Earth Angel

I have a new girl-crush, of a most unlikely nature, but I really am entranced.  She's a fixture, you see, of the news in Bangkok, and since I spent so much time during this trip sitting in a stupor in the hotel room that I saw rather a lot of her.  Such, however, are the local lèse-majesté laws that I thought it wiser to write about her only when safely elsewhere.

Secret Love

Here to enliven your Tuesday - a hideously cold and snowy one where we are - is the latest hit from Iran's fabulous goddess-in-exile, the extraordinary Googoosh.

An Auspicious Introduction

Bridget was at first surprised when Lady Fogminster insisted on holding the interview for the position of under-housekeeper in her boudoir.

All Mod Cons

One Tuesday morning, Irene learned that she could refill her Miltown prescription over the telephone.

Meanwhile, in the Dormitory

Oh, that Rose-Mary. There was a reason the headmistress at Miss Crosbie's Academy for Young Ladies never allowed her to spend too much time with the new girls.

Charming

When was the last time you thought about Joan Armatrading?  For me, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a decade or more.  She never really made as big in the U.S. as she did in the UK, but for a while in the '80s, when I was for a long spell living 'mongst the Lesbians, she was a pop presence.

Now I'm glad for whatever random synapse in my addled brain that fired and made me look her up, because I've gotten very fond this last week or so of the song above, "This Charming Life," the title track of her 2010 album.  Who knew?

And how nice to check in with a name from the Good Old Days and find that she's alive and well, making music much as she always did - poppy and personal, buoyant and warm.  In a age of manufactured stars and shrieking melismaniacs, it's nice to see someone so natural, doing what she likes to do.  Enjoy.

Update:  Oh, dear; MrPeenee has alerted us to the sadly geographically crippled nature of the clip above.  Just in case, here's a backup, although it has an annoying promo caption at the bottom.  All very vexing...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion

Truth to tell, this week's SSCE entry isn't so much an explosion as an implosion.  For the second week running, quite by chance, we find ourselves down in the depths of terrible '70s cinema.

It's natural enough, once a star becomes established and can claim a certain proven box-office appeal, for him or her (or his or her management) to want to stretch a little, try something different.  Sometimes it works - Heartburn, for example, while not a huge hit, showed audiences that Meryl Streep was more than a Solemn Accent, setting the stage for Death Becomes Her and Postcards from the Edge later on.  Sometimes it doesn't (here's my nightmare triple feature:  Kay Francis in The White Angel, Joan Crawford in The Gorgeous Hussy, and Ginger Rogers in The Magnificent Doll.  There seems to have been something about period drama that both drew and proved totally beyond some of the Great Ladies).

Well, the picture above is one of the latter.  Somehow, after the success of Nashville and The Late Show (the latter a too-little-seen gem), Lily Tomlin, or Jane Wagner, or both of them, became inexplicably convinced that what Hollywood really needed was another earnest Clayburghesque leading lady, and that Lily was just the dame to take on that yoke.  The lamentable result was 1978's Moment by Moment, a Rather Different May-December drama that, if nothing else, proved definitively that if both leads in a romance are going to have Kinsey scores above 3, they both better be the same gender.

Actually, had Wagner-Tomlin had the courage of their convictions and just gone ahead and cast, say, Margaux Hemingway (or maybe even baby sister Mariel) in place of John Travolta, the picture could have been a real trailblazer.  The hot-tub scene, particularly, looks more or less exactly what late-seventies big-budget lesbian porn could have looked like (slap a moustache on Lily and it's a dead ringer for a Falcon loop).  As it is, despite sporting a superb and apparently all-Qiana late-'70s wardrobe, Lily looks about as much at ease as - well, as Ginger Rogers in Dolley Madison drag.  As for Travolta, if there's one thing he can play well, it's vacant, so despite a level of discomfort visible from space, he doesn't come off so badly.

Unless you're willing to commit piracy, this may be as close to seeing MbyM as you get (although there is, if you're feeling truly masochistic, a 10-minute version of this shorter tribute available on YouTube, courtesy of user momentbymoment78, no less.  That doughty soul also authored this digest of what he/she boldly claims is "my all-time favorite film").  The movie has never been released for the home market, although bootlegs do circulate.  There is, I suppose, a distant possibility that it's actually a misunderstood masterpiece, someday to resurface to universal acclaim.  I'll believe that about that same time I believe in the possibility of a watchable Cybil Shepherd musical.

Not a Liberace Medley...

According to a new survey, a randomly queried set of Britons have identifed as the Saddest Song Ever REM's dirgelike "Everybody Hurts." I'm not convinced. The others named are really no better, taking in songs from the mawkish ("Candle in the Wind," for God's sake) to the bombastic ("My Way" - !) to the simply mystifying (are there really people who burst into tears when hearing "Seasons in the Sun"?). A few genuinely are misery-inducing ("Eleanor Rigby," for one, not to mention "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," which can still get me when the mood is just right), but on the whole, I think it's at best a highly incomplete sampling.

For example, not a single song by Janis Ian appears on the list, and that seems to me an egregious oversight. Making up for that, here we have a live rendition of her "Tea and Sympathy" (from an Israeli TV show a few decades ago, a number likely too lugubrious, I fear, for the definitely un-depressing Redundant Variety Hour...). Listening, keep in mind that this is probably not even one of Janis's top-ten tearfests - this is the woman, after all, who came up with "At Seventeen," "In the Winter," and "Breaking Silence," just to grab three titles from her woebegone catalogue.

Long ago and far away, I worked a Janis Ian show, and even then it was a surprise that she was actually a funny, feisty, and fairly completely non-lachrymose personage. More recent videos show that, even though she remains a master of sorrow (not to mention having become rather startlingly lesbo-matronly), this is still the case, which is somehow very nice to know - I would have to think that five decades of making people cry would get to you, somehow.

And to think we haven't even started on the hardcore stuff - "Strange Fruit," anybody? "Anyone who had a Heart"? And let's not even bring up "Puff the Magic Dragon"...

Birthday Girl: Take a Letter, Darling

Hearty best wishes to the eternal secretary, Miss Jane Hathaway, or rather to her creator, Nancy Kulp, born this very day in 1921.

A well-bred Pennsylvania girl, Kulp made a career out of exagerrating, sometimes only slightly, her real-life persona as a cultured, brainy, rather gawky lady of the type frequently if paradoxically assumed to be simultaneously a daughter of Bilitis and a man-hungry spinster.

In real life she may well have been neither. Her only tie to Lesbos, it seems, arises from a supposed late in life interview with one Boze Hadleigh, a writer who claims to have carried out such conversations with a jaw-dropping array of notables, all - if he is to be believed - without ever making tapes or even taking much in the way of notes.

Whatever the case in her private life, Kulp achieved her little slice of immortality by acting as the perfect straight woman (in the comic-performance sense, of course) to the lunacy that unfolded around her, a visual joke next to the voluptuous appeal of Donna Douglas, the dogmatically logical victim of the Appalachian world view of Irene Ryan, and the stand-in for languishing youngsters of all sexes across the country in her helpless attraction to the carnal charms of Mr. Max Baer.

I adore, by the bye, stills like this one of character ladies. We are generally so conditioned to think of them as only the incarnations of the roles they play that it can be pleasantly jolting to see them, as it were, in their civvies, looking perfectly normal and indeed rather attractive. I am sure that whomever she took on as special friend would have been very happy to wake up next to her.

In the Clinch

I don't know about you, but I had no idea that Ginger Rogers and Doris Day felt so strongly about one another.

Design for Living

This can only be considered, from what one gathers from the illustration, a Hollywood Pattern in that it might in fact have been designed with Dorothy Arzner in mind.

Actually, I find it rather touching, somehow, that at least some lesbians of the 1930s stayed home and tailored their own mannish clothing.

Glamour, Girls

Amazingly, Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley (forever to have a silent "poor thing" inserted after her almost-famous name) are able to keep a straight face as they are subjected to the very best in '90s boudoir photography.

Birthday Girl: Funny Woman

Hilarious Wanda Sykes is forty-something today, which is depressing to me only because it reminds me how many fabulous famous people these days are anything from one to thirty years younger than I am (she's the former, by the bye). She's amazing, whether doing the heavy lifting of making Julia Dreyfus look good on New Christine or free-associating (in a razor-sharp kind of way) in her own act.

Genêt

Or, to her friends - and they were legion - Janet Flanner. Along with the Murphys, Cole Porter, Gertrude and Alice, et al, she was expat Paris between the wars, and brought the news back in her wonderful writing for The New Yorker. She had a kind of slightly austere lesbian chic; she was debonair.

I'm trying to imagine the occasion that would call for pajamas, top hat, and a pair of masks; it must have been quite a night.

A Word From Our Sponsor

You're soaking in it!

Is it just me, or do Madge and her customer seem a tad too chummy, if you know what I mean? What went on at the Salon after hours?

Birthday Women: The Female Continuum

Today marks the birthday of two women, each of whom quite happily and successfully staked out a position on the further reaches of female self-expression.

First, we have Saint Gertrude:

Seen here, as she should be, with her inevitable companions Alice B. Toklas (possessor of one history's great names and moustaches) and the poodle, whom if memory serves was usually called Basket.

She was a Genius, full stop, and someone whose baffling, brilliant, and in its own way quite entirely lucid prose changed how English speakers think about our language. She and Alice were in their way style pioneers as well; their sometimes dowdy-looking lesboduds were often by Poiret, Schiaparelli, and other friends.

From the Sublime to the...well, something else: it's also Morgan Fairchild's birthday. She is somewhat younger than Miss Stein.

Seen here in full glam, albeit without her trademark hair, we can see that she actually has rather marvelous bone structure. And enormous hands.

Only one of the two has, to date at least, been immortalized in bronze and enthroned behind the New York Public Library in Manhattan's Bryant Park.

On the other hand, only one gets to go to premieres and hang out with ZZ Top, so I suppose things balance out in the end.

You know what I'd pay good money to see? Morgan Fairchild starring in a revival of Pat Carroll's smash one-woman show Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.

Office Drama, Johnson-Era Division

"Someday," thought Vicki, "I'm going to be a modern Executive Secretary just like Roz!"

"Dammit," thought Roz, "If that baby dyke doesn't stop giving me the stinkeye, it's gonna take me 'til Thursday to finish that Bastard McCrae's dictation. I swear if she doesn't back off, when I finish with the lips I'm gonna throw that mug at her."

Unanswered Questions

"No," thought Rosalie as she posed with the girls, "best not to ask Harriet why she and her new friend Rae have taken to wearing dungarees. Might just stir up a world of troubles. But goodness, they do look pleased with themselves..."

Crime is Beauty...

...Especially when it's been retouched.

The work that's been done here on Cheryl Crane (Lana Turner's daughter, of course; seen waiting at the police station after that unfortunate incident with Mr. Stompanato and the steak knife) gives a standard jailhouse photo a kind of still, timeless, accidental beauty.

Crane survived her stormy childhood (which included yet more unpleasantness stemming from Lana's legendarily lousy taste in men) and grew up to become a happy dyke, a successful real-estate agent and author, and good to her - definitely rather trying - mother to boot.

Sisters a Go-Go

Legend has it that the Vatican took one look at these leggy va-va-va-vestals and immediately decreed that, henceforth, all sisters religious should stick to pale-blue polyester pantsuits and shag haircuts.

Oh, and big, big crosses, so that you can tell that they're not kindergarten teachers or lesbians.

Or at least, not just kindergarten teachers and lesbians.