Newsletter April 2019

 

After two weeks in Italy eating too much pasta and drinking (great) wine I got to thinking about discipline. How can one (I’m not saying “me”) have discipline in one area of one’s life but not another? What even is discipline? And is it necessary?
 
Katherine Hepburn said, “without discipline, there’s no life at all.” All unpleasant connotations. I think of the disciplined women I admire, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich. Fierce, determined and highly disciplined. At various times they engaged in extreme dieting and exercise. Marlene drank Epsom Salt and stood still for hours at wardrobe fittings. And yet . . . all three drank too much, not to mention bad romances, child rearing “issues.” How was it they could exercise discipline in their careers and less often in their personal lives? How can we harness discipline and turn it from a negative into a positive? 
 
Dictionaries give us these definitions: correction, self-restraint, control, strictness and “training people to obey rules using punishment . . .” No wonder so many of us set out to “discipline” our diets, habits, minds and “fail” when the whole meaning around it involves paying a price.
 
Maybe if we think of “consequences” instead of “discipline we can harness a more positive energy to accomplish what we want (those extra 5 pounds, 1000 words a day . . .) If I tell myself I won’t eat that plate of pasta because the result will be, I won’t fit in my bikini . . . (vanity I know)
 
As I’m competitive with myself I thought I’d challenge myself to the changes I want to make instead of wondering why I have no discipline. i.e. today I’ll run 5 minutes more than I ran yesterday.
 
I don’t really have an answer to harnessing “discipline” and making it work, but I’m on the hunt . . . And I’m still not sure it’s necessary to even have it. I’ll leave you with this quote from Julie Andrews: “Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.”

LA Times Book Festival
 

I was so honored to appear on two panels at this year’s LA Times Book Festival at USC. It was a gorgeous sunny day, my panels were lively and interesting: “Girls to the Front: Women Breaking Barriers” and “Showgirls and Superstars: Gender in Music, Dance and

Comedy.” I specifically spoke about Faith Bacon and Sally Rand and the prejudice accompanying the life of a showgirl in the 1930s taking off her clothes, and all my burlesque performers in general. I signed and sold books. All in all a fab day!

Hypatia, philosopher
 

I stumbled across a very interesting feminist. Hypatia. From the little I can glean, she was born in Alexandria around c. 370 CE (or some claim 350) CE means Common Era. Unlike AD (anno domini – in the year of our Lord, not as is thought, after death) and BC (before Christ) Common Era does not have any religious implication. AND it starts from the year 1. (Confused? Me too. So enough of that!) Hypatia, was a kick ass little Egyptian. She was a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, educated by her father. She was a “pagan” but did not believe in feeding the Christians to the lions or whatever they were doing before the coliseum. It was very rare in those days for a woman to be educated, to teach. She was beloved, political and very influential. Perhaps too influential. Some hated the fact she wore robes and rode horses like a man. One day after teaching she was accosted by a mob of Christian men, taken to a Christian church, stripped bare and brutally murdered her. It was rumored her eyes were torn out and they cut her beautiful virginal body to pieces, only to then burn said pieces so nothing would remain of this brilliant scholar. Why should we care about her today? The result of her murder is credited with “delineating the classical age of paganism (it was a thing) from the age of Christianity (when the shit gets real).”

I’ve started a notebook with words: I love words. Words I want to use more, like “putative”

“nomenclature” “maladroit” “veracity.”

I spent a couple nights in San Diego at my mom’s. I went through old pictures that her mom, my Grandmother had. I found great treasures and things even my mom didn’t know about, like Grandma liked to ride horses, she played tennis, she hiked to the top of Mount Baldy. There was a bag with her wedding stockings, which are so luxurious feeling, soft, grayish. My grandmother was a city girl who lived on a farm with her husband. They traveled often. Later in life she returned to school and became a medical technician. She loved to read and kept many diaries, which were not very exciting but did trace how I am related to Abraham Lincoln. I’m currently reading a great book about Mary Todd Lincoln, called “Mary Todd Lincoln” by Jean H. Baker.

Shaker Village in Kentucky

We visited the home where Mary Todd Lincoln lived in Lexington on Main Street. It is beautiful and elegant and has been lovingly restored. They have many pieces that were hers. Years after Mary lived there (and the President visited) the house was sold and taken over by a Jennie Hill who ran a brothel, or house of “ill-repute,” “Cat house,” “sporting house,” or any number of names for where working girls lived. Lexington had a thriving brothel business. I forget the number, something like 200 houses at the time. One of the women

working for Jennie Hill was Belle Brezing, who was the inspiration for Belle Watling in “Gone with the Wind,” though Margaret Mitchell always denied it, probably because Brezing was still alive when the book came out. Belle was born in 1860 in Lexington. Her mother was in and out of prostitution and when Belle was a 12 she was “ruined” aka “raped” by a thirty-six year old douchebag. There would be other men, a baby, a possible murder of a beau outside her gate, shot through the head (deemed a suicide, not likely).

Belle would go on to have her own house, or houses, they were orderly run, luxurious and popular. She would become addicted to morphine and several times tried to break the habit, but failed. Clearly not disciplined enough. She died of uterine cancer, like her mother (and I think sister) in 1940 having become mostly a recluse, shut in her house in Lexington. Her items were auctioned off. Boy do I wish I had been there for that!

Shameless plug: “Welcome to Marwen” is out on DVD and streaming now. Such a great film. Check it out. Also there is an LP of the soundtrack.

Je suis Suzette

And finally, I shot an episode of “Inside the Issues” with Alex Cohen for Spectrum TV, talking “Feuding Fan Dancers” of course. The little book that keeps on . . .keeping on . . . like Sally Rand herself.

Faith Bacon

Coco: “Are men really not attracted to girls who wear glasses?”

Have you subscribed to Coco’s You Tube channel? Here’s the link   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0P2blG9YdE&feature=youtu.be

Burlesque and Pinup Emojis

If your BOOK CLUB would like me to visit via Skype I’m available on the road or when I’m at home. It’s been fun coming into your homes, sending specialty FAN cocktail recipes before for you all to try. email me at staar@staarlet.com  if you want me to join in on some Fun FAN talking. A questionnaire is available on my website to download for your Book club.

Belle Brezing (not a great book, but interesting story)

Checked one off my “classics” list. I finished “Madame Bovary.” Good God, 19th century male writers sure liked “fallen” women to kill themselves. I enjoyed this better than “Anna Karenina” though. I also read “George Sand,” very good biography by Elizabeth Harlan. Sand, while not very likeable (to me) because she was a terrible mother, was a prolific writer. Born in 1804 in France, her mother was negligent, leaving her mostly with her own mother, then sent to a convent for schooling. She was occasional anorexic, often dressed as a man, was referred to by George Sand in her personal and public life. Amongst her lovers was Chopin. She was awful to her daughter.
 
Until next month . . . read on . . .

 

Ciao Until next time . . .read on…