Hip Hooray...

...for Doris Day!  America's Last Professional Virgin* is 89 today.  After yesterday's tempestuous blonde, her milder allure seems deceptively serene, no?

She's seen here in a mod moment that makes it hard to believe she started her climb to the top in '39.  It took a decade of band-singing and touring to get into pictures, and then another few years as a known but unremarkable star, mostly in minor period musicals, before she really registered and sailed out of the fifties and through the mid-sixties (a very different decade, after all, then the few years that followed) as the Toppest of the Top.  Her brand of dressy, frothy comedies - sparked with endless innuendo, not about sex, but rather its absence - may seem paleolithic today, but they enchanted audiences in their day, still have their rewards - and allowed her to walk away when decided that she no longer felt like keeping up with the kids.

When you look at what can happen to even the biggest ladies when they try to hang on too long, more and more it seems like it's the ones who give it up early who have the better deal.  Despite an at-times messy private life, Day seems to have few reason for regret and much to be pleased about, were she to look back on her birthday at the long, long road from Cincinnati to Hollywood.  I hope she has a lovely day.

* Oh, wait.  America's LPV until, at random and at various points, Brooke Shields, Miss Diana Spencer (up to the moment she walked back up the aisle, at least), Britney Spears, and Justin Bieber to name a few.  Sometimes I think the Massive Social Changes that supposedly dethroned Our Doris weren't all they were cracked up to be...