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A Facelift for the Sun-Maid Raisin Girl

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Our own Dan Schorr isn't the only national icon who is still employed, active and animated. This week the Sun Maid growers of California announced that the Sun Maid girl has received a digital makeover and is becoming an animated character in raisin commercials. The Sun Maid girl was an actual young woman named Lorraine Collette who posed for the portrait in 1916. The new digitized Sun Maid maiden still has a red bonnet drawn around her raven hair. But the crates of purple and golden grapes arrayed before her chest are gone now. Instead she lifts a bunch of golden grapes in her left hand and her right hand is not visible. I like to think she's holding a mobile phone. She's also been growing notably more slender over the past 90 years. She now looks like she takes a yoga class in Santa Monica three days a week. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Scott Simon is one of America's most admired writers and broadcasters. He is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and is one of the hosts of NPR's morning news podcast Up First. He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy.