Flower power fuels repurposed 70’s majorette

By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher

Opening with a halftime show featuring the twirling and dancing majorette line leading the MP Going Gold 1970’s Marching Band, the Kelly Redfearn Highlight reel cuts to a post-graduate Highland Park bankerette montage before coming home to serve time on the home décor manufacturing floor in Jim Shanahan’s old factory on Industrial Boulevard, before making a roller coaster plunge racing through Hollywood, then coming in for a landing in the coveted role of East Texas Journal Cover Girl, autumn, 2023, marking the 75th anniversary of Mills Flowers, which she’s owned for the past dozen years.
Cut to, Pilan Lewis in the shop.

Pilan met Kelly in the usual way, scrolling by obits while studying floral casket sprays posted on line. At the working class level of Pilan’s love of floral arrangement, funerals are where the money’s at.
At this point, Pilan’s been keeping the bills paid working the graveyard shift on the killing floor at the poultry plant for three years. Her greatest hope’s the on-line action she’s generated with Mood Makers, the artificial floral design company she’s created in moonlighting hours. Like walking into a waking dream, hope erupted when her work caught the eye of White Bayou Wreath Supply, which called and booked her to lead a demonstration at a vendor’s show.

Intersecting Kelly and Mills Flowers on line, Pilan pulled up on impulse and posted a line, “I’d love to work for you,” which is how it happened that she switched mainstream careers from poultry processing to flower arranging.
Brenda Bowman was in the middle of a personal episode of suspected cardiac arrest when the phone rang.
“Hello,” she managed pleasantly, suppressing anguish in favor of social convention, because that’s how she is. It was Kelly calling with a personal pitch, telling her how well she’d fit into the Mills operation.
(“She knows everybody in town,” Kelly said, which is a major small-town plus in the flower game.)
“I’ll think about it,” said Brenda, whose favorite grandchild at the moment had already called the ambulance. “They’re putting me on the gurney right now.”
“What?” asked Kelly, closing the first act of a job offer that took two years to bring to fruition.
Lisa Strickland’s the work room HIPPIE CHICK, the working foreman sunbeam balance to high command’s penchant for focus on scheduling, cash flow, inventory, and so on. Not to belabor the point, but to make it clear, responsibilities of high command can create illusions of evil.

“Sometimes I feel like the meanest person in the world,” said Kelly, but somebody’s got to walk potential Mills recruits into the part where the key line is a direct order to drink from “the bucket.”
“What?” Kelly thought she hadn’t heard correctly 12 years ago when EVON was grooming her as the potential incoming steward of Mills Flowers, which opened in Mt. Pleasant in 1948.*

“I said take a drink out of the bucket,” said Evon, referencing one of the five gallon buckets they were washing, which are used for storing fresh flowers in the shop’s walk-in refrigerator. The point of the exercise is the critical nature of cleanliness – “Flowers,” Kelly learned in a way that left a permanent imprint, “are more delicate than your body.” And every Friday, the buckets have to be washed clean enough to drink from.

(* As of press time, management was still hoping to get a Mills family picture of the shop at the original location to post on the business website Pilan now manages. For a documentary touch, this would be a good spot to work in scene of Pilan being jetted away to another all-expenses paid plus stipend wreath making demonstration during “Believe,” a three day Christmas craft show.)
Lisa Strickland’s turkey acts like he knows he’s loved.
“He’ll be still while she puts on his bandana,” said Kelly, Lisa’s soul-mate balance in the business world. In spite of the approach of Thanksgiving, Lisa’s turkey lives without fear. Lisa’s a vegetarian from Daingerfield, where she first worked in a floral shop.
There’s more to this story, but I’m outa room. By Thanksgiving we’ll finish the interview and get details of the Hollywood adventure in which Kelly reports that everybody on the set was laughing at her Texas drawl.