Happy Weekend!
How’s tricks? Having a good week? Still feeling good from the midterms? Well, why not celebrate by having a pickle on this National Pickle Day?
Your special present this week is one of the first things I always think of when I think about pickles — the skit from Kids In The Hall in which Tammy gets herself into a pickle-related scandal with Her Majesty, the Queen of England.
It took me a minute to find it because the only specific thing I remembered was the part where she said “I didn’t mean any harm, as everybody knows, I just don’t like pickles.”
Today is also the birthday of my absolute favorite silent film star, Louise Brooks. Fun fact, I bought a postcard with her on it at a bookshop in Northampton, Mass, when I was a kid and was just absolutely obsessed with it for years, because oh my goodness, glamour. So much glamour!
Then we moved to Rochester, New York, at which point I actually found out not only who she was, but that she had lived there in her later years and died there. She had been found living as a recluse in in New York City by James Card, the film curator of the Eastman House (if you’re ever there for some reason, check it out!) and he convinced her to move to Rochester — right across the street from the vintage shop where yours truly later worked. Spooky! Anyway, partly because she had lived there, I was finally able to get a hold of her films and watch them and I became even more obsessed, to the point where my desire for very short bangs became the premier point of contention between my mother and me for quite some time.
As I would later learn on one of those days where you keep cutting your bangs trying to even them out and eventually they end up way too short and still kind of crooked (we all have them!) … she was not wrong.
Anyway, here is Louise Brooks and her amazing bangs and amazing hair that I cannot pull off, in one of her most amazing films, Pandora’s Box. (Another fun fact, if you are familiar with my gal pal Pandora Boxx, of RuPaul’s Drag Race, that is what she named herself after and also how we became instant friends many years ago.)
And here she is in a British documentary that was released in 1986 (a year after her death) explaining why she was never a great actress — because she could only play herself. Which, she notes, not everyone could do.
But she was, of course, a great actress and did more with no words than many do with millions. So cheers to her and cheers to you and I hope you have a very nice rest of your weekend!
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Talk amongst yourselves!
My auntie made some of the world's best watermelon pickles
"Pandora's Box" is such a great film. I remember seeing it for the first time at university, on a black and white telly, and as it was pre-video, staying up till 1-ish to see it, and then realising with horror how it was going to end