Golly, gee, fellas! Find her an empty knee, fellas!

A centenary to celebrate today, dear reader - our Patron Saint of "Raspberries", Miss Carol Channing. All hail!

Carol Channing once said that she hoped to die like David Burns, her original co-star in Hello, Dolly!, who got a big laugh in 1971 in a tryout of the musical 70 Girls 70 in Philadelphia and then keeled over onstage while the laugh continued.

“The audience didn’t know there was anything wrong, you see,” she said. “He died hearing the laugh build. I can’t think of a better way to go.”

She may not have gone in exactly that way, but she should have been assured that her audiences loved her, right to the end.

Read my own little tribute to her when she died.

Carol Elaine Channing (31st January 1921 - 15th January 2019)

Bet you didn't know it

Born to Rule

Chita Rivera (born 23rd January 1933)

Etta James (25th January 1938 – 20th January 2012)

Alan Cumming (born 27th January 1965)

This weekend, I am mostly dressing casual...

...like today's birthday girl, the opera diva Rosa Ponselle - considered to have been one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th Century...

...who in this photo looks surprisingly modern. Shades of Katy Perry, methinks:

There's big hair...

...and then there's Dolly hair!

All them other girls are mere amateurs in comparison...

Our Patron Saint of wiggery, Miss Dolly Parton is 75 years old today!

All hail.

The higher the hair, the closer to god

Faye Dunaway (born 14th January 1941)

Caterina Valente (born 14th January 1931)

Ethel Merman (16th January 1908 – 15th February 1984)

Marilyn Horne (born 16th January 1934)

Eartha Kitt (17th January 1927 – 25th December 2008)

Dalida (17th January 1933 – 3rd May 1987)

Tippi Hedren (born 19th January 1930)

Weekend Reading

A Beard, a blowjob and a bon vivant

I must confess I had never heard of James Beard - apparently America's first "celebrity chef" and gourmand, whose recipe books expounded the virtues of fresh local produce and preparing tasty meals in a post-War era when the country's predominant preoccupation was with "convenience foods", tinned, packaged or frozen and above all, processed - nor his legacy (he ran a cookery school and a prize for culinary excellence is held annually in his name). Then again I had never heard of his protégé the US TV sensation Julia Child until the film Julie and Julia came out; we in the UK had our own set of culinary icons, from Elizabeth David to Fanny Cradock to Zena Skinner, so neither made any impact over here.

On a typical Google search for something else entirely, however, today I stumbled across a comprehensive biography The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard by fellow chef and cookery writer John Birdsall, which examines in detail his extraordinary life as an out-gay man having to hide the fact from public view in a puritanical era in American social history, whose breezy tone and popular cook-books belied the fact that quite often he lifted without credit other people's recipes and peppered his prose with outrageously made-up "anecdotes" and "histories" about these. Thrown out of his first college when he was caught giving a blowjob to one of the professors, he decided to embark upon a life in the theatre before reverting to his first love: food.

It is at this stage of the story - with young Mr Beard in 1920s London in pursuit of his theatrical ambitions, where he is taken under the wing of the flamboyant Helen Dircks, poet, socialite, theatre promoter and obvious "fag-hag" - that the following passage really caught my eye...

In James's eyes, Soho was nothing short of magical. Helen took him to lunch at Gennaro's Rendezvous on Dean Street. It was there, in the faux-Olde English farmhouse dining room, with its black ceiling beams, banks of small-paned cottage windows, and high-backed rush-weave chairs, that Helen ordered James his first London dry Martini (three parts gin, one of vermouth). They ate Sole Rendezvous (in white wine sauce) and soufflé Gallina (named for the restaurant's previous owner), with brandied cherries and an amber puddle of Cognac, flambéed at the table with high theatrics. James was enraptured. James was drunk.

Through her gay friends, Helen gave James an entrée into London's discreet queer subculture, something he hungered for without even daring to hope that such a thing could exist, or what it would feel like, what its rules and language were. Queers in the other great European capitals flaunted their existence. There were drag balls and openly gay beer bars in Berlin and male hustling on radical display in the Left Bank cafés of Paris. London was different. Police raids were constant. The queer city blossomed at night, in the dark. London's gay scene operated more like a network of speakeasies. One had to be tipped off about where to find the alley tea shop of boys in berets and coloured sweaters, some wearing rouge and lipstick; or the basement bar of quiet yet purposeful men in crisp suits and bowler hats with tightly rolled umbrellas. The hunt for these places alone was thrilling.

The hotspots were usually takeovers of existing places: the monumental marble bar at the Trocadero; the basement bar at the Criterion Hotel in Piccadilly Circus. Queer men had been stopping in for drinks at the Criterion, amid the neo-Byzantine splendour of its mosaics and arches, almost since the death of Queen Victoria more than two decades earlier. (It had camp nicknames: the Witches' Cauldron for its bitchiness; or the Bargain Basement, since the men could be had so cheaply). Another place, though James didn't know it the night he met Helen and friends there, was the downstairs bar at the Ritz. Gay regulars called it l'Abri, the Vault, a place locked away from the dangers of the nonqueer world. Subterranean bars were London's queer cocoons, incubator sites for pleasure and discovery, as remote as possible from the cruel and risky street. James found recognition and safety there. He learned the culture of cocktails, and of camp.

Even the galleries off the Rococo lobby of the Palladium, Helen's client, were places where men found each other; where they could lock gazes and discreetly grope beneath raincoats folded over arms, especially during the blare and pyrotechnics at the climax of the popular Rockets revue, when the audience's eyes would be focused on the stage. The body language in these establishments, the queer code, was subtle but undeniable. Even on the streets of the West End, a daring man might telegraph his queerness by walking with his overcoat slung behind one shoulder. One simply had to know how to read the signals.

An utterly fascinating insight into a lost world...

The PBS channel in America produced a comprehensive documentary James Beard: America's First Foodie in 2017, which may prove illuminating, if only we could get it here. I'm just going to have to read the book!

But now you shall play in the market square, 'till you'll be a man

From a post by by "Cherrybomb" on the ever-wonderful Dangerous Minds:

Though it’s not actually from Mars (BOO!), a David Bowie Monopoly-themed game does exist, and yes, you can have one.

The Thin White Duke’s version of Monopoly came out [in 2020] via an exclusive distribution with UK site Booghe...[and] here’s the scoop on the gameplay for this Ziggy-centric edition...

First, speaking as a collector of Monopoly board games, one of the things geeks like me look forward to are the game pieces, and wham-bam, thank you ma’am, the ones created for Bowie Monopoly do not disappoint. There is Major Tom, an astronaut helmet, a rolled-up tie for Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, and a replica of the hat Bowie wore as Pierrot in the video for Ashes to Ashes and on the cover of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), designed by Natasha Korniloff. Of course, there is a lightning bolt in honour of Aladdin Sane, a star to signify Bowie’s musical swan song Black Star, and a skull, which of course, was often a Hamlet-esque Bowie stage prop...

...instead of buying property, the squares on the board represent albums from Bowie’s vast musical catalogue. Once you own one of his albums, you can then build stages (instead of houses) and then stadiums (instead of hotels) to increase the “rent” paid when other players land on your square...There are also Sound and Vision cards (like the Chance and Community Chest cards), which bring both good and bad fortune to players drawing from the deck.

It’s hard to conceive there might be a Bowie fan out there who also digs board games that would not want a Bowie-themed Monopoly game. I should know; I am one of those people currently waiting for their very own Bowie-Opoly to arrive.

I'd love one!

In memoriam, David Bowie (born David Robert Jones, 8th January 1947 – 10th January 2016)

The Woman with a Whip

A typically bizarre hotch-potch of "names" were born on this day - not least our beloved Dame Shirley Bassey and David Bowie - including Gypsy Rose Lee, Graham Chapman, Stephen Hawking, Elvis Presley, William Hartnell, Dennis Wheatley, Ron Moody, Roy Kinnear, Wilkie Collins, José Ferrer, Saeed Jaffrey, Kim Jong-un and - ahem - R. Kelly, but, speaking of "bizarre", there is another birthday celebrant that probably wouldn't feature on many people's list of the "great and the good"...

...Fearless Nadia!

Born Mary Ann Evans in Australia to a Scottish father and a Greek mother, hers was already a rich mix of cultures even before the family moved to India. It was there that this blonde, blue-eyed athletic ballet dancer, after touring with "Madame Astrova's dance troupe" and with the Zarko Circus, first caught the eye of Wadia Movitone studios - pioneering producers in the early days of Bollywood cinema - in 1934; and was cast as a stuntwoman for their films. 

By this time, after consulting a fortune-teller, Mary had renamed herself Nadia.

In spite of her distinctly non-Indian appearance (and outfits), her roles as "the fearless heroine fighting evil oppressors" - displaying her impressive circus stunts, cartwheels and leaps as she did battle, and her strength by throwing men around - became massively popular in such melodramas as Hunterwalli ("The Woman with a Whip"), Hurricane Hansa, Jungle Princess, Lady Robinhood and Punjab Mail. 

In all, she made 55 such films, and in most of them her unfortunate co-star was muscleman John Cowas, who inevitably was on the receiving end of that whip.

"Fearless Nadia", as she became known to her adoring public, eventually married one of the Wadias, Homi [although the couple had to wait until his matriarchal mother died before they could tie the knot in 1961], retired from cinema, and lived out the rest of her life breeding racehorses. She died in 1996, the day after her 88th birthday.

It's a fascinating story. What a remarkable woman!

Nadi Wadia (8th January 1908 – 9th January 1996)

The way you look tonight

Brandon de Wilde and Paul Newman in 'Hud'

Joel Grey and friend

Matt Damon and Jude Law in 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'

Sal Mineo and James Dean in 'Rebel Without a Cause'