s more home improvement than home decor. It was easier to find piping for your bathroom there than, say, towels. I was taken by the fact that the brand of denim it carried was Dickie’s, which was a third-tier brand for sure.

But it also has a grocery store, which was the first time I encountered such a thing. (This was way ahead of Target, K mart and Wal-mart superstores.) I didn’t do much grocery shopping there at the time, because, again, it carried odd things and not staples.

However, in time, it became a must trip to hit either of the two Andersons, which are located at opposite polar tips northwest and southeast in Columbus, because The Andersons has the best wine selection of any chain store in the city. In the fall and winter of 1994-95 when I was listening to Pisces and this song extensively, that didn’t mean anything to me.

It does now, and when I went back to Columbus last winter to help my mom, I made it a point to hit The Andersons for the first time since I moved to Chicago six years ago to search for a few hard-to-find labels on my wishlist, which I found. I was even more glad to find that The Andersons is still the same.