Women of Distinction - and an Aesthetic Opportunity

As another blessed week limps to a close, and in the face of bad news from all over, today more than ever I needed a lift...

And blessings to the divine hostess of Parterre, that scamp La Cieca, for bringing the above to my attention.  Three old pros strut their stuff, and it only makes one regret that there wasn't some way for Misses Marilyn Horne, Eileen Farrell, and Carol Burnett to have starred in a big splashy revue. Rarely this side of Miss Alice Faye have I seen a good old-fashioned bonking stick en style Miss Lillian Russell handled with such aplomb - let alone three.

Now, don't you feel better?

Now, speaking of Big Spenders, I'd like to take the opportunity to offer you a chance to, relatively speaking, be one.  I've waxed effusive on several occasions about the work of video artist Ed Cachianes, who's increasingly elaborate and moodily effective video collages plumb the mysteries of fame, aging, and melancholy in a way that I find enormously resonant and visually dazzling.  All of that, though, doesn't come easy, and it requires good equipment and sophisticated software. He has reached a stage at which he needs more and better of both, and this being 2017, he's taken to crowd-sourcing to help.  His Indiegogo page is here, and while he's doing fairly well, I'm sure he'd appreciate your support.

When it comes to things like this, I don't pop my cork, as it were, for just anybody - I really think this is worthwhile.

In the interest of full disclosure (and maybe boasting just a bit to boot), I should note that in the last couple of months Mr. C. and I have become friends, in the virtual sense, on the Facebook; I find him as charming in (digital) person as he is in his art, and I look forward to at some point adding him to the honor roll of Café friends I've turned into actual ones - he's a great deal more respectable than Peenee, if nothing else...