Another example of finding beauty in thrift?

For my art gallery of thrift -- where form intersects with function at little or no cost -- I nominate a bottle of liquid soap that, in the few minutes before company arrived one evening, underwent an amazing ugly duckling transformation.

I should note that I’m not one to indulge in fancy soap dispensers. A three-year-old plastic Soft Soap container performs that function in our main downstairs bathroom. Until recently, I’d been refilling it from a giant Sam’s Club container of soap the color of orange medicine. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job.

And then one day, just before company arrived, we discovered the giant refill bottle had run dry. Under deadline pressure, I cleaned the soap scum off the geriatric dispenser and ran to the kitchen for some dish soap. It was bright green -- which turned out to be just the right color to bring the freshly scrubbed dispenser’s floral pattern into sharp focus. It looked vibrant and new and even -- dare I say it? -- pretty. Ready to take on all the world’s germs.

Is it silly to admit finding beauty in a soap dispenser? I should note that I wouldn’t put the dispenser itself on display in this imaginary museum, any more than I would display the actual leaf that held the paint (see "Is There Beauty in Thrift," posted Dec. 4), unless it was in a purely documentary sense. The beauty present in these objects existed for only one moment in time. It wasn’t their physical features that made them beautiful so much as the interplay of interior and exterior forces acting upon them.

Part of what made the leaf beautiful, at least to me, was the relief it provided -- a north star revealing an escape route from misery. It did, I suppose, have intrinsic natural beauty, but no more so than any other oak leaf, especially since it fell from the tree while still green. An anonymous leaf, in the right place at the right time to shoulder a lowly yet crucial task.

And the soap dispenser? No disrespect to the artist who designed its floral pattern, but the most a soap dispenser can hope for is “cute,” and every soap dispenser is cute in pretty much the same way.

But in those crucial moments before company arrived, the soap dispenser achieved something more. Cuteness lost, then found, is more potent than the original cuteness, don’t you think? There’s an element of wonder and surprise and gratitude that was missing the first time around -- tinged with the knowledge that before long, in even the thriftiest household, the recycling bin beckons.

That wouldn‘t be enough to make it past the museum‘s review committee, though, if it hadn’t fulfilled all three criteria: form, function, free. Because it achieved this triple play with such grace under pressure, the plastic soap dispenser makes the cut.