Guest Post: Jinnie Lee’s Grand Slam Cup Collection
Guest Post: Jinnie Lee’s Grand Slam Cup Collection
Started well before the Challengers fever set in!
Hello out there~
After an insane whirlwind of illness, earlier in September, I lost my stepdad. While I’m finding my footing, some of my talented friends and peers are stepping in to put together some Treehouse-esque posts for you all. Big hugs and thank you to this incredible community during my weird time.
This week, we have my pal, and pal to many, the illustrious Jinnie Lee. Jinnie went to college with some of my closest friends and when I finally got to meet her in our early 20s, I was instantly jealous of the extra four years they all got to spend with her. Jinnie has traveled around some similar writing-and-editing avenues as myself and has been a fun friend and peer to chat the old writing slog game over the years. I love Jinnie’s voice and I’m excited to have her here today, to rattle on about cups. What a gift. Jinnie—your serve, my bud.
Had it not been for the lockdown and a panicked urge to get outdoors, I don’t think I would have picked up playing tennis again (which first began with me hitting balls against a wall in McCarren Park, and then playing sets with neighborhood friends who were on the same wavelength). I had grown up taking lessons as a child and then played on my high school varsity team but I never intended to pick up a racquet after I had graduated. But, you know, trying to get through a pandemic led people down curious paths. For me, it was reigniting a former hobby that I was decent at but gave up immediately once I didn’t have to play competitively anymore.
Around the time that I was figuring out how to improve my new and competitive outdoorsy self, I simultaneously began obsessing over how to improve my indoorsy self as well. After all, I was suddenly spending too much time inside my rental apartment, a unit I had moved into when I was 26 years old and never had once thought about truly “nesting” in. Case in point: At the beginning of lockdown in 2020, when I was 34 years old, my entire cup cabinet was still filled with empty salsa and mason jars. I thought to myself, Listen, when all this is over, if you ever want to have people over for a dinner party again, your guests should at least drink out of actual glassware! This is embarrassing! Get to it!
And so I did: My first order of biz was overhauling my cups, a seemingly simple task. But to avoid being a bore and a snore about it, I used this project as an opportunity to showcase my personality as a reemerged tennis chick. Were there any well-designed, tennis-themed drinking glasses out there, I wondered? HA HA HA, you wouldn’t believe just how many tennis-themed vintage glassware and barware there are on the resell market. Over the next few years, I shelled out hundreds of dollars of my unemployment checks on random vintage tennis cups I’d find on eBay, Etsy, and Mercari. It’s been a thrilling, thirsty time for me.
As for my game on-court, the muscle memory, the motions, and the momentum have all come back more swiftly than I imagined. It’s a funny thing to reawaken these familiar moves that have been dormant inside my body for almost two decades, and to play better today as a 39-year-old with a crunchy lower back than when I was as a more spry and nimble 17-year-old. I obviously had no appreciation for what my body was capable of back then! But I do now, especially as an aging millennial barreling towards early middle age. Onto the cups!
This is a collection of promotional glasses made to look like cans of tennis balls from various brands. I bought them individually as I’d see them pop up on sites. What I love about serving these glasses is that guests always know which cup they’d been drinking out of.
This one’s slightly more highball than the others so I use this as a flower vase instead.
Lowballs!
Since the mid ‘80s, a company called Howw Manufacturing made a ton of these promotional acrylic tumblers with built-in coasters that showcased some fun and playful design. I think their “On the rocks” cups are their most popular and recognizable, but search long enough and you’re bound to find a themed Howw cup for any occassion. See: casino; Christmas; Corvettes.
Another set of promotional glasses; these are shaped like tennis balls! I use these for wine.
My everyday drinking glasses — gosh, I really love that Snoopy plays tennis.
The juice glass is from a company called Libbey — search for vintage Libbey glassware and be prepared to be delighted by the late midcentury modern-ness of it all. This particular Libbey cup is signed by J. Scott, who I imagine must have been the artist but I cannot seem to find any info on them.
