Well, another holiday is approaching, which means one thing: Marissa Mayer is totally changing the decorations in her front yard and, most visibly, is repurposing the funeral home she owns (a block away from her house, closer to mine) as well. If you weren’t accustomed to it, you’d be as confused as my dogs were this morning.
As I’ve mentioned before, I think it’s kind of cool that a crazy-rich woman ($600 million) feels some kind of obligation to the hoi polloi and trots out expensive decorations for Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I mean, the twenty-thousand bucks she tosses for each of these little fetes is less than rounding error for her, but I’m sure the neighborhood kids appreciate it.
But, still, it’s………………kind of weird. I mean, you’ve got this famous woman worth over half a billion bucks who bought the only funeral home in town, just for the hell of it, and between her and the funeral home is what is basically Palo Alto’s low-cost housing (subsidized rent).
In the photo below, you can see these enormous Christmas balls she is putting on display, with the low-rent housing in the background. You can get a sense of the size of these goddamned things by looking at the nearby cars.
Anyway, my hunch is that her heart is in the right place. Unless, all this time, she’s just using this as some kind of weird public art tax write-off. Who knows. It’s still a nice gesture. And I like her balls.
