Birthday Roll Call: Goddesses and More

It's a banner day on the birthday front, starting with the remarkable fact that sharing the day are ultrastars Dalida (shown here effortlessly demonstrating her fabulousness) and the still much-missed Eartha Kitt.

Those two alone would be more than enough to brighten up your average January Sunday, but there is, it turns out, so much more: demurely foul-mouthed TV survivor Betty White, iron-armed White House tenant Michelle Obama, redheaded Red Shoes wearer Moira Shearer, Lambchop-wielder Shari Lewis, second-tier Blonde Bombshell Sheree North, and Gallic yé-yé songbird Françoise Hardy, for example. That's not to mention, on the distaff side, arch novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie and his camp coeval, Ronald Firbank, pugilistic poetaster Muhammed Ali, the stentorian James Earl Jones, and hairburner extraordinaire Vidal Sassoon.

Altogether, that's enough natal glamour to offset the presence of the last and least Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, Larry Fortensky, and talk-show dullard Maury Povich. It seems presumputous of them to have chosen Dalida's day, but such is her magnaminity that I'm sure she would have risen about it all. And I can't help thinking that she and Eartha are having a hoot, possibly in tandem with Mr. Firbank...