There has been loose talk around the town in recent years that South Dunedin is no longer a retail hub, that something needs to be done to bring it back to the halcyon 1970s.
Rubbish. South Dunedin has never been in better shape.
It is impossible for me to go out there and not return with a bagful of bargains. No? I have just two words to fend off your querulous yelping: Jayne Mansfield.
Jayne Mansfield, for those of you quite long of tooth, was as glamorous a film star as there ever was. Forget Marilyn Monroe; sandpaper her name from your 1960s high-school pencil case.
Jayne was the real deal. My memory of the '60s is hazardously inaccurate, and I may be wrong in remembering a key question in the form 2 Stanford-Binet IQ Test was Marilyn Monroe is to Jayne Mansfield as pretty is to *****, but I do remember the answer was voluptuous.
Every boy got it right. Jayne was more everything Marilyn was not, more hair, more woman, and, sorry Arthur Miller, more husband.
Arthur Miller could twist words around niftily, but Jayne's man was Mickey Hargitay, a former Mr Universe, who carried Jayne around the house in one hand while he built her legendary Pink Palace with the other.
Yes, Mickey was a carpenter as well. He built heart-shaped swimming pools where Arthur Miller couldn't even change a light bulb.
No wonder Marilyn toodled off with Mr President. Jayne never toodled off with anyone. You don't when you have Mr Universe on tap.
A friend lowered her voice to me recently and admitted she once wrote to Enya and Alison Holst. One has to have chutzpah of soaring
Sky Tower height to confess something like that, but I have to admit, when I was 11, I nearly wrote to Jayne Mansfield.
It was only the ominous shadow of Mr Universe reading her mail that held me back. I certainly never wanted to write to Marilyn Monroe.
Brigitte Bardot maybe, but she was a foreigner, she wouldn't understand a word I was saying. My mother wrote to all the film stars; that was where all this writing stuff came from.
I did construct a letter to Jayne in the wan belief that film goddesses secretly yearned for two-foot-high bespectacled 11-year-old boys, but mercifully, I held back. A pity really.
During the 35 years that was Records Records, I thought I had seen all the major actor-singer albums, well, the true clankers I mean - Shatner, Nimroy, Cabot - but I had never come across the Jayne Mansfield album, Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky & Me, until sifting through a stack of records at Zodiac in South Dunedin a few weeks ago.
I had to rub my eyes when I saw it, for like all lifetime vinyl addicts, I frequently hallucinate in used-record shops.
I just assumed Jayne was another lysergically enhanced vinyl flashback, but when I held it up to the light, whanged it with my fist and didn't meet thin air, I knew it was real.
I fought my way past the inexplicably transvestited cover, and asked the nice lady behind the counter if she would give it a spin.
I read the liner notes as I listened. Jayne said she chose these particular examples of classical poetry because they had soothed her during times of stress and given greater meaning to the love and happiness she had known in her life.
She didn't say with Mickey, but I knew that was what she was referring to.
The titles confirmed her commitment was literary and non-titillating - Upon The Nipples Of Julia's Breast and To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time particularly caught the eye.
Jayne emoted every syllable with the care of a Swiss jeweller, and the accompanying music, Für Elise especially, was frightfully well played.
I was impressed. I tell you, there's something like this on every corner in South Dunedin.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
