Friday, November 28, 2014

This happened



I caught an airing of The Dolly Sisters while home sick a while back.  It included a musical number of The Dark Town Strutter's Ball sung in french and in black face make up.  To further the bad effect there was a presentation of  a long  Ziegfield-esque line of white girls, in black face smiling at the camera for closeups to show how pretty they were.  I tried to tell a female African-American friend about it the next day but felt I couldn't quite capture how odd it was as(let alone wrong) without actually showing her the number, which I unfortunately cannot find on video to embed here.  I think it was a combination of the make up artist using a dark caramel/gingerbread color  universally on every girl and the fact that each chorus girl was of course wasp white and so had no African-American features.

Of course don't get me started on June and Betty's hairstyles pictured above.

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