When the girls dress like the boys x white tie and tails VIII. Marlene Dietrich understood men’s clothes better than most men. And style wise she was far ahead of her time. In a time in which women were more or less stuck to skirts and dresses, she started raiding the male wardrobe to add to her collection of dresses and gowns. She had her men’s tailors, shirtmakers and cobblers (she frequented quite a few) make her suits, blazers, sports coats, shirts and custom made trousers. But only Knize in Vienna and Eddie Schmidt in Hollywood made her many tails. Fun trivia: Dietrich’s starched shirt cuffs were directly attached with a hidden buttoned fastening in the sleeve of her dress suits. So she wore sleeveless shirts with her tailcoat, that allowed for quick costume changes and slimmer, more feminely cut jacket sleeves. And while costume jewelry was always worn with stage costumes, for Marlene’s favorite white tie and tails, the cuff links were always her own- from Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels or Trabert & Hoeffer.
Some Marlene to class up your day.
ALL of this. Encourage people to try new words, to mess them up, to experiment with vocabulary, to learn complicated adjectives and verbs and nouns, because words are fun.
Also, don’t be a jerk.
AMEN SISTAH. PREACh
Thank you.
This is me. I mispronounce a lot of words because I spent my childhood and adolescent years reading by myself.
I didn’t go to a house warming party tonight, because I am grieving, and I must honour my grief. “Celebrating life” as my friends recommend will come later. After the funeral. Now, I am sad, and feel a sense of loss, and I must honour myself by honouring how I feel.
This is why I baked cookies for her grieving family, but would not cook dinner for my own. Until my mourning is over anyone who eats my food will be eating my grief, and for those who also mourn it helps because grief shared is grief lessened. Well, it doesn’t feel lessened, but its grief expressed. And grief is something toxic to hold inside without expressing, denying it gets me nowhere. I know this isn’t true for everyone but its true for me.
My father told me early this week he and hundreds of others lined the road leading up to his small down to welcome back a family returning from a big city hospital with their ten year old daughter in an urn. Cancer. He said as the car passed and he saw the look on her father’s face as he held the pink urn he felt the weight pressing on him. That everyone there, most of the town, took on a a piece of the weight of his grief. Even if his load wasn’t lightened, he was less alone in bearing it. Perhaps.
In my fridge there is a little container of ginger and molasses cookies held shut with two rubber bands, because I overfilled it. I’ve never made these cookies before but my grief drove me to bake, I wanted to eat my own grief and in my family that’s what you do when someone dies, and I don’t know what kind of cookies she liked. Did I inadvertently cook something she never would have eaten? Or maybe they were her favourite. More likely they would not fall to either extreme but the not knowing highlights how I did not know her nearly as well as I know she deserved to be known.
But who knows any of us as well as we deserve to be known?
Tomorrow morning I will wear my mourning clothes, and take an unreasonably long bus ride to pay my respects. Like the unreasonably long bus rides we shared when we were five to get home from kindergarten. I will even have my backpack with me. So I can carry the cookies.
Tomorrow night, after the funeral, will be another screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I will be in the shadow cast, as always. Then, in my ripped fishnets and corset, I will celebrate life. Then it will be time. But not now, and not tonight.
When I was at tcaf I got a small comic called Poorcraft which had various tips on how to live well on less money. It included a recipe for rice porridge which I made a half batch of yesterday.
For today’s lunch, I added two packs of plantation sugar that I stole from Starbucks and threw in half of an orange. It tastes much better than it looks, and for the next batch I’m going to play around a bit more with the ratios to get a thicker consistency.
It was really easy to make, and throwing other things into it is fun and delicious!
(Source: homoarigato)
