Shades of highschool...

I feel Mandy's pain, it's hard running tea shop in a motorcycle gang dominated town.

And it's not like the other cliques in the clubs are any more welcoming either.....

Happy Thanksgivng!

For each new morning with its light,

For rest and shelter of the night,

For health and food, For love and friends,

For everything Thy goodness sends.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Regardless of all the complaining I've done, and, yes I know I've done a lot, I do indeed realize I have a hell of a lot to be thankful for! I am alive, intelligent, capable and healthy. Currently free of drama and bitterness, I am fortunate to have numerous people in my life who care about me. For all this I give thanks.

A good man is hard to find!

After being kept out of the gym for over a week due to a plaguing cold I returned last night only to find out my workout partner had been called out of the country due to a family illness and probably won’t return until next year. It was disheartening news and I will miss him and wish his family well. It’s not that I can’t work out alone, but in order to lift heavy and spur hopefully aggressive growth it’s helpful to have someone to spot you and encourage you.

It also got my thinking, he and I have been training for a while and it’s probably the healthiest relationship with another man I’ve had in a long time. We stay in communication with each other, show up when we way we will, are committed to seeing each other, encourage each other, look out for each other and watch each others backs. Now why can’t I find someone to date who would treat me like that??????

cataloging dementia

So I've been cataloging since early morning and it's starting to steer me towards slap happy. Am I the one who finds this cover more "Village People" than Earth's people?????

The Look you want!

brought to you by Man International!

via: Flickr: emisanboo's Photostream

Beach Girls And The Monster (1965)

Featuring “The Watusi dancing girls from Hollywood’s famed Whiskey a go-go” and “music by Frank Sinatra Jr” What’s not to love about this film?

“Yeh-Yeh-Yeh!”

What the world needs now....

is more Janice!!

Goodby to all that!

P.S: for anyone following the saga, my living room rug was returned this weekend! Nicely dropped off on my back porch, thus avoiding any physical or verbal interaction(NICE!)

This last little detail being nailed down, I can finally instruct my lawyers to close all legal actions and now, never, ever, ever have to deal with my thankfully gone ex!-

Things I wouldn't mind getting for Christmas #1, Adam Vinatieri

Maybe with the new economy owning a football team or at least a few player's may well become affordable....

Baby it's cold outside!

The cold saga appears to be over and I get to go back to the gym today! Or, more likely I am forcing myself back in early as per usual due to body issues. Four days off and I am sure that I am sure that my weight has ballooned up. My muscles have atrophied and now no one will ever love me.

Yes I know I am dancing on a landmine of issues here but as I am broke form all the housing renovations professional help is financially out of my grasp. I am hoping a kind psychologist will start reading the blog and commenting……

Mary Wickes

Just because......

In tribute to Planet Fabulon

I have just hear the sad news that PlanetFabulon is seceding from existence. A happy day when I first stumbled upon it while tripping along the net, a dark day approaches when it will no longer exist.

Thombeau, you will be sorely missed. Your fabulosity helped me get though many a mind numbing day at work or my random nights sparring with insomnia. Best wishes for your music projects and job search.

Now who will get my April Ames references????

Further renovation wants.....

Add Reb Brown dressed in his best acting attire and I would gladly go further into debt to add an indoor pool onto the old manse.

pool shot via Shorpy Photo Archive History in HD

Reb Brown, Just saying..........

Even as a young teen in 1979 I recognized talent when I saw it. Although I found the Captain America Movies rather lacking, Mr Browns"acting abilities" whether semi shirtless, shirtless or poured into spandex aptly managed to carry most of the film thus keeping my attention over 30 years later....

A former USC football player, Reb Brown turned actor with a supporting role in "Sssssss" in 1973, playing opposite another stellar actor Dirk Benidict. After playing Capatain America Mr. brown also played "Yor, the hunter from the future", again where his acting ability shown brilliantly thanks to excellent costuming.

MUST HAVE!

Seeing as I'm still in a funk due to my cold and any cold medication I take turns me both morbid and loopy, I think I found the perfect viewing for my planned couch and comforter marathon this weekend!

Groovy half-sisters "Cindy and Donna" (1970) bloom into babes, but tragedy soon strikes. Sue Allen, Nancy Ison star. "The Stepmother" (1971) lusts after her hubby's teen son. Alejandro Rey, Katherine Justice star. A would-be singer gets hot for her "Sister-In-Law" (1974) and caught up in drug smuggling. With John Savage, Anne Saxon. An affair between "The Teacher" (1974) and her student turns scary when a maniac stalks them. Angel Tompkins, Jay North star. Can "Best Friends" (1975) stay friends when one wants to get married and the other objects? Richard Hatch, Susanne Benton star. Two hippie chicks hitch a ride with a dude ready to show them a good time. "Pick-Up" (1975) stars Jill Senter, Alan Long. A "Trip with the Teacher" (1975) to see Native American ruins goes badly for a group of young girls when their bus breaks down and the bikers who help them turn out to be rapists. With Brenda Fogarty, Zalman King. AKA: "Deadly Field Trip." In "Malibu High" (1979), a student decides the best way to get good scores on her tests is to score with her teachers. Jill Lansing, Katie Johnson star. 11 1/2 hrs. total on two discs. Standard; Soundtrack: English.

They may not be nutria........

Big excitement in the library office tonight. In the last two hours we've caught no less than four white mice. Okay one had already given up the ghost, making catching it's corpse an easy thing, but the other three are now penned in in under various Tupperware bowls weighted down with books until someone from facilities arrives tomorrow to actually cart them away. Until then we're keeping our fingers crossed as we've run out of Tupperware.

Green leather???

I know it's meant for farming, but really....

Actually I can't help but be reminded of Forbidden Planet when Is e this cover.

Satan Press!

City of Wantons?

Scranton? Ithaca? Cleveland?

Am I the only one who finds the black sock clad feet cropped in the front of the cover vaguely disturbing?

Rhetorical

Now what the hell are we supposed to assume happened when the lust-crazed convict ran wild????

Full fledged funk.

No rug appeared this weekend after all, although it looks like a cold has come to visit and settled in. As a result of the latter occurrence nothing was achieved around the house other than sleeping and moping. Still that pastime was made bearable by the lucky configuration of having three unwatched Netflix shipments, several bottles of red wine and a few bags of Smartfood all luckily on hand.

Today, so far suitably medicated I made it to the library and have a a bar tending gig to follow. Looks like I won't be sleeping again until after midnight. Oh look more whine........

Doldrums

Ye Gods! I’ve got a bad case of the Friday afternoon sleepies and the minutia of cataloging does not help in any way! Further I’ve nothing more to look forward to than a weekend of clothes sorting, switching over to autumn and winter wardrobe, pack up summer, etc. The one thrill will be the fact that I am finally moving all my clothes (with a shoe horn no doubt) into the closet and recently acquired wardrobe of my new bedroom. Yes kiddies the construction of the new bath and bedroom are finally done!

Least to look forward to, but a seminal point, my ex is stopping by tomorrow. He has to return the living room rug he stole from me or face more legal actions. While it will in no way be an enjoyable interaction I do have the pleasure of not allowing him to step one foot inside my (and the banks after remortgaging) home. I did not pay all that money to get rid of him to only allow him entry into my now peaceful inner sanctum!

Intoducing Janice Mars

This morning's walk to campus, though today's rainy weather and falling autumn elves made the perfect backdrop for listening to one of my all time favorite albums. How I wish Miss Mars would record more.....

Review by Michael Mascioli
Janice Mars is a mere footnote in the history of popular music. It's safe to say she's never been discussed at any length anywhere but in James Gavin's fascinating Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret (a book which keeps alive the memory of many otherwise forgotten artists like Spivy, Nan Blakstone, Rae Bourbon, Dwight Fiske, and Claire Hogan). In it, Gavin touches on Mars' reign, at 33, as the proprietor of—and sole singer at—her own club, the tiny Baq Room on 6th Avenue in the late 1950s. There her following was comprised of the New York cognoscenti, including Judy Holliday, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Comden & Green, Noel Coward—and Marlon Brando, in whose study the master tapes for Mars' only album—never released— were stored for safekeeping for the last 40 years. The recent, long-overdue release of the CD Introducing Janice Mars moves her at last out of the footnotes and onto the main page, alongside more famous— but no more talented—names, where she rightfully belongs.
On the CD cover Janice Mars looks mild, staid—even (dare I say it?) a little boring—and inside there's an old newspaper photo of her holding court at the Baq Room (Tennessee Williams sits ringside), looking for all the world like the quintessential boite chanteuse— sort of a white Mabel Mercer, only standing up. So imagine the shock of playing this recording for the first time and hearing an opening blast of trumpets and a huge orchestra building to a crescendo to herald Janice, who makes a bold entrance, blaring, "Damn the city!! I'm SICK of the whole city!" It's the beginning of Baldwin Bergersen & Phyllis McGinley's ultra-obscure and ultra-charming Commuter Song, from their 1948 revue Small Wonder. Mars quickly relaxes and begins to extol the joys of quasi-pastoral living:
Got a bee in my turbanThat I'd like to be suburbanAnd live among the vegetables and fruit...Let's be commuters and commute.
The scenery's pretty and life is swellIn Garden City and New RochelleAnd every morning, come rain or sun,We can hurry in a flurry to the 8:01....
And every night when work is doneI think we might have a lot of funFor the very best families get begunBetween the 5:08 and the 8:01.
(Bergersen, incidentally, also served as Mars' accompanist at the Baq Room.)
Janice Mars is essentially a dramatic singer, and she shares the fluttering, heartthrob vibrato of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, as well as the latter's hearty, authoritative, clarion style. Indeed, Mars was considered by some to be America's young answer to Piaf. Both her singing and her interpretations are—there is no other word for it— charged. But she also owes much to Eartha Kitt and to other theatrical singers who trod the floorboards a block or two west of the Baq Room during Broadway's golden age—belters like Susan Johnson and, especially, Eileen Rodgers, whom, along with Kitt, I would name as the singer Mars most sounds like, though clearly only by coincidence, not by calculation or imitation. But Mars is, I think, more capable than either of examining all the layers and levels of emotion and color below, shall we say, "the belt." She can be sweet and tender, girlish and genuinely vulnerable when necessary— witness her readings of When the World Was Young (which must be the quintessential cabaret song), Nobody Told Me (also from Small Wonder) and especially the first half of Bye Bye Blackbird (before it begins to build, thrillingly).
That same Broadway sensibility invests her with a sparkling personality, a sense of fun and lightness missing from so many other self-consciously serious, even somber, singers, especially these days. After all, musicals used to be called musical comedies. On Yip Harburg & Harold Arlen's "mockalypso" I Don't Think I'll End It All Today (from Lena Horne's Broadway vehicle Jamaica) you can almost see Mars sashaying and swishing her skirts as she grinningly makes her way through a list of ways to end it all—only not today.
Throughout, she is supported by vibrant instrumental settings created by the triple-threat combination of orchestrator Ted Royal, arranger Don Evans and conductor Milt Rosenstock (who, significantly, was the Musical Director for classic shows like Funny Girl, Gypsy, Finian's Rainbow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells are Ringing and Can-Can). Their combined talents add infinite excitement and color to the proceedings.
The CD contains a dozen songs—her entire recorded legacy—including a hidden bonus track, her commanding version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic (of all things) which, legend has it, a very young Janis Joplin would come to hear Janice sing. I also especially like her uber-dramatic version of Winter of My Discontent (a song I never enjoyed before) by Alec Wilder and Benedict Berenberg—who, it turns out, was Mars' first husband. If she performed this at the Baq Room with this kind of intensity, they're probably still scraping the audience off the walls.
Rounding out the esoteric yet accessible program are Duke Ellington & John LaTouche's Take Love Easy, Lilac Wine (earlier popularized by Eartha Kitt), The World is Your Balloon (from the famous '51 flop Flahooley, starring Barbara Cook—and Yma Sumac!), Take it Slow, Joe (also from Jamaica ), and Frank Loesser's Inchworm (strangely, a big favorite with jazz and cabaret singers.)
Introducing Janice Mars has fast become one of my desert island discs. Of course, my desert island is populated by singers like Frances Faye, Elaine Stritch, Susan Johnson and Kay Thompson—confident, assertive, big-voiced women considered a little sharp, a little edgy, a little too Broadway by some, especially, I would think, by today's growing coterie of jazz snobs.
It's said that Janice Mars (who is alive and well in New Mexico) mistrusted fame and sometimes even seemed to sabotage her own career—surprising considering her enormous, self-evident talent. We can only thank the gods that two members of her family decided to resurrect and release these important recordings as a "late-blooming gift" to Janice. And that Marlon Brando keeps his study so well organized.

via: MisterLUCKY: Music Reviews

The Best of Everything

THE WAY IT WAS Hope Lange answered a “Help Wanted, Female” ad in a newspaper in the 1959 film “The Best of Everything.” (She got the job, but not with this suit.)

via: The Return of the Interview Suit - NYTimes.com

I Loved!

Someone seems to have gotten the dialog reel mixed up! Or are we to believe that Biff(or insert other he-man like name here) is actually saying "You've got my heart on the run. Don't play with me dearest" without the aid of a rufy while riding that carousel horse in a speedo?

Bimbo's Initiation

Would you say this film best describes your last...

a. Job.
b. Bawdy Spree
c. Date
d. Relationship.

As far as mugshots go...

This one's pretty good! I know of several people who would hope to photograph this well after a thorough gussying up! Let alone being arrested!

Original Caption: Held On Kidnapping Charges. Omaha

--

A fifteen-year-old girl and four sixteen-year-old boys, all from Chicago, are being held in Omaha for Federal Grand Jury action. They are accused of kidnapping a Chicago salesman and transporting a stolen car across state lines. Left to right: Edward Neerose, Anthony Medino, Pauline Barrett, Tom Murphy, and Robert Campbell. As juveniles, they face confinement in a correctional institution until they reach 21, or possible life imprisonment under the kidnap charge. (1944)

Via: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,<br>There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

What I wouldn't give.......

for either the hoosier cabinet or the wheeled cart!

Circa 1918. "Food Administration home economics demonstration rail car, University of Illinois." National Photo Co. glass negative

via: Meat Train: 1918 Shorpy Photo Archive

those jeans ain't worth squat!

Bad news on the wardrobe front yesterday. I tried desperately to fit into a former favorite hardly ever worn pair of jeans yesterday only to find that my quads have become so big they are prohibiting the pull and close of a smaller waist size.

While the working out has paid off must it cost me my favorite clothes???

Vince Edwards

I spent this afternoon at the local Noir theater talking in a little "B" quickie, 'Murder by Contract" starring Vince Edwards in a very generous amount of shirtless scenes....

Murder By Contract (1958) dir Irving Lerner w/ Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, Herschel Bernardi [81 min] This quickie B movie, shot in just 8 days(!), drags film noir into the sunlight and finds it just as tense and thrilling when brightly lit. At the film's center is Claude (Edwards) a contract killer who is more salaryman (he's saving for a house on a river) than sinister assassin. Yet his workman-like killings are all the more chilling for their efficiency. When Claude takes a big payday job that brings him to Los Angeles, however, he meets his match in the growing modernity of that sun-drenched locale.

Born Vincent Edward Zoino in Brooklyn, New York, in July 1928, actor Vince Edwards was initially pegged as an athlete rather than a thespian. A terrific swimmer, Edwards won a scholarship to Ohio State in the 1940s, but a serious illness sidetracked his ambition. He then returned to New York to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Edwards' natural acting ability and impressive physique got him noticed quickly by Broadway producers, and soon Hollywood talent scouts signed him for films. His first was the low-budget 1951 United Artists comedy Mr. Universe, with Edwards portraying Tommy Tomkins, an honest wrestler who runs afoul of gangsters. His next starring role came in Monogram's 1952 release Hiawatha as the title character. By the mid 1950s, Edwards swapped his 'pretty boy' image for that of a shady character in such film noir thrillers as The Night Holds Terror (1955), The Killing (1956), and Hit and Run (1957). In 1961, Edwards again shed his image, leaving behind the bad-boy roles in favor of heroes, by taking the title role in ABC's Ben Casey. He also proved himself to be a good singer, releasing several albums and making nightclub appearances.

Marlys

The asnwer is no, by Lynda Barry

via: Marlys Magazine: starring Ernie Pook's Comeek by Lynda Barry

And who could compete with that????????

Via: Flickr: Retromod's Photostream

Yeah, that'll happen....

So don't let them snicker at your skinny scrawny figure...........

via Vintage Ads

Why Not?

Here's Hoping

DON'T FORGET TO VOTE!!!!!!

Lest you misbehave......

Original Caption:Girl Evangelist Blasts Beach Iniquities, Boston -- When Mary Agnes caught this pair spooning on Revere Beach, her wrath knew no bounds. Incidentally she would not appear on the beach in her one piece bathing suit until she had securely fastened her stockings above her knees. "Bare legs," she shuddered, "not before that crowd." (1922)

Unfortunately Mary Agnes(it figures) failed miserably. I grew up near Revere Beach, this sort of thing went on all the time and is still going strong...BOTH the spooning AND the bare knees!

Meanwhile.......

You just KNOW that Jimmy's about to get whacked across the head with oneof Lois' manolos!!!

I am going to start telling irritating people that "I'm going to make a test with my shoe"........