Putting on the Ritz, I mean, the Marriott…

At the risk of sounding Andy-Rooney-ish, it is, I think, perplexing that Marriott, where I stayed a week and more back, while on business in Kansas City, should have found some reason to have outfitted my room with a catalog pitching its “collection.”

Certainly, that catalog begs questions on many levels: Is it, for example, worth the proverbial paper it was printed on and the consequent damage to the environment, both on the front end and the back? Who at Marriott ever dreamed that those visiting its hotels would have a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rush home to redecorate their homes á la Marriott? And if any Marriott visitor ever did succumb to such urge or desire, why?

Nonetheless, if, by some quirk, or, more correctly, some outright and utter suspension of all reason, I ever wanted to sleep at home on the same bed I had once slept on in Kansas City, that very bed — I’m not kidding — is only a catalog-click away. I could even order the “complete bed package,” replete with one of four “signature bed dressings,” one of them dubbed, after Marriott’s leader, the JW (we are, after all, talking “signature” bed dressings). But why stop there, when I could easily add a duvet, pillow and bed linens, each reproducing, down to the very last stitch, the furnishings that made my Marriott room my so-very-home away from home.

But there’s more, as they say in the ad trade…

My telephone or online order could also include a shower curtain to match the one in my Kansas City Marriott bathroom, not to mention towels, oh, excuse me, “towel therapy,” the better to enhance the aromatherapy products and the shampoo and conditioner, which, in the catalog’s words (who could make this up?), have “developed a cult following.” (Me? I’m holding out for the chocolates-on-pillows cult, or maybe the cult of free cable-TV previews, or even the cult of ice-down-the-corridor.)

But if, like me, you’re still not convinced, still thinking that maybe this Marriott thing is not the thing for you, then go ahead…go ahead and imagine yourself lounging in your Marriott robe, sipping tea from your Marriott tea cup, the room’s ambience enhanced by a home diffuser wafting notes of lemon verbena, thyme and lavender. And whatever you’re now thinking, if it’s not enough to make you want to plunge right now into your Marriott-inspired bed décor for what the good folks at Marriott promise will be “a transcendent sleep experience,” well, then, maybe, just maybe, you’re not Marriott material.

As a former advertising copywriter, I know what it is like to have to write such drivel and to feign accountability, if not outright pride, when submitting copy to the client. And, yet, here I am a career later, confronting in that catalog a vision of my former self and realizing, again, the Newtonian/Pavlovian knee-jerk action and reaction that animates our economy: some of us sell; most of us buy. And that is, still is, all these years after I abandoned that career for another, what makes this world of ours go ‘round, maybe even more so, given Marriott’s assumption that I, or anyone, for that matter, could ever want what Marriott passes for wares.