Picture This: A Coupla Swell Dames

For no better reason than that things have been a little melancholy lately, let's spend a moment considering this marvelous confection by the brilliant Miguel Covarrubias, part of his long-running "Impossible Interviews" series in the old real Vanity Fair.

The idea of Miss Mae West sitting down with the formidable Queen Marie of Rumania to discuss life, love, and diamonds is both delicious and, in its own demented way, quite sensible. They actually had a lot in common, those girls, not least a gift for self-transformation.

West started out a scrappy and deeply unsuccessful small-time vaudevillian from the wrong side of Brooklyn and ended up - even now, almost thirty years after she left us - an international synonym for sex taken not-too-seriously. Marie, from her precariously Ruritanian position in the 1930s as Queen Mother of the Balkans, must have looked back at her sheltered girlhood as a proper Victorian English princess with something like disbelief.

Together, I think they would have had a ball.