A Pain in the Ice

Two formidable ladies join forces, and the result is... curious.

A Shady Dame Sings a Song

Because I am spending this weekend doing everything possible to avoid thinking about politics in any way, shape or form, here's a rich little gem from Peggy Lee, going Latin with a vengeance.

Birthday Girl: Hot for Teacher

Many happy returns to the peerless Miss Peggy Lee, who joined us - in the almost comically unlikely form of Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota - on this day in 1920.  I don't know about you, but I never had a math teacher quite like this...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Drag Rant

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

A few snippets of Camp at its most classic for this lovely August Saturday...

Lady Sings the [Christmas] Blues

I had long assumed that when it came to wrenchingly depressing holiday moments, nothing else was a patch on Judy singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in Meet Me in St. Louis.  As you can see, I was wrong. 

I can't help but think that this was not exactly what the producers of Julie Andrews's 1973 Christmas special had in mind when they settled on Miss Peggy Lee as a guest star, and I can only imagine what a befuddled national-television audience made of it.  If you only listen to the audio, it's a lovely thing; watch it, though, and it becomes a kind of psychodrama that's almost unsettling in its intensity.  Enjoy, if that's quite the right word (it's not).  We'll have to poke around for something cheerier for our next holiday music update...

Birthday Girl: Miss Peggy Lee (and Friend)

North Dakota's finest export, Miss Norma Egstrom, might have been 92 today.  Peggy Lee didn't live quite that long, but while she was around, she ruled.  We see her here in 1969, delivering a definitive take of her most curious hit, "Is That All There Is?"  A charting number in a year in which the competition was deathless numbers of the ilk of  Lulu's "Boom Bang a Lang" or, at the other extreme, David Bowie exploring the universe in "Space Oddity," the song - unsettling, unsparing, brittle - would seem to be a long shot in the popularity stakes.

But it works, in spades.  Lee, at this point in her long career, is a daunting presence, totally in control even as she she seems on the edge of shattering.  It was a quality she retained to the end, when she was little more than a ruin tricked out in wig and caftan, carried on stage and deposited into the spotlight in ever smaller and more unforgiving rooms.  I last saw her a year or two before her curtain finally fell, but she still drove home every stage of this song's journey - fire, circus, love, the story of a life, really - and still made you want to break out the booze and have that ball...

I like that she shares her day with a survivor of a very different kind, an even more imposing self-creation: the Queen-Empress, dowager extraordinaire, superb creature who started out as a sort of semi-royal poor relation of Queen Victoria, but who ended up as the grandmother of the current occupant of Victoria's throne - Queen Mary.  I have long had a soft spot for that unapproachable grande dame, and I like to think that, while she  might not have approved quite entirely of "Fever" or "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" (the latter of which, by the bye, Peg not only sang, but wrote - she was a good songwriter on top of everything else), she might have felt a pang of recognition, had she had the chance to hear "Is That All There Is?"  She had, heaven knows, seen her share of fires and circuses.

Birthday Girl II: Peg and Co.

It's a day of birthday richness; in addition to the magnificent creature that was Queen Mary, today marks the birth of one of the Café's favorite thrushes, the fabulous Miss Peggy Lee. Apparently, as evidenced by these clips from Pete Kelly's Blues, the two ladies shared a fondness for pearls.

It must be admitted, though, that the birthday roll today blends the sublime with the sublimely annoying: also sharing this natal day are Lenny Kravitz, Helena Bonham Carter (I bet even her birthday cake is Edwardian), Al Jolson, and Bobcat Goldthwait. It takes the combined might of fellow celebrators Pam Grier, John Wayne, Norma Talmadge, and Jay Silverheels to offset all that horror...

Midler a la Lee

The Divine Miss M. gives us a little acting lesson, courtesy of Leiber, Stoller, and Norma Deloris Egstrom. I don't generally give much shrift to covers of such iconic material, but for Bette I'll almost always make an exception.

She uses my favorite part of her voice - I think of it as her 40s radio sound - a lot here, along with her Gallant Indomitable Survivor mode. What can I say? For me, it works...