Slow dancing, swaying to the music at a pre-war Sunshine State trailer park sounds Grrrrr-REAT to me right about now. This January weather does not suit me.
Cold + windy = evil
The bystanders look bored to tears, or just plain miffed. Maybe they ran out of rum?
This straining adolescent is performing the Posin’ maneuver, as part of a new dance craze called The Big Apple. Nope, I’d never heard of it, either. But I bet Liz at The Vintage Inn has (she knows all about the Lindy and other swing dancing). In 1937, Time magazine attempted to describe it in words I can’t comprehend:
To be fair, all cats hate you. The contempt is thinly-veiled. For those of you unfamiliar with the wide-eyed Brazil nut pictured here, it’s Carmen Miranda, aka The Chiquita Banana Lady. And wide-eyed she was!
She may have danced her way to fame with a pile of fruit atop her head, much to the chagrin of Latin nations who felt stereotyped, but she had the last laugh. By 1945, she earned more than $200,000 (over $2 million in today’s money), becoming Hollywood’s highest-paid entertainer.
Numero uno, y’all!
She must have had fabulous posture and core control to forever be balancing colorful edible headgear and bearing the burden of 27 lbs of heavy metal accessories. No pain, no gain.
In August of 1955, Miranda was shooting a a song and dance number for the The Jimmy Durante Show when she fell to one knee. Out of breath, she finished the segment and went home. The next morning, Miranda died from a heart attack at her home in Beverly Hills. She was only 46.
To see her sing and samba, catch this 1943 clip of her in “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat.”
We don’t need to rehash the Rockefeller Christmas Tree incident. Singers age and so, too, their vocal chords. I’ve winced recently when both James Taylor and Amy Grant tried to reach those old high notes. God bless them for trying but sometimes old goats can’t do young goat tricks.
Time catches up with the best and richest of us. And enough already with the 44-year-old decolletage. This is not a vision of love.
You’re a married mommy, remember? Yes, technically still married. You are better than this.
I wish you could stay the lithe, curlyheaded racially questionable five-octave pre-diva chanteuse that you were my freshman year of college, but it’s not possible. You remember her? The one who married the cadaver from Tales From The Crypt?
Ick. I could have told you marrying Smarmy Much-Older Tommy Mottola was a bad choice.
But nearly a quarter century has passed since my buddies and I would pass college bars where drag queens belted out “Love Takes Time” in strapless sequined dresses. Time has been taken, my dear. It has been took.
So just be 44. Use a little more material. Cover it up. Stop trying to splash around in a bikini in the fountain of youth. You’ll just drown. Or worse, flail about pitiably while your middle-aged orbs spill out. From one 40-something to another: honey, just run for dry land. Let the fountain alone.
Mercy, even the trash man is trying to scoop you into a recycling bin. At least let him take the dress. Or the duct tape Borderline gloves.
You still get to be Mariah. You just can’t be Forever 21. So sit back and collect royalties and obsess over glittery butterflies and Marilyn Monroe and raise dem babies. And don’t kick Nick to the curb. He seems like such a nice boy, such nice manners. I’d introduce him to my Nana. Why, I saw him help Lara Spencer on with her pink coat this morning on Good Morning America. With or without his ruby slippers and velveteen jackets, he’s the best thing to ever hit America’s Got Talent. Give him a second chance. You knew he was young when you married him. You knew you’d have to raise him up.
And if you’re feeling perimenopausal and hormonal, feel free to throw shade all over Nicki Minaj. I don’t care if it is her birthday today. Do what you do best.
Look on the bright side: you can still be beautiful with clothes on. You’re not dead like Whitney. You can sing better than all of us poor peons who don’t have a Morrocan-style hookah lounge; you just can’t sang like in days of yore. But that’s First World Problems, girl. While your peers are busy misplacing car keys, you can chuckle in your rainstorm of Benjamins. Who needs car keys when you have a driver?
You can still be the mistress of condescension. Time hasn’t slowed that down.
And look, I’ll go one better. I won’t tag this post “vintage” like I usually do.
Oh, college students do love to have a “cause.” Why would they be giddily high-fiving in the midst of a bonfire? Here’s the explanation.
Fortunately for them, the Japanese dropped a bomb on Pearl Harbor a few months later, and they were sent off to war instead of this foolishness.
“A-one, an-a-two, and a-seven.” Such was his catchphrase. At least the first part. Here is Welk surrounded by seven lovely ladies in an array of Skittles colors. This ain’t no accordion solo.
Those of you who are over 60 have seen many decades, and you know that 60 is a lot of years. Can you imagine being married for 61 years? Well, Lawrence Welk was, to his wife Fern, from the Depression to the year we voted Clinton president. No scandalous stories of adultery there. In fact, the host of The Lawrence Welk Show actually fired one of his “Champagne Ladies” for showing too much leg. Did you know that his California Model A Ford license plate read “A1ANA2”? Wunnerful, wunnerful.
“There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you realize there’s so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.”
― Zayn Malik
I Don't Get It 