Paradise In A Pan

If you are relatively new around here, you might not even know that PJP was A THING in the 1990s (just like jelly shoes, choker necklaces, and turtleneck sweaters from Casual Corner).  The original version was owned by Jeanne and her best friend, Peggy.  (Get it?  Peggy Jean's?  Yep.) And honestly, sometimes I am so focused on this PJP V. 2.0 that I don't think much about the original iteration, despite a 10 year tenure and some splashy appearances in Southern Living magazine and Food Network programming.  I never even worked at the first PJP, unless there was some sort of DEFCON 1 crisis that Jeanne couldn't solve any other way.  And then sometimes I think about how I'm about the same age now as Jeanne was when they put PJP into action.  Gulp.

Often, I ask Jeanne to compare some of our current experiences to PJP Original...but that can be tricky because the Internet was a newfangled contraption that required a dial-up connection and there was certainly no social media.  Also, despite our strong similarities, Peg and I have vastly different skills sets, so it is no wonder that PJP looks quite different then as compared to now.  But you know what looks and tastes the same?  The pie, because that is Jeanne's area of expertise.  Whew.

Today one of our best customers stopped by to buy pie AND bring us something he found in a box of photographs in his house.

I completely love this piece of marketing collateral because Jeanne created the PJP logo and she wrote the text on this card (my 12-year-old daughter read the text and said it sounded "mawmaw-esque"...she couldn't be more correct in her observation).  Also, I had almost forgotten about Nowell's grocery stores in Columbia or that you could buy PJP there in the mid-1990s.  But what I love most is that it is the foreshadowing of #WorldPieDomination...when hashtags were still just pound signs, but selling in three local grocery stores had to have felt significant (even if there was no Instagram post to prove it).

That said, tomorrow I'm adding #paradiseinapan to our Instagram posts.