Ladies of a Certain Age

One of the goodies that appeared during My Dear Sister's recent whirlwind visit was a disc of family photos that she's had scanned.  The person who did the scanning did his or her level best to read the backs of those photos that were inscribed, which is helpful, but sadly this formidable lady is described only as "Auntie Harriet."*  Just think; here she's very likely just about the same age as Jane Fonda.  Getting old isn't what it used to be, although in Auntie Harriet's defense, she's less shy about showing her hands than Madonna.

Meltdown

On a fine March day 35 years ago, there I was sitting in Concert Choir, right where I liked to be, just behind and slightly to the left of Scott Edelman, who had a truly epic backside and was my guide - what with me being, to be kind, what cruel judges on television singing contests call "pitchy" - toward hitting any note above middle-C.

Beauty and the Beast

Seconds before she planned to spring at and devour rising starlet Jane Fonda, Louella Parsons finds her attention distracted, saving us from the prospect of a world without Barbarella.

Pre-Consciousness Pinup

I'm always struck, when looking at her earliest work, that Jane Fonda ever emerged as an activist/feminist/entrepreneur and, most recently, nascent grande dame.

For at least the first five or six years of her career, she gave every sign of being a sleepwalker, as vapid and absent as any fifties starlet more interested in who was taking her to El Morocco that night than in fleeing convincingly from a man in a zipper suit.

She was lovely, all right, but weirdly blank. It's a quality that persisted as late as 1968 (and one of the things that prevented Barbarella from achieving true immortality - if she'd been half as knowing as her costumes, it would have gone entirely over the top - as it is, one never knows just how much she is or is not in on the joke), but that vanished, more or less forever, by 1969 and Klute.

While perhaps at times she's gone too far in other ways, she's never once again seemed to be, as above, a pretty, slighty stunned, vacancy. And that can only be a good thing.