Bad Girl Blog

Vocal Fry & Britney Spears: This Isn't What I Mean When I Say Bad Girls Are Good

2012-01-29T15:37:00.002-05:00

A curious vocal pattern called vocal fry has crept into the culture and become disturbingly popular with young women, Science Magazine and the blogosphere are now reporting.

What's vocal fry? It's a language fad, formerly considered a speech disorder, that has gained popularity with young women who speak American English. Apparently, pop singers like Britney Spears have slipped these low, creaky vibrations into their music, and now it's a vocal style.

I've heard it--long before I ever knew what it was--and always hated the sound of it. Makes an intelligent woman sound stupid and shallow.

"Vocal fry, or glottalization, is a low, staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of the vocal cords (listen here)," reports Science. "Since the 1960s, vocal fry has been recognized as the lowest of the three vocal registers, which also include falsetto and modal—the usual speaking register. Speakers creak differently according to their gender, although whether it is more common in males or females varies among languages. In American English, anecdotal reports suggest that the behavior is much more common in women."

In British English, the pattern is the opposite, apparently. Huh. Culture is strange. At any rate, scientists at Long Island University investigated the prevalence of vocal fry in college-age women, recording sentences read by 34 female speakers, and listened for two qualities, called jitter and shimmer. The study found that two-thirds had fried their voices.

Oops, Britney, I think you did it again.

How Not to Give a Reading: Thoughts After My Bar 82 Reading

2012-01-22T16:35:00.000-05:00

OK, so I did my Bar 82 reading. Thanks to my friends who came out to hear me read! Thanks to We Three Productions, who asked me to read! (A little snippet of the story below, in case you're interested, using an incidental character from a novel I'm working on.)

Anyway, I don't give many public readings, maybe once a year, and I really thought I was ready for this one. Spent the entire day before, writing, rewriting, practicing out loud, editing, re-reading out loud, reading to my husband, reading to myself, reading to myself in the mirror, which Dave suggested and was horrible, because I felt self-conscious already, and seeing myself only made it worse, which I guess was Dave's point, that I should confront my fears and not back down, maybe even practice naked....

So I get up the next day on the Bar 82 stage to read, feeling super-prepared, but then...seeing the glaring spotlights and dim faces in the dark crowd and having to talk into a microphone and realizing that I wasn't just expected to read but would have to perform, holy mother of god it suddenly became an out-of-body experience, and as I floated above the reading, I saw down there on the stage a woman who looked a whole lot like me, but couldn't possibly be me, because she didn't have a personality, only she was very formal and serious, and just looked like a stiff stick up there on the stage, with words coming out of her mouth, and that couldn't have been me, because I do have a personality and like to have fun besides!

Photo: Phillip Giambri

Oh, I suppose I did the right things--I read clearly, didn't stumble over my words, spoke with expression, remembered to look up at my audience every now and then, But that woman up there on that stage clearly wasn't having any fun, was she?

So my advice, if you're planning on giving a reading, is to get super-drunk and watch a bunch of Three Stooges movies ahead of time, and not do any preparation at all, and make the guy who reads before you do a really lousy job of it. In his underpants.

The problem, I later realized, was that I read not just one but two linear stories with a beginning, a middle and an end in the space of just 12 minutes, with lots of multi-syllable words, when what I should have done was stay on the stage for five minutes and just tell Tommy Cooper jokes. Example: A woman tells her doctor, 'I've got a bad back.' The doctor says, 'It's old age.' The woman says, 'I want a second opinion.' The doctor says: 'Okay - you're ugly as well.'

Tommy Cooper was such a brilliant performer that he died of a heart attack while on stage doing a funny bit, and kept the audience laughing the whole time.

And now, for a snippet from my reading, from a story called "The Marquis de Morès:"

Antoine de Vallambrosa, the Marquis de Morès, dragged his wife off to the northern Dakota territory in 1883, just after she had given birth to their first child.

A retired French cavalryman with a taste for adventure, he dreamed of starting up a meat-packing plant. By going straight to the source of cattle production, where the Northern Pacific Railroad came through, he could cut out the middlemen who ran the Chicago stockyards and process his meat right there on the Great Plains.

New York banker Louis von Hoffman, who financed the plan, spared no expense because the Marquis de Morès was his son-in-law.

So although he was a successful businessman with a sharp eye for a bad deal, Von Hoffman decided anyway to spend vast sums on the purchase of 26,000 acres and the construction of a meat-packing plant in the middle of nowhere. The banker also shelled out money to build a 26-room château so his daughter and grandchild could live a life of comfort in the godforsaken Badlands.

“You won’t regret this!” Antoine bellowed to his father-in-law on the day they signed their deal. “My plan will completely change the meat-packing industry! I am inventing the way forward into the 20^th century!”

“We’ll see,” said the banker.

See? The words aren't so bad. It's my delivery that sucked.

For more advice on giving a reading, check out:

Nine Ways to Give a Better Book Reading
(Your audience can read your book themselves. Little is more monotonous than hearing someone else reading words aloud. Great authors elevate the text by using a compelling vocal delivery to emphasize key phrases, increasing the tempo to build suspense, and modulating their volume to match the content. )

How to Give a Good Reading Despite Your Myriad Neuroses

(Some people lack the confidence to give a reading because they lack confidence in themselves as a writer. They are plagued by feelings of being an impostor. These folks think, “How can I be sure I’m even a real writer? What make me think I have the right to get up and read?”)

How to Give a Reading on Mushrooms
(Arrive early and talk to Rita and her friends, unsure if they’re all also on mushrooms (as they’d previously agreed) because Rita giggles nonsequiturly even when sober, until an unsmiling woman in her 40s—the event organizer—approaches saying something about “housekeeping.” Follow her into the backroom and learn it’s important you speak clearly tonight, “into the microphone,” as the reading and Q&A are going to be “livestreamed” onto the internet.)

Bar 82 NYC Reading Jan. 9--come hear me read!

2012-01-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

My first reading in NYC! Please come (I'm the second reader):

We Three Productions Present Biweekly Readings of

Poetry and Prose at

Bar 82

136 2nd Avenue @ St. Marks

212-228-8636

www.bar82nyc.com

telreadings@gmail.com

Subway: 6 Train to Astor Place, F Train to 2nd Ave., L Train to 3rd Ave.

FREE

Monday, January 9^th at 8 P.M.

Brendan Costello

Brendan Costello teaches Creative Writing at the City College of New York, where he earned his MFA and also won the Irwin and Alice Stark Short Story Award. His work has appeared in epiphany magazine, smokebox.net, and Salon.com. He is also one of the organizers of the City College MFA reading series here at Bar 82 -- their next event will be February 17^th.

Joyce Hanson

Joyce Hanson is a Brooklyn writer who's going to read a couple of stories about the wilds of North and South Dakota. One story was written by her dad about his Dust Bowl Great Depression childhood days. The other story comes from Joyce's novel in progress, which uses her research about rebelliouswomen in history. Normally, to pay the bills, Joyce is a journalist and a
web editor. You can read more of her stories at her blog, Bad Girl Blog.

Matt Grasso

Matt is the host of Fahrenheit, a monthly open mic series located in the East Village. He completed a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony in 2011 and is currently wrapping up his first collection of short stories. His nine-to-five credentials comprise work in the fields of Industrial and Exhibit Design.

“Producing Biweekly Readings since 1995”

Prayers for Etta James

2011-12-20T12:36:00.000-05:00

Etta James, the blastingly hot and juicy soul singer who has inspired so many performers, is terminally ill and hanging on to life by a thread this holiday season.

“I am Southern and Christian and would just ask for the prayers of her fans and friends,” her family doctor, Elaine James (no relation), told The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif. “They know she’s been sick, but not how sick.”

As I write this post, I'm listening to Etta James sing "Something's Got A Hold On Me" in a televised performance from 1962.

Wow. What a voice. What a soul. She owns that song, taking it places it didn't know it could go, growling and shouting when she wasn't delivering a deep melody line in pure low tones.

And look at her face, that round, joyful l'il face peeking out from behind her beehive hairdo and thick dark eyeliner (hello, Amy Winehouse). It's the sweet and hopeful face of a sure-footed girl. The girl who gave us "I'd Rather Go Blind," "At Last," "All I Could Do I Cry," "A Sunday Kind of Love," and the list goes on.

After a life of tough times and beautiful music, Etta James, now 73, is suffering from chronic leukemia and it's not looking good for her. Despite her love troubles, drug addiction and legal problems, she gave us so much during the course of a long career. I hope she knows how much we loved her. I know I did. I'm glad she lived to see her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Peace and prayers and many thanks to Etta James.

Uh Oh—Christopher Hitchens Is Dead

2011-12-16T18:33:00.001-05:00

Christopher Hitchens is dead. Now who's going to tell women they're not funny?

Hitchens died of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, reported Gawker, calling him a "Clinton-loathing, religion-mocking, Kurd-loving, war-mongering, ball-waxing British drunk who contained multitudes and seemed to be insulting you somehow even when you agreed with him."

Christopher Hitchens, smoking, as he led his life, down to the nub. (Photo: jeffsingerphotography.com)

And then there were the times you didn't agree with him, or at least thought you didn't agree with him, until you started to read his clever prose and started to get swayed by his sinuous writerly logic, the jerk.

Remember when Hitchens wrote this "provocation" in the pages of Vanity Fair?:

Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about. All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life.

In writing this, I just went back to that Vanity Fair article, and I dreaded having to re-read it because I remember how viscerally annoyed I got the first time I read the piece. To my surprise, Hitchens' elegantly argued thesis actually started to convince me...and then I got to thinking, "Wait, is he right? Are women not funny? Maybe he's got a point." How maddening!

Then again, Christopher Hitchens was a genius of the abrupt statement that makes people laugh in spite of themselves. For example, he managed to find a way to criticize Mother Teresa, claiming that she was more interested in glorifying God than in helping the poor.

Daily Hitchens, which bills itself as an unofficial Christopher Hitchens site, notes that the author's memoir, "Mortality," will be published early next year.

House of Pleasures: Boredom in a Bordello

2011-12-11T17:12:00.003-05:00


In "House of Pleasures," Iliana Zabeth plays Pauline, a 16-year-old prostitute who manages to escape the fate of most girls in the Apollonide bordello. Watch a movie trailer at Sundance Now. (Photo: www.allmovie.com)

I just caught "House of Pleasures" at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, a gorgeously produced period film that takes place at the turn of the last century. It depicts the end of the era when European bordellos offered Champagne and luxuriously legal sin behind closed doors for rich men who could afford the price of entry. And I mean "entry" quite literally, because these men had access to every nook and cranny of the female flesh on offer.

French director Bertrand Bonello sets his film in Paris, and with the exception of one sunny scene on a river bank, the entire story takes place within the richly sumptuous yet sometimes claustrophobic rooms of a brothel called the Apollonide, a classic bordello where a whore could feel like an elegant courtesan if she didn't think too much about the risk of disease, her growing indebtedness to the madam or her inability to leave the house unless accompanied by a customer or one of the other girls.

Still, "House of Pleasures" creates a lush ambiance of indolence and excess. Grateful old men explore their sexual fantasies with beautiful girls they can worship without ever having to marry. The girls, in turn, accept the men's money, which allows them to lie around the house all day taking baths, smoking opium and stroking a black panther who enjoys lounging in the salon. It all looks great, but life for the girls of the Apollonide looks to be a crashing bore because they can't do anything or go anywhere--even Champagne, marvelous though it is, can and does go flat.

No one woman features as the star of the show--and Bonello said he was more interested in the idea of putting together a group than focusing on a single face--though some characters are standouts: the madam (Noemie Lvovsky) who feels sympathy toward her girls but doesn't let affection get in the way of business; Madeleine (Alice Barnole), a fin de siècle Jewess who pays dearly for attracting the wrong kind of man; and Pauline (Iliana Zabeth), a level-headed 16-year-old girl whose curiosity brings her to the bordello before coming to a logical end.

As a modern woman, I had mixed feelings about the film. It was never clear that the women in the house had any agency, to use a modern term, in choosing their men or their pleasures. Was Bonello just showing the reality of life in a bordello, or ultimately punishing these women for working as courtesans? They weren't, after all, prostitutes turning tricks on a street corner; they were a select group with a repeat clientele of open admirers.

At one point in "House of Pleasures," one of the girls advises newcomer Pauline not to get carried away and enjoy the sex too much. When Pauline asks why not, the girl gives a muddled answer, saying that it's just not done. Well, why the hell not?, I wondered, too, leaving the IFC Center with a frustrated sense of incompletion and gratitude that my Champagne days are few enough to savor.

Table for One

2011-07-25T19:33:00.000-04:00

I recently ate lunch at a fine French bistro in midtown Manhattan, at a table for one. Having just left my doctor’s office with a clean bill of health, I figured there was no better way to celebrate than with a cheese-rich meal accompanied by a glass of burgundy.

Illustration by Raj Martino, www.rajcreations.com

This was an impromptu celebration—planned only when I realized that my doctor’s office is just around the corner from Artisanal, a popular bistro that I’ve always wanted to visit. I was hungry, the menu was enticing and I didn’t need a reservation because it was the noon hour when tables aren’t in great demand.

Only one issue, if you want to call it that, remained: No one would be joining me for lunch. I would be alone, eating by myself in one of New York’s nicer restaurants. In his book Heat, which details his life as a kitchen slave at Babbo restaurant in New York, Bill Buford writes that people who dine alone at the bar are referred to by staff as “bar losers.” Would sitting at a table for one make me a loser, too?

I’m married, but I’ve been known to enjoy a solo martini in a crowded bar, and I will certainly go to movies on a date with myself and hold my own hand. That’s not all that unusual in New York, a city where 32% of all households are made up of single individuals.

Still, it’s one thing to walk into a neighborhood diner for a sandwich and another thing entirely to be escorted by a maître d’ to a well-appointed table for two in a nice restaurant and watch as a member of the wait staff discreetly whisks away any trace of china and cutlery from the place opposite you. I used to find this moment extremely embarrassing, but now that I’ve eaten alone just for the fun of it at a few of New York’s best restaurants, I’ve learned, as we say in yoga class, to breathe into the position and enjoy the whisking theatrics as part of the experience.

Lunchtime theater

At Artisanal, I play my part in the performance of being served. Alone, I’m better able to observe the rituals and engage in a dialogue with my server, a bespectacled young woman with the look of a recent college grad. In her smart black tie and vest, tailored shirt and long white apron, she opines judiciously on which glass of burgundy would best pair with my English cheddar grilled-cheese sandwich half, dreamily gooey French onion soup and mesclun salad.

“The full body of a Nuits Saint Georges would match the strong flavors of the cheddar,” she says as we study the wine list together.

“That sounds nice, but you don’t think it might be a bit heavy?” I murmur tentatively.

“Why don’t I give you a sample,” my server suggests, briefly disappearing into the bistro’s din and returning with a bottle.

She splashes a sample into my glass, I taste it, and it is good. Now, glass in hand, my order in, I can just let it all wash over me.

Transient thrills

I hope I never get over the thrill of enjoying a beautifully served meal in a thoughtfully managed dining establishment designed for my pleasure. Designed for our pleasure, all these happy people sat buzzing around me, sharing this happily transient moment before moving back into the realities of the day.

“We went to Atlantic City for the bachelorette party and we lost her,” says the woman at the table next to me to her lunch companion. “We thought she was gambling, but it turned out she had run off with two guys.”

“That sounds pretty crazy,” he answers desultorily as he reads the menu.

“I mean, it’s the last free night of her life and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, we’d all had a few drinks, but running off and leaving her own party? Really?”

Across the table, the woman’s companion still has not lifted his eyes from the menu, and I can’t tell if he finds the lunch specials completely riveting or if he’s trying to discourage her from talking.

Bacon and the Buddha

It can be such a treat to hear a scrap of somebody else’s chatter without feeling obliged to show interest in what’s being said. Talk takes away a quiet appreciation of the five senses, and there is plenty to appreciate at Artisanal: the taste of onions infusing hot broth, the visual appeal of stretching and twirling melted cheese with a spoon, the savory scent of smoked bacon, the crunch of a well-turned crust of grilled bread, the smooth lusciousness of cheesecake for dessert.

Don’t get me wrong. I do know how to eat in a group. Just a couple of weeks ago I invited our next-door neighbors to dine with us on the spur of the moment because a big, fresh free-range chicken had arrived in our CSA box and I wanted to share it.

Still, I spent years living in New York and not going to its better restaurants because I couldn’t afford them or because my friends and family didn’t share my enthusiasm. Now I’m a grown woman, so I go, and if no one wants to join me, I go alone. Why? Because I’m not perpetually broke anymore and, quite simply, because I can.

“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life,” says the Buddha.

I have learned on my travels through New York that the city’s temples of fine dining are open to all who can afford the price of entry, and they will welcome me with open arms whether I’m in a group or at a table for one. And eating alone is a wonderful way to be where I am.

Check out my latest restaurant review for New York Press: Passing the Bar: Trix

Reviving Skittles: Life of a Victorian Courtesan

2010-12-19T18:38:00.001-05:00

Click here to read Part 1 of Reviving Skittles: Life of a Victorian Courtesan, my 10-part Bad Girl biography of Catherine Walters, a.k.a. Skittles, the most popular, remembered and notorious courtesan of Victorian England. For the other nine parts, click on the links located on the right-hand side of this blog.

Illustration by Shaina Ortiz

Reviving Skittles, Part 10: The End and a Beginning

2010-12-19T18:21:00.000-05:00

Contrary to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's poetically gloomy thoughts, Catherine Walters wasn’t soulless. She was just unwilling to let her heart be broken again. After the first few days of their affair, Skittles returned to her familiar round of social and intimate engagements, and when Blunt visited, she would casually brush him aside, telling him she was busy and would have to see when she could fit him on her calendar.


Illustration by Shaina Ortiz

In truth, Skittles now found it easier to enjoy a simple romance than to fall into an emotional abyss, which she had done with Lord Hartington. If anyone was to suffer, better it should be a poet. When with Hartington, Skittles had done the hard work of imagining herself a duchess, moving into Hartington’s world, adapting herself to its expectations, and perfecting the role of dutiful and loving wife.

Now, where could love with Blunt lead? To serial postings in foreign cities over which Skittles would have no say? To endurance of his exhausting emotion, his gloomy moods and romantic wanderings? She preferred staying in the world she knew, with skilled older lovers like Achille Fould, who enjoyed her for herself and made few demands.

It was just as well that Skittles let Blunt down gently. Her fool’s talk and superficial social whirl would have driven him mad. Jealous by nature, could he have coped with the attention she received from the many former lovers who still adored her?

Still, his three days with Skittles were enough to ruin Blunt for life—no other woman could ever compare to her, his first love. This, of course, was convenient for Blunt because he would always struggle to reconcile his religious upbringing with the passionate lust he knew he could feel. The search for pleasure was its own punishment, and allowed the wounded orphan boy to avoid intimacy throughout his life.

The sex stopped, yet Skittles and Blunt began a friendship that was to last for the rest of their lives. It was built on genuine affection and a shared history that continued to grow between them. She could and did tell him anything, as was her way, and Blunt also felt he could reveal himself to Skittles because she didn’t shock easily.

Throughout 1864, Blunt made occasional visits to Skittles’ house in Paris. She was as mercurial as ever, and his melancholy personality showed signs of becoming more entrenched. Now with his sexual initiation behind him but his good looks very much at the fore, Blunt had engaged in a series of affairs and was developing a reputation for promiscuity. In 1865, Blunt’s chief at the Foreign Office posted him to Lisbon, and the former lovers bid each other a platonic farewell.

Blunt eventually married Lady Anne Isabella King-Noel, the only known descendant of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Knowing the history of Byron surely appealed to Blunt as he courted Lady Anne, who like her good-hearted grandmother became embroiled in a troubled marriage to a womanizing poet.

After initially meeting in Venice, Blunt and Lady Anne wed in 1869 and he retired from the diplomatic service in 1872. When their marriage was in the early, happy days they had a daughter, Lady Judith Wentworth, born in 1873.

Like Skittles, Lady Anne was a delicate little woman with searching eyes, and Catholic. But where Skittles might have been “soulless,” as Blunt says in his poem, Lady Anne was all soul. She had converted to Catholicism as an adult, and had a convert’s zeal. Animal lust repelled her; she sought a life of the spirit and quiet meditation. This was exactly what Blunt wanted in a wife. And yet, something about the sensible Lady Anne’s companionship left Blunt cold. She would never toy with him, never “pursue her whim just where it led her, tender, sad, or gay.”

In this sense, Skittles would never be replaced. Not that she would have wanted to be Blunt’s wife, or even continue a long-term affair with him—she was happy he had found a suitable woman to marry.

Years later, Blunt's rebellious and passionate nature brought him back to his relationship with Skittles, but in poetry only. He sympathized with the Irish independence movement, and at one midnight meeting he advocated a home rule plan that got him arrested for charges of resisting the police and sedition under Chief Secretary of Ireland Arthur James Balfour’s Coercion Act of 1887. He spent a two-month sentence in Galway Gaol writing poetry.

In an 1889 review of Blunt’s work, Oscar Wilde thanked Balfour, saying: “It must be admitted that by sending Mr. Blunt to gaol, [Balfour] has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of a prison cell seem to suit the ‘sonnet’s scant plot of ground,’ and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.” Several years later, the now mature poet published “Esther, A Young Man’s Tragedy,” a work that had obviously been in the making for years.

As for Skittles, during Blunt’s time of tumult, her life grew steadier. When the poet left Paris in 1865, Catherine Walters quickly put their passion behind her, ignored letters from her former lover Hartington, and immersed herself in life with her undemanding older lover, Achille Fould. At the age of 26, Skittles saw that her charms as a courtesan wouldn’t last forever. With Fould’s help, she put her finances in order and found satisfaction in pursuits other than men. He died in 1867 at age 67, and she missed him terribly. Paris wasn’t the same with him gone, and Skittles traveled extensively.

She was now welcome most everywhere she went, especially back home in England. The notoriety she had gained in the yellowback biographies that purported to tell her life story made her very popular with the British public, which cheered for the socially rebellious girl who had made a name for herself.

Skittles also appeared in novels such as Ouida’s Under Two Flags, published in 1867, where a character called Zu Zu is a pretty courtesan who rides and hunts. A well-dressed girl with “a vulgar little soul,” Zu Zu does silly things such as throw expensive peaches into the river in hopes of hitting dragonflies, and she thinks it’s “the height of wit to stifle you with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice.”

The 1860s gave way to the 1870s, and the most suffocating aspects of Victorian oppression also began to give way. With so many women now finding work in the cities with the industrialization of society, their public appearance was no longer shocking.
At the same time they began pressing for the right to vote, they were making names for themselves in society, on magazine covers and on stage. This fresh perspective put Skittles at the forefront of London life. “Skittles, thanks to the continued friendship of the Prince of Wales, blazed as brightly as ever in the London ‘hemisphere,’” writes biographer Donald MacAndrew. “She had become a sort of institution, or public monument, half-canonized by respectability.”

As the century turned and World War I came and went, Catherine Walters’ life stayed remarkably consistent—perhaps because she wasn’t a great intellect and had no desire to challenge herself, and perhaps because her early years had been turbulent enough that she sought peace at all costs. A lifelong horsewoman, she maintained her erect carriage and trim figure as she aged, even though she suffered from sometimes crippling arthritis. For years and years she lived at the same South Street address in Mayfair and is believed to have continued receiving Hartington’s £2,000 annual income up to the very end.

Wilfrid Blunt remained one of Catherine Walters’ closest friends, and their affection for each other became truer and more tender as the years passed. She saw that his poet’s passion for her had run deeply, much as she had mocked it, and he saw that she was far from being the soulless angel of his fantasies. They wrote to each other, and sometimes in good weather, she would visit him on his family estate, where he would greet her wearing an Arab burnous and show her the horses he had bred from the Syrian desert studs.

“Though deaf and partially blind, Skittles is still unconquered in talk, and gave us all the gossip of the hour though it is too piecemeal for reproduction,” Blunt wrote in his diary after one such visit. The last time they saw each other was at Newbuildings in the spring of 1918, when they talked about the war’s end and he gave her a basket of farm butter and eggs to supplement her London rations. Two years later, Skittles suffered a stroke while sunning herself in a bath chair at home on South Street and died two days later.

Calling herself a “spinster” in her will, Catherine Walters stated: “I declare myself to be as I was born a member of the Roman Catholic Church and I desire and direct that I may be buried according to the rites of the said Church in the burial ground of the Franciscan Monastery at Crawley in the County of Sussex as has been arranged for me with the Superior of the Monastery.”

Gerald saw to it that her burial request was honored, and Wilfrid Blunt, whose brother had founded the monastery, arranged it.

Blunt died just two years after Skittles, and like his first love received Catholic extreme unction, but was buried like a Muslim at his request.

My Mad Men Avatar

2010-07-25T13:54:00.000-04:00

It's Mad Men night tonight--the start of Series 4--and I'll be watching with friends in Brooklyn and drinking Manhattans and feeling fun and glamorous.

And! I can't stop playing with that new "Mad Men Yourself" toy on the AMC site. You can create an avatar cartoon of yourself, and put yourself in different Mad Men scenes and create a JPEG.

Here's what I look like while drinking a cocktail & saying something very important yet sociably glib:

And here's me in a different pair of glasses, looking sensible and ready the next morning to get back to work (only not in the secretarial pool; in my mind I'm a witty and highly successful yet attractive boss lady type):

And now, to end with a quote from Connie to Don:

What do you want from me, love? Your work is good. But when I say I want the moon, I expect the moon.

Argan oil lover's Moroccan tagine of lamb and prunes

2010-06-06T18:37:00.000-04:00

I've been to Morocco, and I can tell you that along the southern coast near Agadir there are packs of goats who spend their days climbing into argan trees and nibbling the fruit they find amongst the branches.

These goats know a good thing. Argan oil, pressed from the fruit of the argan tree, is a staple of traditional Moroccan cooking. I've experienced argan oil in Morocco and will always remember the nutty smell because bare-breasted Berber women slathered it all over my naked body in the hammam baths when I stayed near Agadir while on a yoga retreat.

I'm glad I enjoyed the oil's richness then, because here in New York City a tiny 8-ounce bottle of the stuff costs about $35, and the only place I know where you are certain to find argan oil here is at Kalustyan's.

I love Kalustyan's. For a dinner party I gave this weekend, I was almost happy to pay that crazy-expensive price for a tiny bottle of the precious oil because it gave me an excuse to go to this specialty foods shop at 123 Lexington Ave., where I splurged on not just argan oil but orange blossom water, preserved lemons, cumin seed, cinnamon sticks, saffron and the spice mix called ras el hanout.

Dinner was lush, with little thanks to me. The thanks go to Kalustyan's, the herbs I found at my local produce market and the Cafe Morocco cookbook by Anissa Helou, who has become my new friend in the kitchen. With her comprehensive recipes and the flavor profiles she sets forth, I have begun to understand the complexity and aromatic tastes of Moroccan cuisine.

Here, then, is the tagine I cooked this weekend, taken from Cafe Morocco. Although the recipe calls for the cheaper and more available olive oil, I used argan oil, which has properties similar to olive oil.

Tagine of Lamb with Prunes (Tajen Lham bel Barquq)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (or argan oil)
2 and 1/4 pounds boneless neck or leg of lamb, cut into big chunks
1 medium-sized onion
2 bunches cilantro, tied together
1 cinnamon stick
pinch of saffron filaments, crushed
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
sea salt and finely ground black pepper
2 cups prunes, pitted
3-5 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon orange blossom water
1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted

1) Put the oil, lamb chunks, peeled onion, cilantro and cinnamon stick into a wide Dutch oven. Add the saffron, ginger, a little salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Cover with 3 and 1/2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then cover and let boil for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the meat is tender and the cooking broth has become very concentrated.

2) Remove the cinnamon stick and the cilantro. Turn the meat in the sauce, and add the prunes. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, for a further 15 minutes. Stir occasionally, and add a little water if you think the tagine is becoing too dry. If the sauce is too runny, increase the heat to high and boil uncovered until reduced.

3) Stir in the honey and simmer, still covred, for 10 more minutes. Add the orange blossom water and let the tagine bubble for a minute or two. The sauce should be thick and unctuous, the meat very tender, and the prunes plumped up.

4) Taste and adjust the seasoning, if necessary. Transfer the meat to a serving dish, making sure the prunes are evenly distributed, and pour the sauce over. Sprinkle with the toasted sesame seeds and serve immediately.

Brooklyn Blogfest Is Baaaaack--June 8!

2010-05-31T13:31:00.003-04:00

Blogfest. Brooklyn. June 8, 7 p.m. I'll be there. Will you?

The 5th Annual Brooklyn Blogfest on June 8th at 7PM will be held at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Fourth Avenue and President Street in Park Slope.

Big news: Blogfest is FREE thanks to our sponsor Absolut Vodka (who are also sponsoring the awesome after-party)

--Please register for Blogfest at brooklynblogfest.com. There will be a snazzy name tag waiting for you at the Blogfest.

Daydreaming Out Loud

2010-05-04T17:43:00.006-04:00

I attended a Daydreaming Workshop back in February at the Trade School on the Lower East Side because I've been creatively blocked and was seeking inspiration. Having failed to write about the experience, I'm happy to report that Dirty Hands NY blogger Samantha Stark did--and she recorded my voice telling the bad-girl daydream I envisioned.

Samantha wrote: "Everyone picked two found images from a bucket–one had to be a 'place,' and one a 'character.' Then they got five minutes to insert themselves into the worlds they had created. Here’s one of the fantastical daydreams that came out of that exercise."

Lucky me. I don't have to do a thing now except post a link to Samantha's podcast here: Daydreaming Out Loud

And in the spirit of my daydream, here's a picture of me with a showgirl when I went to Vegas.

Pippi Longstocking Rules

2010-03-11T14:21:00.003-05:00

I just spotted this Jezebel.com post about one of my most favorite fictional Bad Girls, Pippi Longstocking.

http://jezebel.com/5490974/a-room-of-ones-own

Now I finally know what Pippi's creator, Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, looks like.

And, of course, here's what Pippi looks like:

Trees Are People, Too

2009-11-14T18:31:00.001-05:00

Illustration by Julia Yum

In 1981, Barbara Walters interviewed actress Katharine Hepburn, and they discussed what sort of person might want to become a tree.
Hepburn: I’m a very strong…I’ve become a, sort of, you know, thing…
Walters: What?
Hepburn: I don’t know what. You know, a tree, or something.
Walters: What kind of a tree are you, if you think you’re a tree?
Hepburn: Oh, I’d like, everybody would like to be an oak tree. That’s very strong and very pretty.

Miss Hepburn wasn’t the first woman with ambitions of becoming a tree. Daphne, the river god Peneus’ daughter, begged her father to turn her into a tree after the god Apollo went bonkers over her and chased her madly.

A wild child, opposed to love and marriage, Daphne felt nothing for the god of music, light and truth. She fled, her slender limbs bare in the breeze, her fluttering dress blown back, her hair streaming as she ran—and, as is the way with such things—in her flight she looked more enchanting than ever.

“And then,” writes the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, “she was at the river, swift Peneus, and called, ‘Help, father, help! If mystic power dwells in your waters, change me and destroy my baleful beauty that has pleased too well.’”
Peneus took pity and Daphne’s wish was granted. Slowly, and in poetic detail, she became a tree.

“Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs a dragging languor spread, her tender bosom was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; her feet but now so swift were anchored fast in numb stiff roots, her face had became the crown of a green tree; all that remained of Daphne was her shining loveliness.”

And yet Apollo loved her still. He wrapped his arms around her trunk and felt her beating heart beneath the bark. “My bride,” he said, “since you can never be, at least, sweet laurel, you shall be my tree.”

After a romance like that, you can see the appeal of becoming a tree. I thought I’d give it a try, with a four-step plan:

1) Assume the Tree Pose.

It’s a rare feeling to wake up alone in a cold and sunny place. Today, I will commune with the trees here in this ancient Catskills resort where I am on a yoga retreat. Now that the Jewish standup comedians have departed and the ancient vacation camps are reinventing themselves as upscale weekend escapes for stressed New Yorkers, the Catskills have become the place to go for luxury boutique hotels, spa services and kundalini breathing.

It’s mid-October, there’s a chill in this room, and I’ve got my socks on in bed. I’m waiting for Julia, my friend and yoga teacher, to knock on my door with a breakfast tray of oatmeal and coffee. Outside my cabin window smoke rises from the little lake, Lake Cynthia, named after Julia’s mother. I’ve brought a tree branch into my room and put it in a clear glass vase. Willow?

I came to the Sunny Oaks resort once before, two years ago, when the guest staying in the cabin next to mine was a 103-year-old horticulturalist named Eddie. One day, Eddie took me on a nature walk and told me the name of every wild plant growing around Lake Cynthia.

Now, I don’t want to know what has become of Eddie. I want to believe he lives forever. But Julia bursts my bubble when she mentions in passing that Eddie died at age 104. I don’t ask why or how. I prefer to believe that a loving god has turned him into a tree, and that Eddie can now be found among a stand of maple trees on Lake Cynthia’s shore. Old-growth sugar maple stands can live as long as 300 to 400 years.

“Autumn is a good time for the Tree Pose,” Julia says during our morning yoga class. “Choose a tree outside the window to focus on as you cultivate a sense of rootedness in your core.”

The Tree Pose, or Vrksasana, is one of my favorite asanas. The famous yogi B.K.S. Iyengar explains in his book Light on Yoga that the pose involves bending the leg at the knee and placing the right heel at the root of the thigh. While resting the foot on the thigh, one then joins palms and raises the arms straight over the head.

Tree Pose is a favorite of many yogis and yoginis because, let’s face it, it looks good. It looks very yoga-ish, the sort of pose that often appears pictured in yoga magazines and yoga retreat brochures. But in his terse description of the pose’s effects, Mr. Iyengar has only this to say: “The pose tones the leg muscles and gives one a sense of balance and poise.”

But then, trees don’t usually receive much attention, do they? They’re just there. Solitary, rooted and still. Silent witnesses.

2) Watch an Old Movie on TV.

One Sunday afternoon I watch Marilyn Monroe’s last film, 1961’s The Misfits, with screenplay by her ex, Arthur Miller, and see tons of tree references.

Eli Wallach in the role of Guido, a simple guy who likes to scratch, throw stones and lament his dear dead wife, announces: “She stood by me one hundred percent, uncomplaining as a tree.”

Huh.

Then later at a house party, Marilyn Monroe as the ultra-sensitive divorcee Roslyn Taber drunkenly runs off into the night, does a little improvisational dance number, then throws her arms around a tree and starts sobbing.

Also: Clark Gable as the aging love interest Guy Langland says, in a coded reference to the tree-ness of trees, “Sometimes when you don’t know what to do, the best thing is to stand still.”

3) Adopt Some Trees.

When it comes to suffering at the hands of man, trees are even more helpless than animals. They need adopting. Climate change, pollution and destruction of the rain forest have made our planet’s tree situation, well, you know, totally shitty and depressing not to say hopeless.

But at least here in NYC, tree huggers can join groups like Trees New York and MillionTreesNYC in their mission to increase the city’s tree canopy cover.
The Parks Department also plants street trees, free of charge, on sidewalks in front of homes, apartment buildings and businesses in all five boroughs. In order to request a free street tree, all you have to do is dial 311 and ask to submit a forestry request. (Or click here to request a tree online.)

Please go do it now. I’ll wait……
...........
OK, thanks.

When a bizarre tornado blew down my Brooklyn street a couple years ago, leaving a number of destroyed trees fallen in its path, some neighbors and I phoned 311, not really expecting anything to happen. But a year later, in the spring, MillionTreesNYC planted two new trees in front of our apartment building, with tags attached telling us the basics of how to care for our adopted babies:

*Water each young tree 15-20 gallons once a week between May and October.
*Carefully loosen the top 2-3 inches of soil to help water and air reach the roots.
*Spread mulch.
*Clean up litter thrown on top of baby trees’ patch of ground by obnoxious neighbors.

If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll have figured out by now that I adopted the baby trees before I planned to actually become a tree. But for the sake of telling a story using a four-bullet-point format, I’ve compressed the information and, basically, lied.

4) Become a Tree for Burning Man Decom.

I attend a Burning Man Decompression festival in October. Having spent a week in September with thousands of other people in the Black Rock Desert, the Burners aren’t ready to leave the magic behind. They gather together in cities nationwide to celebrate their days on the playa with AfterBurn reports and Decom festivals, and I join them at the Brooklyn Decom.

Full disclosure: I didn’t attend Burning Man, but I have a number of friends who did, and I love their stories of the struggle to stay hydrated and keep one’s head while all about are losing theirs to drugs, flames, deafening vibrations and desert sandstorms.

According to the Burning Man website’s essay What is Decompression?, “Before the playa dust has completely settled and our heads have stopped spinning, many of us gather in the months after Burning Man to ‘decompress’ by taking one more communal plunge into the depths of what we found so affirming and memorable at Burning Man.

I go to Floyd Bennett Field in the wilds of Canarsie, the craziest reunion I’ve ever attended, with art, performances, theme camps, techno music and hundreds of beautiful party people.

A lot of people are dressed as pirates, furry animals and horned gods with gold-flecked faces. I am the only tree.

I wear the green felt Borsalino hat my grandma gave me years ago, decorated with vine leaves I’ve snipped from a neighbor’s fence. I wind orange maple garlands from the dollar shop around my green jacket and a necklace of Swedish ivy around my neck. My trunk and roots are brown tights and brown leather boots. Voilà: I’m a tree.

As the night begins, I wander around and spot a face-painting studio. A man in a white fur hat and his assistant discuss my concept and go to work on a painstaking process that involves selecting two stencils and carefully masking them with tape, mixing paints, applying the stencils to my skin and creating two identical, feathery green-and-orange leaves that trace the lines of my cheekbones. “You’re doing God’s work,” I tell them before wandering off again.

Every now and then, I stand on the Decom dance floor, or sit on the sidelines, a solitary and silent witness, watching the human swirl pulsing around me. Human beings are almost insanely active. What’s the point? What’s so great about constant motion?
I talk about trees to a man named Geronimo who’s been to Burning Man nine years in a row. We stand on the black tarmac of Floyd Bennett Field and look out into the cold and windy night at a couple of trees outlined against the sky.

“When I got back from the desert this year,” Geronimo says, “I saw trees as flat, two-dimensional objects. They were unreal, like art objects. It took me awhile after I got back to New York to see them as three dimensional again.”

We look some more at the fully rounded trees, illuminated by street lights and dropping wet leaves on the tarmac. I tell Geronimo about how I’ve adopted two trees. “You should name them,” he says.

My sister Barb told me about a tree that has stood kitty corner from her house for years. Every fall, she sees it daily from her window and watches as the leaves change color. She also likes the trees in a public wood that we used to visit as children, and she has introduced my niece and nephew to them. “I love trees,” she says. “I have relationships with certain trees, especially trees I’ve known for years. They’re like people.”

Back to Bad-Amy Winehouse/Billie Holiday

2009-08-29T14:04:00.008-04:00

The last time I posted on Bad Girl Blog, I said I was done with my bad-girl obsession and was going to focus only on being good from now on. Well, I lied. Turns out that goodness just isn't as fun to write about as bad behavior. So I'm back to bad, at least some of the time. And even when I do write for My Good Girl Blog, there's going to be some bad mixed in.

So. Somehow that makes me think of Amy Winehouse, who I've been thinking about a lot lately, ever since I bought "Back to Black," started listening to it obsessively, and learned that she wrote all the tracks herself. I don't care what anybody else says, I think she's an exceedingly good girl. But she's at war with her demons, which makes her that much more beautiful.

I was similarly obsessed with Billie Holiday when I was younger, and so was sad to hear Amy say "Fuck her" in a 2008 interview when asked if Billie was one of her role models. I didn't believe Amy, anyway. She was probably being defensive because Billie was a poor, alcoholic junkie when she died at the age of 44 in 1959, and Amy's critics think she's headed down the same path of self-destruction, even though she's only 25. (The world is so speeded up these days.)
But you see both of them sing, and you see the same musical brilliance and emotional vulnerability.

The videos below show Amy and Billie singing songs they wrote, and their similarities are plain to see--the way they get lost in the music, their confidence while singing, the bluesy repetition of their self-destructive lyrics about the tragic and addictive gamble of love that makes you hurt.

Here's Amy, in Love Is a Losing Game: "Played out by the band/Love is a losing hand/More than I could stand/Love is a losing hand/Self-professed, profound/Till the chips were down/Though you're a gambling man/Love is a losing hand"

And here's Billie, in Fine and Mellow: "Love will make you drink and gamble/Make you stay out all night long/Love will make you do things/That you know is wrong/Treat me right baby/I'll stay home everyday/But you're so mean to me baby/I know you're gonna drive me away"

I Have A New Good Girl Blog!

2009-02-17T16:29:00.004-05:00

The Bad Girl Project may be finished, but I have more to say. Check out my new blog: Good Girl Blog

Since 2006, I've used Bad Girl Blog to study what it means to be a wild woman--and to think about whether being bad is good. With the new blog, I'll step through the mirror and look at what it means for a woman to be virtuous in the 21st century. I'm not sure what that means, but it should be fun trying to figure it out. See you on my new blog.

What Happens After The End?

2009-01-19T12:47:00.004-05:00

If you've been a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't written anything here in the last two months. That's because my Bad Girl Project is over. I'm at a creative stopping point, and I don't know where to go next.

There was a time in my life when wicked women of history had lessons to teach me, lessons I was hungry for because I was struggling and needed some direction. They helped me work through my feelings of hurt and anger. I came to understand the positive, emotional pull of satanic worship. But that was then, and now I'm not feeling hurt and angry anymore. I'm content with where my life is, and now I'm looking for lessons elsewhere. Lessons of hope, love and progress. (President Obama's inauguration is tomorrow. We're all in a new era.)

I've enjoyed blogging, but posting on Bad Girl Blog feels false to me now. Now, when I'm more interested in yoga, spirituality, family, friends and hard work. I'm not even sure what to write about anymore. I don't know how to write about yoga etc., and anyway, I'm writing for a living now, and the last thing I want to do in my free time is write. I just want to experience the physicality of living without documenting it. Here's me in the tree pose on a yoga retreat in Morocco last September:

Maybe someday I'll write a Good Girl Blog....

Meanwhile, here's Antony Hegarty singing "U Are My Sister":

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #11 (Mae West)

2008-11-08T19:52:00.010-05:00

We move to New York City—me, Dave and our cat—and a new adventure begins. By now, I’ve become well versed in the ways of the bad girls. I’m tougher and stand up for myself, but with a joyful sense of self-confidence. Like a true bad girl, I’ve learned to roll with the punches and look for the pleasure in any situation.

My new role model these days is Mae West, that blonde siren of the silver screen, who brimmed with pure self-love until the day she died. More than any of the other bad girls I’ve researched, Mae is absolute self-invention. And it wasn’t until she was a grown woman of thirty-nine that she arrived in Hollywood to take her first film test. I adore Mae’s wit, heat and toughness. Plus, she was a Brooklyn girl, which is what I’ve become since I started living here.

Mae lived on her own terms, and she willfully ignored her critics and the bad news they delivered. The story goes that during the filming of her first role, a smaller part in Night After Night with George Raft, Mae rewrote all her lines and insisted that the camera pacing give her ample time to work what she called her “extraordinary sex-personality.”

Early in her career, when she was preparing for a show she had written called Sex, the director Edward Elsner slowed her down enough to analyze her style. Stopping Mae in mid-stride, he made her repeat movements to help her understand the ironic comedy her body was producing. He told Mae that her star power came from the way she used her body and voice, that she exuded a strange and amusing charm he had never seen before.
“You have a definite sexual quality, gay and unrepressed. It even mocks you personally,” he said.

“A self-mocking sex quality?” Mae responded. “I mean, does it overshadow the part?”
“You reek with it,” he said. “You have it all over you.”

“Mae,” I say. “Talk to me. Tell me it’s all good. Give me some wisdom to cope.”

And Mae says: “I have never wanted to be anyone other than me. Why would I when half the world was trying to imitate me? There was the time when my fans, from eight to eighty, tried to look like me, to walk like me, act like me, even feel like me. Too bad everybody just can’t be themselves and be happy about it. I am. Remember that once popular song, ‘I love me, I love me’? Baby, that’s me.”

Here I am in New York, the center of the universe. I’ve got my man, my friends and my neighbors all around me. Unlike Mae, though, I’m a simple girl. I carry my groceries home on foot because we don’t own a car, and I’m on the gardening committee of our co-op building. I don't sleep on pink satin sheets.

Yes, life is good. And now I’m learning how to belly dance. I'm shimmying. I would love to have seen Mae do the “Shimmy Shawobble” live. I would have loved to shimmy with her. The soft and fluid sensuality of belly dancing suits me much better than the dramatic stamping of Lola Montez’s flamenco. Like Mae, I know how good it is to be firmly embedded in the skin you’re wriggling around in and loving it.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #10 (Victoria Woodhull)

2008-11-02T17:01:00.005-05:00

I have sworn never to marry again, and Dave doesn’t believe in marriage.

Still, he proposes to me, reasoning that we love each other and want to be together, and the only way we can live in the same country is if we’re married.

I say no. I’ve been studying Victoria Woodhull, notorious in the Victorian era for her free love views, and she helps me remember what slavery marriage can be.

For two months Dave keeps proposing, every time we talk during our tearful trans-Atlantic phone conversations, and I keep saying no, lecturing him on what slavery marriage can be, quoting Victoria: “I am a Free Lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere!”

Noting that Victoria was a clairvoyant with a close personal relationship to the powers of the air, I also go looking for answers with a visit to a gypsy fortuneteller on Rush Street. The woman gives me the once-over--I'm fortyish, with no wedding ring—-and she charges me for a ten-dollar palm reading.

“You have a difficult time with men," she says.

“Oh, that is so true,” I say. "That is so true,” and I start to weep.

“You have good luck from God,” she says, “but bad luck from people. You need someone to pray for you, someone who knows the right prayers. I can do it for you weekly for six months, fifty dollars each visit.”

I get out of there as fast as I can, and Dave snorts derisively when I phone him up and tell him about the gypsy.

“She wanted you to pay her to pray? What, you don’t have any family who can pray for you? Why don’t you pay her to go to church for you? And then when you die, you’ll go to heaven because you paid her,” he says. “You have to decide for yourself whether you want to marry me.”

So. I tell Dave yes, I do want to marry him, because I love him (similarly, Victoria said yes to an Englishman after saying she was against marriage), and as I say yes I wonder what the hell I’m doing.

We apply for Dave’s fiancé visa, he packs up his worldly possessions, flies to Chicago, and within five days of his arrival we marry. Our marriage is surprisingly convincing and our friends and family say we make a cute couple.

Bella even says that Dave and I look alike. We’re both short, we wear glasses, we hold hands on the bus and shop at the dollar store. After sleeping in other people’s beds for so long, it’s fantastic to finally be together and play house in a home of our own.

You could say that my story ends here, because I have found love and happiness. And yet, I’m still drawn to the Bad Girls Project. It doesn’t feel finished to me. Now that I have the basics, I want to achieve the big stuff, like higher spirituality, creative meaning and more money. I go back to studying the life of Victoria Woodhull in the hopes of learning some important lessons I can apply to my own life.

A suffragette psychic and a former prostitute, Victoria in 1870 ran for US President on a platform of vegetarianism, labor reform, spiritualism, liberal divorce laws, legalized prostitution and free love. She was a kook, basically, a kook with a strong belief in herself, and she never held back on speaking her mind, to the point where she was thrown into jail on obscenity charges.

Victoria was all about mastery of self. She saw that New York was a city on the make, full of people striving for fame and riches, and shortly after arriving there in 1868, she and her sister Tennessee Celeste took a carriage ride to the Washington Place mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in America, where they presented their calling cards and announced that they were lady miracle-healers newly arrived in New York. Taken by the young ladies’ good looks, and in accordance with his policy of allowing any spiritualist to cross his threshold, he welcomed the sisters into his home and became a classic sugar daddy to the girls.

Tennessee, a juicy sensualist, practiced the magnetic-healing arts on him, laying her hands all over his body and manipulating his prostate. He doted on her enema-administering ways, and in short order Tennie became Vanderbilt’s mistress. As for Vickie, she began to commune regularly with the spirit of Vanderbilt’s dead mother, who gave him stock advice and also told him to give Vickie the $7,500 she needed to start up the Woodhull, Claflin & Co. brokerage house on Wall Street.

Hmm, interesting. I can see a lesson for me in this: for a kooky free spirit, Victoria did very well for herself. She took risks, not always sure of their outcome, and was always reinventing herself.

And so when a Wall Street investment bank comes knocking on my door, offering me an editorial job in New York City with a Wall Street-size annual bonus package and all relocation costs fully paid by the company, I consult with the unseen powers of the air and Dave, and accept the position.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was Vickie’s Gilded Age sugar daddy, and J.P. Morgan is mine in this modern age of multinational corporate capitalism.

Bellydancers for Obama

2008-10-25T21:23:00.005-04:00

If the crazies are correct, Barack Obama is a Muslim Arab. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Why, just last night I attended a "Bellydancers for Obama" fundraiser at the Je"Bon Noodle House on St. Marks Place. The music and dancing were fantastic, and we did our part in filling Obama's campaign coffers!

"Because you know he needs the support a bunch of bellydancers!" said our hostess, Leela Corman. Bellydancers For Obama

Dancers include Nadia Moussa, Thalia, Ranya, Andrea Mistress of Bioluminosity, Alura, Amantha, Mark Balahadia, Leela, Melissa Voodoo, Tandava, Najla, Amy, Zahira, and Anarkali.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #9 (Catherine the Great)

2008-10-19T17:51:00.003-04:00

Catherine the Great had a taste for handsome young men. She called her boyfriends “favorites,” and she had quite a few of them. The sweetest one of all was a twenty-one-year-old soldier in the royal guard, Alexander Lanskoi, who fell desperately in love with the fifty-year-old empress. She was in love with him, too, though she didn’t take him seriously at first because he was so young.

As for me, I’m forty-one and the boy I met on the dance floor, Dave, is twenty-five. “I’m not so sure I should see him again,” I tell Denise. “I just want to live in the moment, and last night was a moment that has passed.”

“Oh, that’s not right, Joyce,” she says. “That’s not in the spirit of the free-party movement. You have to call Dave because you felt a connection with him.”

So. I call Dave, and we arrange to meet again in Leicester, where he lives. During the journey there I wonder what I’m doing. A few days later, on the third anniversary of my marriage to Jack, I’m still with Dave, lying under a thin duvet on a lumpy, sheet-free mattress.

Kent is concerned. The Bad Girls Project was his idea, but my interest in Dave is a sign that I’ve gone overboard. I’m so immersed in the bad girls that they’re always with me now, like brushing my teeth or thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch.
“I’m worried about you, Joycie,” he says. “Who is this Dancefloor Dave character, anyway?”

“He’s my guy, that’s who. He likes football, music and people.”

“Isn’t he a bit too young for you?”

My answer is that Catherine the Great liked younger man—and I want to spend as much time as possible with Dave. He’s fun. It’s uncomplicated. And Dave feels so familiar, like I’ve known him forever. There’s no explaining it, and Dave isn’t a big talker. When he does talk, his blunt honesty makes me laugh.

“I’ve never met another kisser who matches me so well,” I gush.

“Oh, is it a long list?”

Sadly, my time in London is coming to a close because Kent won’t fund my bad-girls research anymore. Is he jealous of Dave? Wonderfully, I don’t particularly care; I can well take care of myself.

One night, as Dave and I are lying around in Kent’s bed on Elgin Crescent, we get an unexpected phone call. Kent has just returned from a trip, is driving home from the airport, and wants us to be out of the flat. We throw our bags together, spend a few weeks at a trashy hotel in Bayswater, and then we say goodbye. Dave’s heading off for a year of travel in Southeast Asia and New Zealand.

He asks me to come with him, but I can’t because I’m broke. And very sad. I go back to Chicago to look for a job, and Dave promises to come see me there in nine months’ time. I don’t believe him.

I throw myself back into my research, focusing on Catherine the Great. Her first marriage was not for love, but for the good of the empire, which was fine for Russia, but not for Catherine. Yes, she was a power-hungry monarch with a brilliant political career, but I’m more interested in her love for a much younger man who simply made her happy.

Catherine couldn’t quite believe that Alexander Lanskoi was seriously in love with her, and because she thought she was in control of the situation, she went off on a dating binge in search of a new favorite. When Alexander got wind of it, he freaked out and showed up at her chambers, sobbing. She let him in reluctantly, and he told her he couldn't believe she could just walk away from a love that made them both so happy. How could she do that to him, to them? Stunned and amazed, Catherine took her baby back into her arms, loving him for the rest of his short life.

I go off on a dating binge of my own in Chicago, trying to forget Dave by going out with guys who remind me of him: a British man, a few younger men and a dancer who’s having a fight with his girlfriend. Time passes, one of the younger blokes becomes my boyfriend, I email Dave to tell him the news, and I get a phone call from Australia.

“I can't believe that you could love somebody else the way you love me,” Dave sobs.

“You can’t just walk away from our love. When I’m with you, I feel normal.”

“But you disappeared on me for nine months,” I sob back. “What was I supposed to think? I had to get on with my life.”

“I can get on a plane tonight, and I’ll see you in Chicago in two days.”

“Oh, god.”

“I’m going to book the ticket today.”

“Oh, god.”

Dave comes to Chicago, we remember why we love each other, we decide that being together could never work, we break up, Dave leaves, we miss each other, he returns, we break up, we spend a holiday in France, we go to England, we break up. In between, we call each other and have phone sex and cry. For a year we go on like this.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #8 (Empress Theodora of Constantinople)

2008-10-05T16:24:00.003-04:00

A beautiful girl steps onto center stage. She strips off her clothes and stands nude in front of her audience, wearing nothing but a look of bold defiance on her face. The audience has come from miles around to witness this 16-year-old’s sensational act at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. They watch, bewitched, as she artfully arranges herself in a spread-eagle position on the floor.

A drum sounds. Servants appear from both sides of the stage and sprinkle barley grains over her naughty bits. The servants retire to the wings, leaving the girl exposed and alone. She claps her hands. Cages of hungry geese are rolled out onto the stage and released. The audience roars as the birds flock round her body and devour the grains one by one from her young flesh. She laughs, twisting with pleasure, until every grain is gone. Then she stands proudly, her eyes impassive, her laughter subsiding to just the trace of a smile. The crowd cheers her wantonness and she takes a bow.

Summer is over, the “art colony” is on hiatus, and I’m back in London. This city is a dark and nervously contained place. Why do London men shave their heads? They’re so oppressively Anglo-Saxon, avoiding eye contact. They can’t see my shimmering French sparkle, my long hair, my tan, my sandals, my chiffon harem pants. I feel too sunny for this town, so I dim the lights and don something dark, choosing the Empress Theodora of Constantinople as my new bad girl guide. Her strangely distant past is vague, with the only history written about her a “secret history” by the Byzantine court historian Procopius, who suggests that she was nothing more than an insatiable nymphomaniac.

According to Procopius, Theodora often went to parties with ten or more sex-obsessed men, all at the peak of their physical powers, and she would spend the night screwing them in every conceivable position. When she had thoroughly exhausted her lovers, she would turn her attention to the thirty or so servants in the room and have sex with them, too. “But not even so could she satisfy her lust,” Procopius writes. “Though she brought three bodily apertures into service, she often found fault with Nature, grumbling that Nature had not made the openings in her nipples wider than is normal, so that she could devise another variety of intercourse in that region. Naturally she was frequently pregnant, but by using all the tricks of the trade she was able to induce immediate abortion.”

Procopius’ moralizing is pretty hilarious. Clearly, he hated Theodora for enjoying herself and getting Emperor Justinian to marry her even though she was a big Byzantine whore. He claimed that she was much given to black magic, and that it was through love philtres and the diabolic arts that she kept Justinian enslaved. Theodora’s boudoir was covered in dozens of bearskins, upon which she luxuriated sensuously as she entertained her customers. Her jokes were lewd, she wiggled her hips a lot, and the money poured in. “Never was anyone so completely given up to unlimited self-indulgence.”

Too right. I start to visit Denise, the office manager at Kent’s music studio. Denise is a living bad girl with purple dreadlocks and a huge love of techno music, and I start to live my own secret history in a time of dancing, rebellion and London night life.

I hang out with Denise and her friends in a scene that’s all new to me: techno music, free parties in abandoned warehouses, late nights that carry into the next afternoon and cat-and-mouse games with the police officers who are attempting to enforce the latest, free-party-killing version of the UK Criminal Justice Act. Every weekend and sometimes during the week, Denise plays big mama to the squatters, anarchists, crusties and ex-junkies who come round to her flat in Finsbury Park.

Some day, Denise tells me, she will buy a fine rig so she can become a deejay diva and get busy blasting underground sounds to the free-party nation. Denise drives us one night to an ugly funk show in a club near Elephant and Castle, where I meet a sweet and smiling boy named Dave. One look at his beaming face from across the dance floor tells me that he’s nothing like the scowling, shaven-headed men of London. “That boy’s not from around here,” I say to myself just before we meet and spend the next five hours dancing.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #7 (Ninon de Lenclos)

2008-09-26T10:45:00.005-04:00

I was a French major in college and lived in France for two years when I was in my twenties. Now that I’m talking with Le Mazel’s guests and neighbors and dealing with bureaucrats at the post office, I’m seeing the re-emergence of the French-speaking side of my personality—the one I had forgotten when I was in New York in my thirties, swallowed up in the pursuit of a career as a journalist and the search for a suitable husband.

French people really do know how to enjoy life, it’s true. I’m certainly enjoying life more now. Every morning is fine when you don’t have to go to a job but can just spend a couple of hours eating breakfast and reading on a sunny terrace visited by fat bumblebees and butterflies. We also have a nighttime terrace where we eat snails and look at stars.

My spiritual guide during this time is Ninon de Lenclos, a 17th-century Parisian courtesan who was known for running a school of love and giving great dinner parties. Her salons at the Hotel Sagonne on the rue des Tournelles gave rise to the myth of Ninon as an enchantress, and she chose her salon guests with as much care as she chose her lovers. Some were both, of course, including Louis II de Bourbon, the Marquis de Sévigné and his son, and the Comte Gaspard de Coligny. The Comte’s wife also was a salon guest as were playwrights Jean Racine and Molière, poet Bernard de Fontenelle, painter Nicolas Mignard (who used Ninon as one of his models), writer Jean de la Fontaine and cleric François le Métel de Boisrobert. Yes, a cleric. Ninon didn’t discriminate against theologians—arguing with them amused her.
I gain strength from Ninon, a classic bad girl who never married and lived to a ripe old age pleasing herself with no apologies. She was a devoted friend, but her lovers came and went. People said she had three classes of admirers: payers, martyrs and favorites. She's still revered in France for being a brainy sexpot from the time of the Bourbon kings who wrote witty little maxims such as: “A sensible woman will consult her reason before she takes a husband, but her heart when she takes a lover.”

As for me, my summer at Le Mazel is starting to feel like my summer of love—a sometimes disastrous summer of love, but my summer of love just the same. I’ve passed the six-month mark of running away from my husband, and my hormones are starting to kick into overdrive. I need a boyfriend, and now I’m asking myself, “What would Ninon do?”

On one special weekend in late June, Denise, a techno deejay and Kent's office manager, visits us from London. During all the fun, wine and music, I start to notice Erik more and more, the only boy out there on the terrace, so his maleness is imprinted on me and I fall in love with him. Oops.

Of an evening, Erik would rather sweep the kitchen floor, dry the dishes I’ve washed, and chat amiably about intentional communities and how he and the young wife he hasn’t met yet are going to raise their someday children amidst organic goats and chickens in the European countryside. This pleasant conversing is nice, and helps me remember how nice men can be, unlike my mad drunk of a soon-to-be ex-husband. But it’s not enough.

I try to be like Ninon and just think of Erik as one of the many available, sexy men in my life. Lalala. Bella’s French boyfriend, Jean-Michel, advises me to sneak into the young Texan’s bedroom one night and jump his bones, confident courtesan-style, but I just can’t do it.

I can’t do it, Ninon or no Ninon. But that summer I also meet Nigel, one of Kent’s friends from the London music scene, and we go out together—once. It’s lovely because it’s the first time I’ve had been kissed since I ran away from Jack, but it’s also a mistake because now Nigel’s maleness has imprinted itself on me, and I can’t get him out of my head, even though he’s gone back to London. What would Ninon do? What would Ninon do?

“Bella,” I say. “I’m thinking about going down to the pay phone in Banne and calling Nigel in London.”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea, Joyce? I mean, technically speaking, Nigel was a one-time fling.”

“Huh? One-time fling? We had a real connection. Anyway, I wasn’t just snogging Nigel. I was romancing myself, like Kent says I should do. It’s got nothing to do with Nigel. I’m just like Ninon de Lenclos. I’m empowered. I choose my own lovers.”

“Ninon de Lenclos was a prostitute, Joyce.”

“She was a courtesan! There’s a big difference.”

“You’re really under the influence, aren’t you?”

Sigh. Silence. Some summer of love this is turning out to be. Maybe it’s time for me to forget about these boys and start looking for a new bad girl.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #6 (Mai Zetterling)

2008-09-16T14:55:00.000-04:00

I go to the Cévennes Mountains of France, where Kent has a little château in a mountaintop hamlet. Called Le Mazel, the house is an eerie and magical place, and its previous owner, a Swedish actress and film director named Mai Zetterling, still makes her presence known here even though she’s been dead for a few years. Kent discovered Le Mazel through his lost love Ava, who met Mai through her mother and spent summers here as a child.

Le Mazel is a house of many rooms built in the 1840s by a coal mine owner, but the mine shut down long ago, and the remote region of les Cévennes is now home to local montagnards, French hippies and a few passing Dutch and Parisian tourists. To get to the house, you have to travel up a winding, pine-needle-covered dirt road that seems to go on forever. It’s so beautiful and secluded that the first night I arrive at Le Mazel, when the warm wind is gently caressing the house’s stone walls and the interior is filled with candlelight, I can’t believe how lucky I am to be spending the whole summer here.

Most days at Le Mazel, it’s just me and two painters rattling around in our newly founded art colony, where we live in squalid splendor among the remains of Mai’s estate. Painter No. 1 is Bella, a longtime girlfriend of mine, and painter No. 2 is Erik, a friendly young Texan recently graduated from art school. Bella likes to travel and her boyfriend is French, so I invited her to join me here when Kent said he was looking for artists. Bella knows me so well—sometimes too well—but her presence at Le Mazel is tremendously comforting. Erik is the mystery card, but he’s young and fun and eager to learn French, so he adds life to our little party.

Mai left Le Mazel in a hurry in 1994, when she took what she thought would be a quick trip to London for treatment of cancer, but she never returned. Everything she owned—a pack of cheroots on the table, her fur coat on a chair, the table, the chair, everything—stayed in the house until Kent bought it in 1999. I’m sure her spirit resides at Le Mazel, especially since she’s buried beneath a tree in a field next to the house.

I spend the summer of 2000 cooking and eating in Mai’s kitchen, breaking more than a few of her wineglasses, writing on her desk, bathing in her enormous tub and sleeping in her bed. I can see from all the photos she left behind that Mai was a classically beautiful Scandinavian ice princess, and yet her autobiography and the short stories she wrote as well as the books in her library show that she was a classically feminist nonconformist.

She was a “wild child” as a girl, she says, eager to escape the numbing poverty and intellectual emptiness of her hometown in Sweden. Considering my own Scandinavian roots, Mai’s story fascinates me, and I feel like I have a personal connection to her thanks to our shared genetic history. I love to look at her face.

“Bella! Come here! Look at this picture of Mai I just found. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Gorgeous. They just don’t make actresses like that anymore, do they?”

“I wish I could look so glamorous. Did I tell you about my theory that Mai and I are actually related, that she’s a long-lost member of my Swedish tribe, and that my grandmother and her mother were cousins?”

“Fascinating, Joycie. Your mind works in such mysterious ways.”

Early in her career, Mai showed great talent and starred in an Ingmar Bergman film, Music in the Dark, before moving on to a solid film career in Britain, where she acted in and directed a number of movies. Briefly in the 1950s she went to Hollywood, where she had a big love affair with Tyrone Power, but she made only one movie there because she couldn’t stomach the artificiality of the place. Her co-star, Danny Kaye, called her “refreshingly different from my usual leading ladies,” and it’s this refusal to fit in that adds to Mai’s appeal for me.

“Oh, that Mai,” I say, chuckling appreciatively, as I read select passages of her autobiography to Bella. “She really was the black sheep of the family.”

Also judging from the photos, Mai went from being a glamorous film star to a proud, independent woman who cared less and less about society and its expectations as she grew old in the Cévennes. And again, there’s that family connection—Mai looked a lot like my Swedish-born Aunt Helga in the later stages of her life. Spooky. “I have been a child, a girl, a party doll, a mistress, a wife, a mother, a professional woman, a virgin and a grandmother,” Mai wrote in 1985. “I have been a woman for more than fifty years and yet I have never been able to discover precisely what it is I am, how real I am.”

Despite Mai’s quest for authenticity, she never seemed to attain that goal because she dreamed so big. Having met her son, her ex-husband and her ex-lover, Kent has all kinds of stories about what Mai was actually like: hard on herself as well as the people around her. Mai herself admits as much in her autobiography, several copies of which are lying around Le Mazel, which Mai describes in a 1981 journal entry as “my home: a ramshackle castle, perched on an iron rock.”

Everybody who stays at the house enjoys gossiping about Mai as if she were still alive. And when we talk about my Bad Girls Project, people point out that Mai herself was a bad girl. During long, wine-drenched parties, we scare ourselves by summoning the spirit of Mai to join us at the dinner table. Erik is convinced that he’s seen Mai’s ghost, and he starts to wear her hat, robe and crystal amulet.

Mai’s presence here is strong. There’s no television, phone or computer at the house, and when I’m seeking a little entertainment, I paw through her office papers, steal the books off her shelves and snoop through her film stills and family snapshots. The more I see and read, the more I understand everybody’s point about Mai being a bad girl.

And yet I’m living under her roof and gazing at the same mountain views she saw when she lived at Le Mazel. For the first time since my studies began, I understand that bad girls were flesh-and-blood human beings whose joys and struggles were real. Maybe Mai was tough to be around, but she was so full of love that it overwhelmed her sometimes. I recognize her Scandinavian stoicism and craving for solitude, and there’s plenty of room for both here in this French villa, especially at night when all the guests have gone away.

And yet, daylight does follow. On summer mornings Le Mazel is filled with flowers. Like me, Mai had a feeling for flowers. “A large pink camellia is in flower in a bright terracotta pot; the red of the sun makes the petals shiver,” she wrote shortly after the end of her final marriage. “The first swallows have arrived and whiz past me with excited shrieks. I join them in their excitement and shout to the sky: ‘I have survived, survived, survived.’”

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #5 (Bessie Smith)

2008-09-06T15:21:00.005-04:00

Every day, I set out with my sack lunch and a sense of serious purpose to the British Library, a safe and magnificent place, so I can learn about women behaving badly. The ones I’m attracted to are rebellious, don’t care if they shock people, are bad wives and worse mothers, control their own finances, enjoy sex, are vain and generally don’t like other women, are drawn to youth and fun, and can be seductively charming or nastily abusive depending on their mood.

And now here comes Bessie Smith, the wild and pure blues-singing diva of the 1920s who lived, loved, ate, drank and dreamed music. Bessie was six feet tall, weighed about two hundred pounds, and got into a lot of fistfights because she also had a talent for punching people. I enjoyed meeting Lola, Isabelle and Theodora, but Bessie is the uncompromisingly unapologetic bad girl I’ve been looking for.

Her voice was so loud she didn’t need to sing with a microphone, and her commitment to singing the blues was inseparable from who she was. What she loved best was to disappear for a few days, get drunk with some new friends, and then sing for them when she felt like it, when some thought crossed her mind and she had the words of a song to fit the mood. She’d lapse into a pleasant state of oblivion, take a few more sips of corn liquor or hits off a reefer, and wait for inspiration to strike again. Then in the morning, she would go to church and sing with more conviction than anyone in the choir.

Exploring Bessie gives me the opportunity to look at the issues of self-will and creativity in my own life. She was a sensitive artist, but tough. Every day, she fought to sing and be heard.

Hmm. How can I be heard? I conduct an experiment at the bar of Home House, a private club on Portman Square in Marylebone, where Kent is a member. Built as a palace of entertainment for the Countess of Home in the 18th century, it has four well-appointed drawing rooms, a grand staircase and a garden for dining al fresco, and it’s all very posh. Surely, an 18th-century Georgian countess had to have been a bit of a bad girl herself, and there are indeed loads of bedrooms upstairs for guests who stay the night.
But on the night in question, I stay at the bar to have a drink and a look around.

Ever since I left Jack, I’ve been drinking more. I don’t have to be the sober one now, which is a big relief. It’s a drag trying to balance out your partner’s crazy binges by assuming the role of a purse-lipped teetotaler when you know your body is built for moderation and you can enjoy a few drinks without turning into a chronic drunk.
The Countess of Home’s pleasure palace has turned into a stuffy club for music producers and investment bankers, a club in desperate need of a little excitement.

Hmm. What would Bessie do here? Bessie was no stranger to posh joints, where the New York swells of the Roaring Twenties would invite her to sing for their amusement. As if she was some kind of Negro freak show. Screw ‘em.

One of Bessie’s biggest fans, the music promoter Carl Van Vechten, invited her to sing in his Manhattan apartment one night, and Bessie showed up in a limousine, wearing her white ermine coat and escorted by her piano player, Porter Granger. She sang a few songs, the white folks clapped and cooed appreciatively, and all was well until Bessie started to knock back the whiskey and keep on drinking between songs.

Granger knew her drinking was cause for worry, and after playing one last song, he gently coaxed Bessie into her coat and started to steer her to the front door. They almost made it there when Van Vechten’s wife, a pretty little Russian actress named Fania Marinoff, threw her arms impulsively around Bessie’s neck and said, “Miss Smith, you’re not leaving without kissing me goodbye.”

Bessie, who was bisexual and under different circumstances might have enjoyed the little Russian’s advances, was in no mood for love. “Get the fuck away from me,” she said, pushing Marinoff flat on her ass. “I ain’t never heard of such shit.”

What would Bessie have done at Home House? Would she have talked to the bloated, middle-aged drunk sitting next to her, the drunk who looks like he still has a bit of the schoolboy in him, the drunk with the floppy blond fringe (that’s “bangs,” in American—I’ve been enriching my vocabulary here in London)?

I give him a sideways glance and he gives me one back. I turn to him.
“Hello. You’re looking quite shambolic tonight.”

“Is that a Yank accent I detect? What’s a Yank doing in Home House? Shouldn’t you be at home, planning for the next war?”

He launches into an anti-American political rant, yammering on about military buildup and the CIA, etc.—the same diatribe I’ve heard from a dozen other drunks in a dozen other pubs. I’m tired of this shit.

“Why don't you shut up before I slap you upside your head.”

“Sorry?”

“Sorry is what you’re gonna be in a minute,” I say, giving him a coy smile to make up for my harsh words.

“You’re a feisty one,” he says as his eyes light up.

He thinks I’m flirting with him. Ah, what the hell—in for a penny, in for a pound.

“You’re a naughty boy tonight, aren’t you, Clive? What’s your name, anyway? Gilbert, Chervil, Reginald? You need a proper seeing-to, don’t you, Reggie?”

“Derek, miss. May I buy you another drink?”

“May I buy you another drink, please.”

“Please, miss.”

“Yes, you may, Derek darling. And then you can...”

“Joycie, there you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

It’s Kent, thank god. I didn’t know where I was headed with this one.

“It’s time to go,” Kent says, ignoring the shambolic drunk with the floppy fringe. “We’re going to Black’s.”

“Is that some kind of racist remark?”

“No, baby, it’s a restaurant. Come on, let’s go. I’m hungry, and you need some food, too.”

The next morning, I’m disgusted with myself for having eaten a huge portion of steak and kidney pie with chips. It’s offset by my delight at having been so wicked with the drunk at the bar. Still, I realize that bad girls are women of substance who don’t just spend their time hanging around in bars. Wondering what else I might be capable of doing, I decide that my only way forward is to keep studying the bad girls. I’m not sure who will inspire me next, but I’m very curious to meet her.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #4 (Elizabeth Chudleigh)

2008-09-06T15:05:00.010-04:00

It’s springtime in London, and Kent and I run around to restaurants, pubs and private clubs, where we drink red wine, smoke cigarettes late into the night and gossip, comparing our love histories. Kent introduces me to his single friends, thus providing me an opportunity to flirt with boys, and he tells me about Ava, his muse, who inspired the Bad Girls Project and nearly made Kent end his marriage to C.

“I worked all the time before I met her, but with Ava I felt free again,” Kent says. “She was such a free spirit, she could make anything fun—just lying on the lumpy mattress in her little flat, talking about art and life. We were in a world of our own.”

“She sounds lovely, Kenty, but what did that do to C.?”

“Well, it wasn’t an easy time for us.”

No, I guess not. But who am I to judge? At the moment, I’m a pleasure-seeker. It’s what I love best about London: the people I’m meeting here aren’t all hung up on morality and the work ethic. Like they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, I’m living one day at a time, only the Twelve Step program I’m running for myself replaces alcoholism with me constantly worrying and obsessing over everything in my life. I’ve admitted that I’m powerless over my addiction to control, my life has become unmanageable, and a power greater than me—namely, the spirit of the Bad Girls Project—can restore me to sanity.

My pleasure seeking isn’t about dating men, however. I’m more interested in food, drink, tobacco, staying up late and cultivating dreamy little crushes on people, places and things. I dream one night of a nice man who helps me fix my car. At the flat on Elgin Crescent, a sexy, silvery gray tomcat wanders in every now and then and lets me caress him for awhile until he gets bored and leaves. I flirt with a married man until he tries to kiss me. That was fun—now go away, please. It would be nice to be in love again, but I don’t want the emotional drama that goes with it. I don’t even have the nerve to pick up the phone and call my husband.

I suppose my biggest crush of all right now is Kent.

He may be my first cousin, but he’s also my muse, and it’s not clear whether he chose me or I chose him. But I do know I’m wildly fond of him. He’s a musician and a materialist (in an artistic way), opinionated and handsome. A big man, Kent takes up a lot of space, and I don’t care if some people call him the Duke of Kent behind his back and say he likes living in England because he’s a royalist.

Being around Kent gives me a taste for the aristocracy. At the British Library, I find loads of information about the British Peerage, much of it detailing the bad behavior of the Marquess of This and the Countess of That. My favorite is Elizabeth Chudleigh, a bigamous duchess from Georgian England who was the subject of a scandalous divorce trial. I like her because she was a sloppy drunk with a gambling problem. As a maid of honour to the Princess of Wales in 1747, she rampaged all over London—drinking, betting, screwing noblemen of King George II’s court and wearing see-through dresses—after her secret marriage and pregnancy were revealed.

“Miss Chudleigh’s dress, or rather undress, was remarkable,” sniffed Mrs. Montagu, a lady in attendance at a Venetian Jubilee masqued ball held at the Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea. “She was Iphigeneia awaiting sacrifice, but so naked that the high priest might easily have inspected the entrails of his victim. The maids of honour were so offended that they would not speak to her.”

Not that the opinions of the Mmes. Montagu of the world mattered a bit to Elizabeth Chudleigh. In fact, her bad behavior won her a marriage proposal from a duke, even though she was still technically married to her first husband, and this teaches me a very important lesson about saying a big “no” to the bourgeois world of convention and respectability. I buy myself a tight, trashy leopard-print dress and sashay around London in it. I flirt with Kent’s friends—musicians, TV producers, landed gentry in Lincolnshire—especially the guys with the plummiest, most artistocratic accents.

“Joycie, do you really think you have bad girl potential? Could you really be that bad?” Kent asks in the lord of the manor style that he developed to compensate for being an American when he arrived on English shores twenty years ago. Kent is such a dandy. He wears bespoke suits around the house and gets his hair colored by a stylist, which he started doing back when he was in a New Romantics rock band.

“I don’t know, Kent. Do you have bad girl potential? I guess I am pretty sure I do but I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what ‘bad girl’ means. You tell me. Do you need me to be a bad girl? What did Ava do to you, anyway? Why was she such a bad girl? You must like bad girls, or you wouldn’t keep talking about them.”

Elizabeth Chudleigh lived as she pleased without having to pay for it in the end. Indeed, she ended her days partying with royals in Europe and throwing around the duke’s money after he died, much to his family’s chagrin. Still, she led a bit of an empty existence. And her politics were all wrong, I’m sure.

They say that the super-rich and the super-poor have a lot in common: amorality, promiscuity, substance abuse, disdain for education and work. With my next bad girl, I want to find a hard-scrabble streetfighter who had to invent herself from scratch.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #3 (Isabelle Eberhardt)

2008-08-31T15:52:00.006-04:00

A Russian Jew who converted to Islam, Isabelle Eberhardt ran off to the Sahara Desert in 1899 when she was 22, served as a war correspondent for an Algerian newspaper, dressed as a man and called herself Si Mahmoud, slept with Arab boys, routinely smoked kif, and drank absinthe and chartreuse until she fell asleep on the dirt floor of whatever random café she happened to be passing through.

“I detest cultivated green country full of crops,” she wrote in a journal entry during her travels. “Why do I have this morbid craving for a barren land and desert wastes? Why do I prefer nomads to villagers, beggars to rich people? Aie yie yie! For me, unhappiness is a sort of spice.”

Isabelle is incomprehensibly foreign to me, which is why she’s my new bad girl as I start life over again in a strange place. I’m in London, reflecting on what has brought me to this point in my life and why I’m here. Sure, I could blame Jack for causing my life crisis, but that would be the easy way out. There’s a reason why I chose him, something in me that wanted his drama and our failure. Maybe I didn’t really want to be in a traditional marriage, and by marrying Jack I guaranteed that would never happen.

Maybe I’m a bad girl myself, which is why the Bad Girls Project resonates so strongly with me. Now I’m free to enjoy the travel experience with Isabelle Eberhardt, and I can spend hours daydreaming of a trip through the Sahara with her. We go on a desert fantasia, riding over the desert dunes on her horse Souf as we discuss love and happiness. She tells me how much she loves her husband, Slimène, a soldier who lets her come and go as she pleases with no expectations, no demands.
Isabelle loved many men in her life, and one of them, a highly spiritual man named Abdallah, attacked her viciously with a sword because he believed that God wanted him to kill her. During Isabelle’s six-week recuperation in a French military hospital, her injured head burned and her badly wounded arm felt uncomfortably heavy. And yet, she says, try as she might to feel hatred for her attacker, she could not find any in her heart.

“What I do feel for him is curious: whenever I stop to think about it, I have the feeling that I am in the presence of a mystery which may well hold the key to the entire meaning of my life. As long as I do not fathom that enigma—and will I ever! God alone can tell—I shall not know who I am, nor the reason for my curious life.”

As for me, I’m trying to be more spiritual and life-loving, but I’m not quite feeling the sheer happiness and gratitude that come from being free. I’ve started to get a sense of extending past my limitations, but I need constant reminding, so I buy a used paperback edition of Isabelle’s journal and carry it around with me. I want her with me all the time, and I scribble feverish, urgent notes to myself all along the margins: “…thoughts of a blissful future, double life, making a home, rootless—searching for direction—the artistic struggle, the passion of religious belief, I like Isabelle…”

Isabelle always put her hopes, wishes and fantasies first—to such an extreme that her nomadic life left her half-starved, penniless and alone. But her mad spirituality and desert wanderings brought her an intense joy that left her ready for death at the age of 27 in a flash flood in the Sahara.

During her desert sojourns, Isabelle made frequent trips to Aїn Sefra, an Algerian village on the edge of the Sahara, where she made a little money by reporting on tribal skirmishes for El Akhbar. On October 2, 1904, she checked herself into the hillside military hospital there for treatment of malaria and syphilis.

She was a wreck but as happy as she’d ever be, deep in the land where she belonged and looking forward to being together again with Slimène, who was coming to see her after an eight-month absence. A few weeks passed, and Isabelle checked herself out of the hospital, against doctor’s orders, and walked downhill to the poor part of town, where she had rented a little clay house on the bank of a dry riverbed for her reunion with Slimène.

The day was mild, Isabelle felt stronger, and soon she was in her soulmate’s arms. Slimène welcomed her home, they smoked kif to their heart’s content, and spent a happy night together. In the morning, under a strangely clear and sunny sky, an unexpected flashflood swept through the riverbed, and water poured into the lowland floodplain. The clay houses in the bottom half of the desert town melted in the flood, and Isabelle was among the dozens who were drowned or carried off. When the waters receded, Slimène was found alive though in shock and Isabelle’s lifeless body was discovered in their little love nest, crushed under a fallen beam beneath the staircase, with her waterlogged writings scattered about, some stored in an urn found in the wreckage.

Isabelle Eberhardt struggled to find the reason for her curious life, and I think that by the end she found it in the Sahara Desert. Can she help me find the reason for mine? What would Isabelle do if she were me? I ask myself on my daily walks through Holland Park. “Isabelle, are you out there?” I say out loud, scaring myself, one day as I look down from the window into the enclosed garden square at Elgin Crescent. It’s a quiet day, unusually sunny, and I hear a whisper in my ear: Seek your spirituality…

Oh, boy. What am I going to do with that advice? Ever since my Protestant parents started sending me to happy-clappy churches in the suburbs, I’ve never been very good at being religious. Church is the last place I would look for God. But on Good Friday, shortly after my arrival in London, I put on a dark skirt and attend St. John’s Notting Hill, a church at the top of a high knoll on Lansdowne Crescent. It feels exotic to me; something like what an Algiers mosque would have felt to Isabelle.

Sitting on a hard wooden pew among the Anglicans, a pilgrim alone in a foreign city, I weep and I weep during the readings from the Passion of St. John, and the readers’ formal diction only increases the beauty of the solemn prayers.

My God my God, why have you forsaken me: Why are you so far from helping me and from the words of my groaning? My God I cry to you by day but you do not answer: and by night also—I take no rest…All those that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out their lips at me and wag their heads…

I sit in the pew and begin praying to the spirit of Isabelle, seeking consolation from her as we continue our desert fantasia together and talk about motherhood, childlessness, solitude, getting old and love. Being here now in this strange place, with so much distance between me and Tearful Valley, I feel safer than I did in my own home.

And I am so grateful that I have the strength and freedom to look after myself, alone, without a husband to get in my way. I can feel myself getting to the core of something essential: I have the rest of my life now to explore the meaning of love, creativity and everything else that’s good, and never again will I fall in line with somebody else’s idea of happiness. Yet again, Isabelle and all the other bad girls out there are beckoning me.

I’m still thinking of Isabelle as I leave the church and walk home, contemplating the poetry of her death. She saw glamour in suicidal thinking, but she didn’t really want to die. Her tragedy was that she ran out of time. As for me, I’m hungry for more time, because I’m only just beginning the long struggle to reinvent myself.

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #2 (Lola Montez)

2008-08-24T21:34:00.005-04:00

What is a bad girl? How does she become one? Are there any personality traits that all bad girls share? Who were the most outrageous bad girls of all time?

Everyone I tell about the Bad Girls Project throws out names I should look into.

Marilyn Monroe (too much of a victim, I decide). Lucrezia Borgia (too violent). George Sand (too neurotic). Calamity Jane (too un-sexy).

And then one day in a bookstore, I come across a name and a story that intrigue me: Lola Montez, whip-cracking virago of the 19th century.

“She has the evil eye and will bring bad luck to whoever links his destiny with hers,” the French novelist Alexandre Dumas Sr. wrote of Lola, and that feels right to me.

Here was a wanton harlot with a penchant for self-invention, a frivolous bit of fluff who was deadly serious about her limited talents and over-reaching ambition. After mad affairs with virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria as well as several ugly marriages and a mediocre dancing career on four continents, she died of syphilis in a New York poorhouse at age forty-three and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Green Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Like me, Lola married the wrong man and ended up running away from him, a decision that proved to be the defining moment that put her on the path toward becoming a bad girl. “Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up,” Lola wrote. “My advice to all young girls who contemplate taking such a step is that they had better hang or drown themselves just one hour before they start.”

Lola didn’t follow her own advice, of course. Far from killing herself, she eloped for the hell of it, and when that didn’t work out she reinvented herself as a Spanish dancer. She hired a dancing-master in London, who over the course of four months taught her some steps while she perfected a phony Spanish accent. Then she spent six months in Spain, where she acquired a haughty and unsmiling “atmosphere” and invented a new name for herself. Goodbye, Eliza Gilbert. Hello, Lola Montez. Finally ready for her debut, she returned to London and booked her first theater engagement, which eventually led to other theaters in other cities and many lovers and husbands along the way, punctuated by the occasional bull-whipping or stiletto-stabbing when Lola’s mood turned foul.

As a woman who made a glorious mess of her life, Lola appeals to me enormously. From time to time, everything would fall apart and she would have to start over again in a new place with new people. I know what that’s like, things falling apart. Images of life with Jack flash through my mind: the desperate phone calls pleading with him to come home, his panic attacks late at night, the flooded basement where our wedding china sat in unopened boxes, my final decision to walk out on him one night when he was drunk and ranting.

Out of sympathy with Lola I start to ask myself, “What would Lola do?” For example, she sold her jewels once when she desperately needed the money, so I do the same and sell a diamond bracelet that Jack gave me.

She died at an early age, though, and all I want to do now is live.

By the late 1850s, Lola Montez was exhausted, ill and dispirited, and she knew her life had gone terribly wrong. She had strength for just one more adventure, and it would be a spiritual one. After spending a lifetime mocking religion and the church, Lola’s last great love was Jesus Christ. “How many, many years of my life have been sacrificed to Satan, and my own love of sin!” she wrote in a spiritual diary she kept in 1859.

On the last day of Lola’s life, January 17, 1861, an Episcopal minister sat by her side and told her again and again of Christ’s love and forgiveness. When Lola could no longer speak, he asked her to let him know by a sign whether her soul was at peace, and whether she still felt that Jesus would save her. “She fixed her eyes on mine and nodded her head affirmatively,” he wrote in a pamphlet titled The Story of a Penitent.

So finally, I have to ask myself: Was Lola Montez a bad girl? I haven’t yet defined to my satisfaction what a bad girl is, but yes, I can see it in her. I stare at the photos and try my best to love Lola, but it isn't easy. If I put my arms around her to give her a hug, I’m pretty sure she would flinch and push me away, glaring in anger and itching for a fight.

I’ve spent all this time with her, but I still don’t understand her. I don’t think Lola understood herself, either, though I do think she was the perfect bad girl for her time, and she was a champion of all women, whether they knew it or not. She had thrown aside the bonds of oppression all across Europe, worn a public face, participated in history and loved fully if not well.

After a week of obsessing over Lola, I go to sleep one night on the guest bed in my sister’s cold, cold basement and wake up suddenly, filled with a sense of dread. It’s the same feeling I had as a kid when I would have a bad dream and wake up in the middle of the night convinced there was a monster under the bed. I open my eyes, and it’s very dark, but I think I can spy a shadowy figure seated in the corner at the other end of the room.

A dark angel. She wears a voluminous skirt, I think, the sort of tight-bodiced, full-skirted crinoline gown that women of the 19th century wore. I can’t close my eyes. I lie there, my mind racing with Lola’s life, the photos of her that scare me, her anger, her passion. I’m afraid she’s going to enter my mind. A phrase from the spiritual diary Lola kept before she died turns around in my head. How did it go? I want to look it up but I’m too afraid to move.

Maybe Lola has come for me because she has recognized me as her familiar. Willful, self-pitying, grandiose me. I have no right to blame anyone but myself for my unhappiness when it was I who chose each turning of the path that brought me to the negative emptiness of my life.

Terrible and fearful…terrible and fearful…Oh, how did that phrase go? My mind is jumbled up, I know I’m not thinking right, this dark and lonely hour is not a time for positive reflection.

…What would I not give to have my terrible and fearful experiences given as an awful warning to such natures as my own! I drift…blackness.

In the morning I wake up, laughing. I have my whole life ahead of me. Lola Montez was my first bad girl, but she won’t be my last.

I send an email to Kent.

“Of course I’ll come to London,” I say. “This is an opportunity I can’t pass up.”

“Great,” Kent answers. “Let’s go. Check into plane tickets. Probably open ended, but I think you’ll need a return portion to get through immigration. Tell them you’re here to travel the country and they’ll give you a six-month tourist visa. As for the research, I think you should be historical but with a focus on fun and excitement. Welcome on board. Got to go. Love K.”

Why I Started Chasing Bad Girls, #1

2008-08-16T17:26:00.006-04:00

I've been blogging about bad girls for about two years now, so I thought I'd go back to the beginning and remember why the wildest women in history (and modern times) became my lifeline.

It starts like this:

One fine summer day in 1852, a chronic alcoholic and morphine abuser named Canning Woodhull visited the Mount Gilead, Ohio, home of Victoria Claflin. A fourteen-year-old girl with a calm and thoughtful demeanor, Vickie had taken to her bed so she could speak at leisure to the unseen powers of the air who regularly visited her.

Though weak, Victoria radiated loveliness, and the 28-year-old doctor prescribed a cure of fresh air and marriage. Vickie accepted, happy to leave the house where her father regularly beat and starved her when she resisted appearing as a clairvoyant in his traveling medicine show. “My marriage was an escape,” she later said. It was also a foolish indiscretion that permanently changed the direction of Victoria Woodhull’s life. Only a few days after the couple wed, Dr. Woodhull went on an all-night bender at a whorehouse, the first of many.

A few years and a couple of children later, Victoria finally came to her senses, asked herself “why should I any longer live with this man?” and answered the question with a trip to divorce court. The same powers of the air who had visited Vickie in her youth remained by her side throughout her life, telling her she was destined to become the ruler of the world. And indeed, after leaving her husband, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to open a Wall Street stock brokerage, the first woman to publish an American newspaper and, in 1871, the first woman to run for US President. She was also an outrageous proponent of free love who shocked America with her libertine views.

Wow, I thought the first time I read about Vickie, this woman’s marriage sounds a lot like mine. I, too, had gone off and gotten married in an attempt to start a new chapter in my life, but my husband, I'll call him Jack, had turned out to be a rageaholic drunk and our marriage was not only no fun, it was a disaster. A disaster that took me a couple of years to get into, a year to recognize for what it was, and yet another year to escape.

Although my marriage to Jack was the biggest mistake of my life, exiting it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’d always been too nice for my own good and too afraid of hurting people.

I’d met Jack on a business trip to small-town Pennsylvania, and moved to a place I now call “Tearful Valley,” but my marriage, my hoped-for bucolic ideal, slowly turned into a series of broken promises, silent anger and empty bottles of beer and vodka. I thought I was staying in the marriage to make an effort to fix it, but the truth was that feelings of guilt, pity and failure prevented me from leaving.

Looking back now, this is the part I hate to think about: Jack’s constant verbal abuse chipped away at my self-esteem and kept me down in the emotional muck right alongside him. I had no strength to resist because I was unfamiliar with the person I’d become, and it took the strength of my friends, family, marriage counselor and Al Anon (my equivalent of the powers of the air) to give me the courage to save money, secretly store my belongings and meet with a divorce lawyer. In short, I was preparing for the awful moment when, like Vickie, I could ask “why should I any longer live with this man?” and answer the question by leaving him.

It was no accident that I read up on Victoria Woodhull shortly after leaving Jack. I was, in fact, on a quest to find women like her, a quest that began when I received a phone call from my rich and somewhat eccentric cousin Kent in London. I had only recently loaded my belongings in my car, driven away from Pennsylvania, and gone home to family in Chicago. But I was unsure about my next move.

Cocooning with the people I loved best, pleasantly numb and returned to a childlike state, I was doing little more than spending hours on the phone with friends, watching television, sitting in coffee shops reading, and looking for a job with such apathy that I might not have known what to do if one was offered. In other words, I’d stopped crying and was, in a strange way, beginning to enjoy myself, but to a rational observer I was still a confused mess.

Naturally, I assumed that Kent was making a sympathy call when he began our conversation by telling me about a notorious woman from the Byzantine era. I didn’t know why Kent mentioned her, but I played along—our conversations have always covered a lot of territory.

“Joycie, have you ever heard about Empress Theodora of Constantinople?” Kent asked me. “I learned about her at a dinner party. She started out as a prostitute in the circus and ended up marrying an emperor. She would go onstage and they would sprinkle birdseed on her privates, and a flock of geese would peck at them until she climaxed.”
I laughed. “No, I didn’t know about Theodora. But Mae West—now there was a sex goddess for the ages. She’s kind of weird but very luscious in her movies.”

“And what about Catherine the Great,” Kent said. “She was outrageous.”

“Do you really believe that story about how she died underneath a horse when she was having sex with it?” I said. “I wonder if that’s really true.”

“Joycie,” Kent said, and from his tone of voice I sensed that our conversation was shifting into new territory. I realized that it wasn’t just because he felt sorry for me that Kent was calling, and he was leading me there. “Joycie, how are you anyway? What’s going on with you right now?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. No man, no baby, no job, no home, no life. I’m screwed.”

“Are you really getting a divorce? Where are you going to live? Do you have any plans?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to figure it out. I’m probably going to stay in Chicago so I can be near family.”

The other end of the line went quiet, and I could tell that Kent was not best pleased with this idea. He thought staying in Chicago would be a bore.

“Joycie, why don’t you come to London instead? Why don’t you come here and study bad girls for awhile? Bad girls like Theodora. I’m working on a project about them, and I need someone to do the research,” he said. “I want it to be you. Seriously, I want you to think about it.”

This is where the logic broke down and my life got interesting. Kent wanted to know about bad girls, for some complicated reason that involved him getting his heart broken and wanting to sublimate it into an art project, but he didn’t have time to spend digging through dusty old tomes in the British Library. That would be my job. He knew I was a writer and would have the patience to read tons of books. Plus, he thought it would be good for me to get away from America and think about life for awhile. And bad girls. Think about life and bad girls and go out drinking together.

Kent had a flat in Notting Hill, where I could live as I studied Empress Theodora, Catherine the Great, Mae West and anyone else who interested me. He would pay my expenses, and I could hang out with him when he wasn’t busy and tell him about all the bad girls I was discovering. In the summer, he added, I could go to France and stay at his villa in the Cévennes Mountains, where he wanted to create something like an art colony or a commune with posh overtones.

I would have been a fool to refuse, so of course I said yes to Kent’s crazy proposal, and this is how our Bad Girls Project began. Why not? It sounded like fun. People have gone off on all sorts of weird expeditions for even less reason. And I had nothing to lose at that point in my life. But I was less certain about how much time I wanted to spend on the project, imagining that at some point my real life, whatever that was, would have to begin again.

Before I left the States, I decided to do a little research so I could better understand what I was getting myself into, and this led me to my first bad girl, a dark angel who cajoled me to follow my destiny as surely as the powers of the air had cajoled Vickie to follow hers. She was soon followed by others.

Vegas Girls! Girls! Girls!

2008-08-10T16:58:00.029-04:00

I have been to Las Vegas.
Las Vegas! Woot! They've got a crazy fake Eiffel Tower there.
And a crazy fake New York City.
But most of all, after gambling, they're crazy about girls there.
There's a Pussycat Dolls casino with Pussycat Dolls slot machines. Grrr!
At the cheesiest, most fabulously over-the-top casino of all, Caesar's Palace, they luuuuurrrve the ladies, from old-school naked chicks
to modern-day girls like Cher, Bette Midler and Elton John

Even the Venus de Milo gets a shout-out:

And in the streets, too, the girls cum straight 2 U:
Blonde girls
Bride girls
Babe girls

drinkin' booze out of plastic refillable cocktail bongs

Like I said, they love them some girls in Vegas.

Dancing girls

showgirls
burlesque girls

It was fabulous. So why did it all seem so exhausting after awhile? Why did I get depressed by the third day? Why was I so happy to go home? Is there something wrong with me that I can't just enjoy the total fabulousness of it all? Gambling, booze and girls girls girls. Somebody's idea of what girls are.

Sex sells! Woot!

The Buddha says that even in the midst of happiness, there is loss and decay. "Nothing in time and space, nothing in the world lasts or can be acquired, however great our desire for things to be other than what they are."
All is impermanence in Las Vegas. Still, I got my picture taken with a showgirl.

Bad Girls Aren't What You Think

2008-07-13T15:14:00.011-04:00

I was having drinks with a neighbor last night--a neighbor who reads my blog--and she asked me, "Do you think you have to have sex to be a bad girl?"

I had to stop and think. I write a lot about bad girls and sex because it's interesting and, let's face it, titillating. Titty-lating. In my wild woman research, I like my bad girls to be independent, strong-headed, vain, eccentric and promiscuous. I'm drawn to that personality type. Sexy women are fun.

But celibate nuns can be wild bad girls, too. Of course they can, if they've got a rebellious spirit. In fact, all kinds of women these days have a bit of the bad girl in them, and they're not necessarily polyamorous bisexual babes like Pixie.

Under the influence
I'm not even sure anymore if I know what a bad girl is. We're living in an excellent era for women now in our industrialized world, with so many of us free to run around and do crazy things, things that not too long ago would have marked us as unhinged. Also last night, I watched the 1974 John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence and was reminded that back then, women who didn't behave themselves were locked up in nuthouses, shot full of thorazine and given so many electroshock treatments that all the sex, fight and talk was blasted right out of them. And it was their own family and friends who were committing them.

Now, women can do whatever the hell they want. And it's not just about the sex. Me, for example, I'm enjoying a lot of travel without Dave this year. I went to Greece in May with a girlfriend, am going to Las Vegas for a long weekend this month with another bunch of girlfriends, and am planning a solo yoga and surf retreat in Morocco in September. When I tell family and friends about my travels without my man, they're a bit incredulous yet amused. "Where's Dave?"

I know another woman--a kind and decent sixty-something woman who used to work as a dinner lady at her sons' Catholic school--who plans to take up karate lessons this summer: "The lady who runs the karate class said, 'Don't worry, I'll take care of you,' so I said, 'Righty-o, I'll give it a go for a few weeks and see if I think it's fun." I imagine she'll be smashing bricks in half soon.

And another woman I know abandoned her husband and children for six weeks this summer so she could travel alone in Portugal and Spain. (OK, she's a Spanish teacher, and working on improving her language skills but still...six weeks! I'm a bit incredulous yet amused.)

She emailed me her thoughts:

"Being a writer, you might appreciate the number of authors I have met on this trip.

"It started in Lisbon. I was standing in front of a clothing store, looking at the display and a woman approached me. She smelled heavily of tobacco smoke. She asked me, in Portuguese, 'Do you appreciate poetry?' 'Yes,' I replied. She then told me that she was a poet and that she survived by selling her poetry, and asked if she could recite a poem for two Euros. So I said sure, and she recited the poem and then gave me a copy of it, which she signed.

"In Spain, one of my professors has published a number of books, one on brujeria (witchcraft) in Spain and the history of people's memories of it, and how the Inquisition accused certain women of it. He has also published a collection of short stories that he says took him twelve years to write.

"One of my classmates is a man from the Dominican Republic, Jose, now living and teaching in New Jersey. I was talking to him one day, and I told him about my stay in DR and the nuns I work with. We talked a little about Trujillo, the dictator/sex addict/murderer who ruled the Dominican Republic for over 30 years. Several days later, Jose casually mentioned that he was invited to the Dominican Republic for the release of his collected poetry, and that he also has two books coming out in the fall about Trujillo.

"OK, number four: One of my companions here is a Puerto Rican woman named Ada, who lives in Indianapolis. She got divorced about five years ago, and about a year ago, a woman she works with fixed her up with her widowed Mexican father. Herman has also published poetry and participated in poetry slams.

"And, last, but not least, number five: I was in the cafeteria one morning having breakfast. I was joined by a Canadian couple, and the husband told me the story of the book he spent ten years researching, a nonfiction account of the Trekkers, exploited workers in Western Canada during the Great Depression. He has promised to send me a copy of the book when it comes out, and I shall have a nice surprise for my husband."

Although my friend says she feels like her life is out of a Hemingway novel this summer, she also says she misses home. "Even though it's been very rich and rewarding, and I know that my teaching will benefit greatly from what I've learned here, it's been difficult--lonely, I suppose. But I am a freak for the insight I get upon re-entry--and I think this one is going to be a doozy."

Pixie: Skittles' Historical Re-Enacter

2008-07-04T15:47:00.010-04:00

“I’ve identified as a bisexual since I was 17, and I’ve been polyamorous since I learned the word, which was about 10 years ago. I believe in abundance, not scarcity. I’m not into the jealousy thing,” says Pixie, who recently found Bad Girl Blog while researching one of my favorite bad girls of history, Catherine Walters, a.k.a. Skittles.

Pixie, from San Francisco, interests me because she’s a real-live Bad Girl--more than I'll ever be. A performer and sexpert with a very complicated life, Pixie has been developing Skittles as a character for the past year. She’s as devoted to the cult of Skittles as I am.
Pixie photo by Kalib DuArte, Corset by Dark Garden

“I worship Skittles,” Pixie tells me in a recent phone interview. “The more I read about her and look into her life, the more I believe I would have been like her in a previous life. High-level courtesans were openly sexual, and they owned their sexuality, and they were independent. Rather than settle down and get married, they were someone on their own.”

Pixie will introduce “an alternate version” of Skittles this year in California at the Steampunk Convention, where an unconventional group of Victorian history re-enactors will convene Oct. 31-Nov. 2 and try to levitate Silicon Valley with a series of midnight parties, dealers’ dens, leather teas and other events teeming with costumed revelers who all wish they were living in an earlier time.

Like Skittles, Pixie is petite and dark-haired, with a joie de vivre personality. Bubbly. Like champagne. And they both love to ride horses. Horses are as good as sex.

“Maybe I was Skittles in a past life!” Pixie muses to me later in an email filled with ellipses... “More likely, I'm nearly her now, with the exception that I don't make my money by selling sexual favors...I give them away. I did work as a professional stripper years ago... and have again recently for a couple of private parties... but that's another story...”

The neat thing is, the more Pixie reads about Skittles, the more she resonates with her, even if they are from completely different backgrounds (mid-19th century England versus 21st-century California).

“They say if someone called Skittles a whore, she embraced it,” Pixie says. “She was sex-positive! And Skittles never had sex with anyone she didn’t want to have sex with. She was very ahead of her time.”

Since she was a kid, Pixie has channeled women from the past by doing historic re-creations. She started out doing Elizabethan courtiers, but as she grew up she moved into the laced-up and corseted kinkiness of Victorian London. Pixie finally discovered Skittles last year, when she was researching a character for the Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco.

“I wanted to do a high-class courtesan character, and someone who knew I love horses and all things equestrian said, ‘What about being a “Pretty Horse-Breaker?”’ I had never heard the term, so I looked it up and was introduced to Catherine Walters.”

Would you describe yourself as a Bad Girl?, I ask Pixie during our phone call.

“Absolutely. It’s so much more interesting than being a good girl. Like a slut or courtesan, a bad girl is someone who is independent and willing to be who she is even if society calls her a bad girl. I’ve worked as a stripper, which is part of the sex industry, so I certainly am willing to be out about who I am. For a woman to take that position, that makes her a bad girl in society’s eyes.”

Pixie tried to be a 'good girl," but after three divorces, she's decided marriage just isn't her thing. She finally freed herself, and now, Pixie is an out, sex-positive “hot bisexual babe,” also known in some sex circles as a unicorn because like the mythical beast, her type is believed to be an ever-elusive ideal.

“I’m totally a unicorn,” Pixie says. “I’ve dated couples before. It can be fun, but I can scare people sometimes.”

And yet, there’s a wholesome totality to Pixie’s existence. She’s the vocalist for Cuir Bleu, a fetish-based electronic rock band that plays at BDSM clubs like the SF Citadel, where people might emerge from the dungeon and start flogging each other on the dance floor. Her day job is serving as an executive assistant for kink.com, which provides links to a series of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism websites.

“I like to be an educator,” Pixie says. “I’m completely out at this point.”

Things can get complicated sometimes. Pixie has to make careful agreements about safe sex with her primary and secondary boyfriend, and if she has a new man in her life, her dad doesn’t want to know his name unless he’s been dating Pixie at least a year. (Her mom, meanwhile, has always been very "sex positive" and still is.)
But polyamory is not about one-night stands. It’s about communication.

“I don’t cheat,” Pixie says. “I just have more open agreements than other people.”

Okay, back to our Bad Girls interview.

“Do you think there are more Bad Girls today than in earlier centuries?” I ask.

“I think they’re more open about it,” Pixie says. “There have been bad girls in every era. I don’t know that there’s more of them or not. Women are less willing to be in the background now.”

"Our girl Skittles never paid for her sins with a tragic ending, which is one of the reasons why she's one of my favorite bad girls. Your thoughts?”

“In my own life, I’ve had a lot more acceptance than you might think. People have come up to me and thanked me for living my life openly. If someone else can do it, now they feel like they can. I’m reading the book The Ethical Slut now. We’re reclaiming the word ‘slut,’ like the homosexual community took back the word queer. If someone who loves sex is a slut, then I am.”

See Pixie perform now:

MaiTai Gets a Room of Her Own

2008-06-25T17:36:00.015-04:00

My friend "MaiTai D'Bauch" has started up a club night on the Lower East Side, putting a modern-day spin on Virginia Woolf's credo that every woman with a creative spark must have a room of her own. (Note to self: Must start club night. Also, read Virginia Woolf, i.e., "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," etc.)

MaiTai (in photo on right, DJ guardian angel on left) claims to be a 28-year-old male from Brooklyn, and I can attest to the Brooklyn part, but I'm not so sure about the rest. I think MaiTai only wishes she were a male-to-female impersonator.

According to the details on her MySpace page, MaiTai's status is "Swinger," orientation is "Bi," and she's a smokin', drinkin' Gemini with an occupation that combines debauchery, nightlife, marketing and promotion.

Are you a dirty faggot? A hung hetero? A slutty str8 girl, radical biker, girlboy, bear, leather daddy, androgynous punk, DL thug, porn slut, social terrorist, faerie queen, closeted politician, kinky hipster or camera whore?

MaiTai seeks to serve you.

"Hello Darlings," she says. "Let's bring a much needed dose of scandal to Alphabet City on Thursdays!"

Important Details:
* Club 40C, 40 Avenue C between 3rd & 4th
* June 26: Pride Party--426 people interested in going so far
* No cover
* $5 MaiTais all night
* Open bar 11 p.m. to midnight
* Debauchery in the back room ;)

You missed the opening night on June 19, billed as a pansexual party. Too bad. I was there (and plan to go again on July 3), with my sparkly costume jewelry and stick-straight hair teased up into a pile on the top of my head, trying to fit in as best I could with the pansexual theme. No picture of that, alas, though here's a nice one of gogo dancer Luc, who shimmied on the bar (if you want to see Luc's face, please click on the picture to see the full image):

Come to the June 22 Brooklyn Blogade!

2008-06-17T15:54:00.008-04:00

The Brooklyn Blogade is coming to town again on June 22, and I hope to see you there this Sunday at noon.

The Blogade is a monthly meet and greet for bloggers, blog
readers, and people who are thinking about becoming bloggers. It's a
great opportunity to network and to learn a thing or two about
blogging. It's also a great way to learn about new blogs. Blog blog blog, etc....

Photo-tastic Adrian Kinloch of Brit in Brooklyn is hosting this month's blogade so naturally the emphasis will be on photoblogging. Anyone who regularly uses images should find it useful and fun.

Brooklyn Blogade: Picture This
Sunday, June 22, Noon
Root Hill Cafe
4th Avenue and Carroll, Park Slope, Brooklyn
RSVP to: ak@adriankinloch.net

If you are thinking of starting a blog you'll be in great company as
there'll be bloggers around who'll be happy to chat with you about
setting something up. We'll also talk about copyright, fair use and
backing up your work.

And that's not all! We'll also do our regular shout-out, where everyone gets to talk a bit about their blog. And we'll all have a chance after the main event to share, gripe, praise, and otherwise gossip and moan about how the blogosphere's growing importance throughout the universe.

See you there.

Psyche

2008-05-29T09:08:00.034-04:00

Please settle in for a nice long post. It's been awhile since I've blogged and I've got a story to tell. It's an old Greek myth, but I've just discovered it and feel like I've invented it myself.

I've just returned from two weeks in the Greek islands, where the beaches are lovely,

the ferry boats and Orthodox churches appear everywhere you look,

the food and wine are delicious,

and the feral cats are always hungry.

While traveling, I read nothing but a tattered and yellowing copy of a book that was assigned reading in my freshman English class during high school. Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Ugh. That's how I felt about the required text when I was fourteen. Nothing but boring gods and monsters.

But in Greece, it was a whole other thing. I couldn't get enough of the Titans and the Twelve Great Olympians. They were so human and imperfect, just like me, and I loved the way Edith Hamilton told their stories.

"That is the miracle of Greek mythology--a humanized world, men freed from the paralyzing fear of an omnipotent unknown," writes Miss Hamilton, who looks to be a very strict and severe school mistress, judging from her picture on the book jacket, but who in truth and in secret except as revealed in her writing was more likely a lushly sensual woman. "The exact spot where Aphrodite was born of the foam could be visited by any ancient tourist; it was just offshore from the island of Cythera. The winged steed Pegasus, after skimming the air all day, went every night to a comfortable stable in Corinth."

Of all the Greek myths, my favorite is the one about Cupid and Psyche because Psyche is a bad girl who seeks redemption through love.

Psyche was a princess, the daughter of a king who had three daughters. Psyche was the most beautiful of the three, so beautiful that mortals worshiped her. Her beauty and fame made her sisters hate her and Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, angry. "Her temples were neglected; her altars foul with cold ashes; her favorite towns deserted and falling in ruins," Miss Hamilton writes.
Edith Hamilton, Bryn Mawr College Archives

Aphrodite sought her revenge through her son Cupid, a winged youth whose arrows of love caused no end of trouble for the people they wounded. "Destroy Psyche," Aphrodite told Cupid. "Make her fall madly in love with the vilest and ugliest of creatures."

But before he could shoot his arrow into Psyche, her beauty so awed Cupid that it was as if he had pierced his own heart with the dart of love. Saying nothing to his mother, Cupid devised a plan that would make Psyche his own. He cast a spell so that no man would fall in love with her, and nor would she fall in love with any man. And so she stayed alone, worshiped from afar by many, as her sisters made good marriages to kings.

Psyche's worried father asked the oracle of Apollo, the God of Truth, why there was no love for Psyche, and the oracle replied that she must be placed atop a rocky hill, to await a fearful winged serpent who would become her husband. This her father did, because the oracle had spoken, and Psyche was abandoned to her fate. Alone and frightened, she waited and cried, until a sweet and mild wind carried her to a grassy and fragrant meadow, where Psyche slept deeply, and when she awoke found herself in a stately mansion, which looked something like this:
Mountaintop monastery, island of Folegandros

She was still alone, yet sweet voices greeted Psyche, telling her that the house was for her, and she must enter without fear and bathe herself and sit at a banquet made entirely for her. She enjoyed herself, luxuriating in sensual pleasure, knowing somehow that at night her husband would come.

And this is what happened. Psyche lay in her bed in the dark and was joined by her husband, unseen, but she felt no fear. Rather, it was ecstasy. "She knew without seeing him that here was no monster or shape of terror, but the lover and husband she had longed and waited for," Miss Hamilton writes. Every day for many days Psyche was alone in her mansion, and every night for many nights she was with her beloved and unseen husband.

But one terrible day, her husband warned Psyche that her two sisters were coming and meant her harm. "You must not let them see you or you will bring great sorrow upon me and ruin to yourself," he told her, warning her also that she must never try to see him because one look at his face would separate them forever. "If you saw me, perhaps you would fear me, perhaps adore me, but all I ask of you is to love me. I would rather you would love me as an equal than adore me as a god."

Psyche's sisters arrived at the mansion, and she welcomed them because she had seen no body in such a long time, but the two women looked jealously on everything that was their sister's, and they filled her head with their spiteful talk. "Why can't you see your husband? Surely if he loved you, he would let you see him in the full light of day. But no, your husband is no man. We know for a fact that he is the evil winged serpent that Apollo's oracle spoke of."

"The Awakening of Psyche," Guillaume Seignac (1870-1924)

Crying and confused, Psyche asked what she should do, and her sisters told her to get a lamp and a sharp knife and stab her husband through the heart that very night as he slept. Then they left, pleased with themselves for having caused their youngest sister such misery.

All day long Psyche's thoughts were at war with each other, and when evening came she was still filled with uncertainty. There was only one thing she was sure of: tonight, she would see her husband's face.

"When at last he lay sleeping quietly, she summoned all her courage and lit the lamp," Miss Hamilton writes. "She tiptoed to the bed and holding the light high above her she gazed at what lay there. Oh, the relief and the rapture that filled her heart. No monster was revealed, but the sweetest and fairest of all creatures, at whose sight the very lamp seemed to shine brighter."

In her shame and excitement, Psyche fell on her knees and upset the lamp. Hot oil spilled onto her husband's shoulder, both wounding and waking him. Seeing the light, he knew his dear wife's faithlessness, and he jumped out of bed and ran out into the night. Psyche chased after him but by then Cupid had sprouted wings and flown off into the night. All she could hear was his voice, calling: "Love cannot live where there is no trust."

Psyche despaired and wandered the earth as she tried desperately to find Cupid and win him back. She went to his mother, and Aphrodite cruelly set impossible tasks for her, which Psyche accomplished only because the gods favored her. Finally, Aphrodite gave her a box to carry down into the underworld so that Persephone could fill it with some beauty, which the Goddess of Love said she had lost by worrying so much about her injured son.
"Psyche in the Underworld," Paul Alfred de Curzon, 1820-1895

Persephone did as asked and filled the box. And once again, Psyche's curiosity got the better of her and she felt that she must see what was inside it as she carried it out of the underworld. Psyche, too, hoped to retrieve some of the beauty she had lost from caring about Cupid.

Psyche opened the box, and though there was nothing there, she fell into a deep languor that carried her into a deadly sleep. But all was not lost, because this was a myth with a happy ending. At the very moment Psyche opened the lid of the box, Cupid revealed himself to her, and thus all was well. Cupid, the God of Love, and Psyche, who is the Soul, lived happily ever after.

In the way of all Greek myths when a human is brought to live forever among the gods on Mount Olympus, Psyche became an immortal and was never heard from again. She is at home now, cooking, cleaning and having Cupid's babies.
"Cupid and Psyche," Jacques Louis David (1748-1825)

Reviving Skittles, Part 9: Poetic Love

2008-05-05T17:51:00.012-04:00

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was an 18-year-old orphan with a delicate poet's soul when he entered the British diplomatic corps. The Foreign Office had already sent him to Athens, Frankfurt and Madrid before he received his Paris assignment in 1863. Just 23 when posted to Paris, he was a romantic rebel, a champion of the oppressed who kept a watchful eye on the privileged lords strutting around Skittles’ parlor.

Tall, with a strikingly pretty face, Wilfrid had a poet’s manner because he was indeed a poet. Though he did little more than sit quietly in a corner, Skittles noticed him because it was impossible not to. He was exceeding handsome:
A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

To draw out the shy young man, Skittles would break away from the chatter and high spirits to join him in the corner for a few moments before she flitted off. He could be brutally candid—-he called her lively conversation "fool’s talk"--yet she saw past that to his easily wounded nature. Wilfrid did not have Skittles’ social ease, and he would withdraw in a jealous funk when she was distracted by another salon visitor.

Though Catherine Walters was just one year older than Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, she understood that his gloomy passion masked his inexperience with women. He was a Catholic by conversion and still a virgin.

Prior to joining the diplomatic corps, Wilfrid confided to Skittles, he had been schooled with the Jesuits and at one point had considered becoming a priest. His father, a Protestant country squire, poet and Tory, had gone off to war and died in battle when Wilfrid was 2. His mother, shy and sensitive like her son, had died of tuberculosis when he was 13, just after joining the Catholic church.

What Skittles now saw before her was a proud and intelligent young man, a sensualist in desperate need of the mothering. But he could take only so much of Skittles’ frivolity, glowering when she left him to enjoy a drink and a laugh with another guest before focusing her attention on him again. Sometimes he would leave her house abruptly, and she would let him disappear into the Parisian night without trying to stop him.

But one fateful night, Skittles followed Wilfrid discretely as he wandered the streets and finally approached him. Their encounter that night became an encounter that he would return to in both memory and fantasy for the rest of his life. The experience became the subject of a 58-sonnet poem, "Esther, A Young Man’s Tragedy," published in 1892. In this a highly personal and melodramatic work, Wilfrid speaks in the first person of meeting and falling in love with a woman named Esther in Lyons. Clearly, the place and the woman are stand-ins for Skittles and Paris.

The poet describes the event in terms that carry grief-tinged romance to an absurd level, starting with the first line: "When is life other than a tragedy."

It is the evening of the St. Martin’s Day fair, a popular event in agrarian France that celebrates the autumn harvest. "Working bees and drones," as Wilfrid calls them, mob the fairgrounds in search of mad laughter, and the poet, a stranger in a strange land, is carried along with the crowd to The Booth of Beauty, a freak show. Two female monsters, one with the disfiguring spots of a leopard and the other a seven-foot-tall giantess, "The Queen of Love," fascinate and sicken the poet, and as he goes faint he feels a woman’s hand behind him in the crowd, clutching at his arm.

Laughing, half aloud, she is a little woman dressed in black, "who stood on tiptoe with a childish air, her face and figure hidden in a sacque, all but her eyes and forehead and dark hair." This is Skittles, as Wilfrid sees her, "wise with woman's wit," but with a face that had "something, too, pathetic in its gaze." He also sees that she has a pale scar on her cheek, and this tells him "she had not lived a nun." She is beautiful, but it is a broken beauty, marred yet gracefully natural in its degradation, and this fires his bashful heart "to a zeal divine."

In other words, the virgin poet sees a sexy young woman whose look assures him that she would welcome him into her bed.

She is also a tease, because she complains that the poet, being so tall, can easily see the Queen of Love, and she can see nothing. She points to a chair and has the poet lift her up to stand on it, insisting that he keep his arm around her waist in case she falls. The giantess' attention is drawn to the laughing girl and the shamefaced boy, and she challenges them to come to her. The girl pushes the boy up to the stage, and at the leering crowd’s insistence, he touches the freak’s knee. When his deed is done, the air swirls darkly around him, and the blushing poet turns and flees, leaving Esther behind.

Too elated to simply return to the inn where he is staying, he doesn’t know where to go. He feels that he's on the threshold of evil, his soul until now "a thing pure from sensual strife," and on the verge of corruption. Wandering the streets, musing upon the world’s wickedness, the poet crosses the path of a woman as she angrily leaves a house on a side street, calling out an insult in French as she slams the door. It’s the broken beauty from the fair, and upon seeing the poet her look suddenly turns from fierce to gay, her black eyes gleaming with triumph "as they caught, like some wild bird of chase, their natural prey."

Telling him she’s not angry, but only too soft-hearted, she takes his hand and presses it to her heart. "Why did you follow me?" Esther/Skittles asks, mockingly. "Here, feel how my heart beats." The poet feels it is his own heart’s match, yet the girl pushes him off, saying he followed her only because he thought she was his fat Queen of Love from the fair. Now he’s confused and grows angry, turning to leave, but then her mood changes again, and she tells him in all seriousness that his John the Baptist’s face has turned her head.

"We are strangers both among these heavy Lyonnese," she says. "By right we so should hold together….I saw it in an instant in the booth that we should know each other and be friends."

In a daze, the poet agrees, and the girl goes on talking like a running stream, "without more reason or more pause or stay than to gather breath and then pursue her whim just where it led her, tender, sad, or gay. Her moods seemed all alike to her."

Joyfully, yielding to sin, he stops resisting and drowns in her torrent of words. The night grows cold, she shivers, and she tells him to follow her. Like two lost children, hand in hand they walk the streets of Lyons, pausing aimlessly here and there, until they come to a house, her dressmaker’s, she says, where Madame Blanche is too wise to pry into the affairs of her customers, no matter what hour of the night they choose to come. The poet is led to an inner room, where for the first time in his life he hears the language of a woman’s clothing spoken as the girl throws off her hat, unties her veil, undoes her jacket and then the jet buttons of her dress one by one,

And stood but clothed the more in loveliness,
A sight sublime, a dream, a miracle,
A little goddess from some luminous field
Brought down unconscious on our Earth to dwell,
And in an age of innocence revealed,
Naked but not ashamed. Nay, wherefore shame?
And I, ah, who shall blame me, who shall blame?

The poet chooses modestly not to tell the secrets of what happened in that inner room, and when we return to it with Madame Blanche, we see him kneeling as Esther/Skittles kisses his face and dries and comforts the former virgin’s tears.

The poet and Esther stay together only three days, and what for more experienced men might merely be a dirty weekend is for Blunt a life-changing event. It shocks him to see that after their precious days together, she blithely return to the Parisian high life and her undemanding and rich older lover. The girl, he decides, is a destroying angel incapable of real love:

Esther had no soul which Heaven or Hell
Could touch by joy or soften by the rod.
She could not really love me…Now life's light
Illumines all, and I behold her gay
As I first knew her in my love purblind,
Dear passionate Esther, soulless but how kind!

Watch for Part 10 of Reviving Skittles, when we learn why a long-term relationship between Skittles and Wilfrid could never have worked and what made her decide instead to be a great courtesan and never fall in love again.

Francesca

2008-05-02T16:24:00.013-04:00

I've just returned from a trip to the north woods of Wisconsin, where I spent some time visiting my niece at her college on the shores of Lake Superior.
While there, I ate a delicious grilled Superior whitefish dinner.Mmmm. Most excellent. Fresh off the boat (not this boat, but something like it.)
My niece is attending an environmental studies college, which seems to attract two different types of people: 1) deerhunting hockey players; and 2) animal rights vegetarians. She's in the second camp, as is her friend Francesca.

This is a story about Francesca, a college freshman who tried hard to be a good girl as she defined it, but failed. Before arriving on the shores of Lake Superior, Francesca lived in California and ate a raw food diet. I'm pretty sure a raw food diet involves chopping, pureeing and mixing uncooked fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains into a creative variety of dishes. I'll have to look it up some time. Anyway, it's labor-intensive and supposed to be very good for you.

Winter came to the north woods, and Francesca tried to be faithful to her raw food diet--a raw food diet to which she had added the extra requirement of being made strictly with locally grown produce. That was no problem in California, where Francesca had access to tropical foods such as bananas and other yummy things like carob powder and crushed macadamia nuts, which take easily to a raw food diet.

But in the north woods of Wisconsin in the middle of winter, when the snow drifts up to your waist? M'eh...not so much. Francesca found herself gnawing on a lot of raw tubers. According to The Cook's Thesaurus, "Tubers...are swollen underground plant stems, but it's easier to think of them as the 'family of potato-like vegetables.' They're used worldwide as a source of carbohydrates, often taking a back seat to more flavorful and colorful ingredients."

So what do you think happened? Did Francesca make a deal with the devil by giving up her vegetarian ways and dating a deerhunting hockey player who supplemented her raw food diet with venison sushi? Did she spend a looooong north woods winter eating nothing but raw potatoes? Did she choose starvation?

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., online student edition.

Nah, she cooked. And I really hope she doesn't feel like a bad girl because she did.

Ashley

2008-04-14T16:18:00.007-04:00

She tells me she lives for pleasure. Sitting with the late-lunch crowd in a midtown Manhattan sushi bar, the only one drinking a martini, Ashley watches the Japanese chefs peel cucumbers methodically with excellent knife technique. The top layer of sound is ambient lounge music; the layer beneath that, the anxious buzz of corporate employees talking about their jobs as they tuck into their bento boxes.

"I love to see them work," she says.

Ashley is eating slowly and living for pleasure these days. She knows there's a war on, and we're all plummeting toward recession, yet she feels unexpectedly serene ever since she lost her job as a real estate broker just before Christmas. She carries her laptop and briefcase around town and goes to the occasional job interview, but she's in no hurry to be employed again. She still has plenty of severance and unemployment payments coming in.

"I feel like I'm still washing the stink of corporate America off me," Ashley says with a laugh. "I've learned that it's possible to be out of work and extremely happy."

Her biggest worry today is finding a solid pair of Harley boots that she can wear on her long walks around town. She has stopped buying whatever she likes--those days are over--but a good pair of boots is essential.She repeats that she knows there's a war on and this country is plummeting toward recession, but she can't help feeling that she's simply lucky to be alive.

Ashley's vodka-tinged haze of pleasure in the middle of a Manhattan work day and her simple quest for a good pair of boots put me in mind of one of my bad girls, Isabelle Eberhardt, a rat race drop-out if ever there was one.

Born in Switzerland in 1877 to Russian parents and raised in a community of anarchist-nihilist émigrés, Isabelle traveled at the age of twenty to Algeria and converted to Islam. She renamed herself Si Mahmoud, dressed as an Arab man and spent her days with the Kadriya brotherhood of Sufis when she wasn’t riding the Sahara dunes on horseback. It was her ambition to be a great writer, and she kept journals and served as a war correspondent for El Akhbar, a newspaper in the Sud Oranais. She never got very far with her ambitions because she preferred camping in the desert among the soldiers of the Foreign Legion and sleeping with hot young Arab boys. Although she married a soldier, Slimène, who tried to make a home for them, Isabelle liked to go on the prowl at night, smoking kif (a form of hashish) and drinking absinthe, kummel, chartreuse and cognac until she passed out on the floor of whatever random café she happened to be in.

"There are women who will do anything for beautiful clothes," Isabelle wrote, "while there are others who grow old and gray poring over books to earn degrees and status. As for myself, all I want is a good horse as a mute and loyal companion, a handful of servants hardly more complex than my mount, and a life as far away as possible from the hustle and bustle I happen to find so sterile in the civilized world."Isabelle felt that she lived in the presence of a mystery that held the key to the entire meaning of her life. "As long as I do not fathom that enigma—and will I ever! God alone can tell—I shall not know who I am, nor the reason for my curious life," she said in a state of semi-exaltation, her dreams nourished on the narcotic smoke of kif.

I wish Ashley well as she seeks the answer to her own enigmatic mystery in the vodka-nourished haze of her urban reverie, drinking in the pleasure of watching the Japanese sushi chefs of Manhattan attack a massive heap of fresh salmon ahead of the dinner crowd.

Elena

2008-04-10T10:49:00.002-04:00

This just arrived via email:

Hi dear!!

My letter will surprise you!!

My name - Elena. My age-26 years. I live in Russia!!

Private life didn\'t turn out well. I decided to find a foreign man. I dream to meet a decent, kind and clever man!! It is difficult to tell about myself. If this is of any interest to you, write to me.

My address - ramsdams@gmail.com I\'ll wait!!

Kisses Elena

Now I'm worried, and I hope Elena isn't waiting for me personally. She sounds desperate, sad and beautiful. I've never met her, but now I'm feeling pressured to help her find a foreign man, a decent, kind and clever foreign man.

I don't know the details of how Elena's private life didn't turn out well, but I do want to tell her that finding a man won't necessarily solve the problems of her private life. What went wrong? Why is it difficult to tell? Elena, you are a mystery.

I'm in no position to help--Dave and I and our two cats live in less than 1,000 square feet of space, and it would be tight with Elena sleeping in our second bedroom, which is also an office, and anyway Dave is my foreign man--but if anyone out there can help, please contact her at ramsdams@gmail.com. Elena will wait for your answer.

Linda

2008-04-01T16:36:00.004-04:00

Linda S. was the first bad girl I ever met. We were in grade school together, age eleven, and got breasts and periods before most of the other girls. It was our physical maturity that drew us to each other.

What fascinated me about Linda was that she knew exactly what to do about her maturity, while I was a clueless geek. She shaved her legs, used tampons, had boyfriends and smoked Marlboros. And she had style, wearing tight t-shirts, low-slung jeans and wide belts. She had beautiful long blond hair, a broad Slavic face and a big confident laugh. I could't understand why she wanted to be my friend.

Her Italian mother was divorced from her Polish father--the only "broken home" on our street at the time. The rest of the divorces didn't come until at least five years later in our Chicago suburb, including my parents'. Linda's mom, Carmella, always seemed to be cooking big pots of tomato sauce, and she scared me. Carmella was the only person who could wipe the smile off Linda's face, and she did it with shouts and hitting. Thank god I didn't see Carmella often; she had a 9-to-5 office job, so Linda and I could run around the house freely.

When I was in fifth grade, I was in a brief love triangle with Linda and my kindergarten best friend Wendy, but I eventually dropped Wendy for Linda. She was the only friend I wanted to be with. We liked to dance in the rain together, listen to pop music and put on glamorous shows for each other in the basement. I especially enjoyed lip-synching to one of Carmella's records, "Goodbye Charlie," by some singer like Dory Previn or Patti Page or whoever it was.

Anyway, Linda was seriously involved in all of my first kissing experiences: 1) She pinned her boyfriend Mike in the schoolyard one Saturday afternoon and forced him to make out with her to prove to me how long she could hold a kiss without taking a breath; 2) She instructed me and a neighborhood boy, Greg, to kiss each other on the lips because neither of us had ever done it before and it was time to learn; 3) We were bored one weekend night with no boys around and decided to practice French kissing with each other, which we did on my bed.

I haven't seen Linda in years, but I thought about her the other day after watching Madonna's 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare. While performing in Detroit, she gets a visit from an old schoolfriend, and Madonna describes her as a bad girl from a broken home who was a bad influence--she showed Madonna how to insert a Tampax, ran around with boys, smoked...

Basically, Madonna--one of our era's biggest bad girls of all--had a wild bad-girl friend in childhood just like my very own Linda. It seems like no matter who you are when you're a kid, it helps to have a bad girl around to guide you through tough times.

"Can I just say that I find it really irritating that everyone beats up on Britney Spears?" Madonna told Elle magazine in February 2001. "I want to do nothing but support her and praise her and wish her the best. I mean, she's 18 years old! It's just shocking. I was so gawky and geeky and awkward and unsure of myself."

Instead of perfume there will be rottenness

2008-03-21T10:35:00.004-04:00

It's Good Friday today, and I'm reading The Bible. I struggle with it; I don't understand. Isaiah is a cruel, cruel chapter of the Old Testament. Reminding us of God's terrible disappointment in us and the punishment he has in store.

Yes, there are bad girls in The Bible, and God does not love them. Woe to the wicked! They let their women rule over them.

Isaiah 3: 18-24
The LORD said:

Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet; the Lord will smite with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.

In that day the Lord will take away the finer of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets, and the scarfs; the headdresses, the armlets, the sashes, the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the signet rings and nose rings; the festal robes, the mantles, the cloaks, and the handbags; the garments of gauze, the linen garments, the turbans, and the veils.

Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; and instead of a girdle, a rope; and instead of well-set hair, baldness; and instead of a rich robe, a girding of sackcloth; instead of beauty, shame.

Swish Blogade Hostess

2008-03-11T17:24:00.008-04:00

Oh boy. I'm still cringing from this video that my friend Lisanne of Found in Brooklyn took at the March 9 Brooklyn Blogade. I'm not used to seeing myself on film. Do I really move and sound like that?

But in the spirit of accurately disseminating the local news and embarrassing myself, I give you here a video of me being a swish hostess in the Old Brick Cafe on Church Avenue in Kensington.

Blogade Review from the Laziest Girl in Town

2008-03-10T17:42:00.015-04:00

I've always wanted an excuse to call myself "the laziest girl in town," and now I've found the perfect one. I was the hostess for yesterday's Brooklyn Blogade and planned the event, but rather than me going to the trouble of writing about it, I'm going to leave that chore in the capable hands of other Blogadeers.

Please go to the Flatbush Gardener's review, which has tons of pictures, including a fabulous one of me being a posey wanker. I tried to download the JPEG, but I couldn't figure it out and am probably stealing or breaking some law by trying, and anyway, I'm too lazy to figure it out. Just go to the Flatbush Gardener's link.

I received a really sweet thank you from Eleanor Traubman of Creative Times:
"When I think about what word comes to mind to describe yesterday's blogade, it's
GENEROSITY.

"First, Joyce set such a warm, welcoming tone for the event. Setting it up for folks to read was such a great idea, really gave us a chance to see each other in a new and deeper way that went a step beyond a Shout Out.

"Second, people who read were generous in terms of sharing different pieces of themselves through their writing - personal stuff, stuff that reflected who they are. That takes courage.

"Third, the folks who ran the restaurant just kept the food coming.....homemade food from their family's cultural tradition. I liked, also, that they got to be part of the event. I saw that they were listening to everything and seemed moved.

"Joyce said it well when she saw the afternoon as a way to humanize technology, see the human faces behind the blogs.

"I feel honored to be part of such an amazing, kind, smart, funny, savvy, and civic-minded group of people."

Thanks, Eleanor! And now here's the complete list of everybody else who came yesterday to the Old Brick Cafe in Kensington:

Blue Barn Pictures
Brooklynometry
Crazy Stable and A Year in Prospect Park
Found in Brooklyn
Hutch Owen comic strip
Luna Park Gazette
Midnight Cowgirls
Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn
Self-Absorbed Boomer
Shellytown
Washington Square Park

My god. Many of these links contain posts where people have already written about yesterday's Blogade. I've been scooped on my own event. That's what happens to lazy girls who want to appear as if hard work is beneath them. I hope somebody's making some money off of all this energetic reporting. Me, I'd rather swan about on the day of the Blogade, wearing a cute outfit and filling people's wine glasses and asking them if they're having a nice time.

Reviving Skittles, Part 8: Escape to Paris

2008-02-25T18:09:00.011-05:00

Note to English courtesan lovers: I just found a real-live English courtesan's blog. She has a first from Oxford, fancies Wim Wenders films and the music of Massenet, and charges anywhere from £400 for 2 hours to £2400 for 48 hours. A 45% deposit is required. Check it out: The Diary of an English Courtesan

At the end of 1862, The Times announced that Catherine Walters’ Park Street house off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair was available to let and that all its contents were for sale. Curious mothers and daughters showed up on Park Street under the pretext of wanting to rent the house. But what they really wanted was to get a glimpse into the notorious courtesan’s life.

And maybe get a feel for what it's like to be a bad girl. I've noticed that some of the most interesting women in the world, especially the ones who are single and good at it, create lavish living spaces that are such an absolute reflection of themselves that it's impossible to imagine them ever living with a man on a daily basis. (In other times and places, Frida Kahlo and Mae West also created fabulous me-only spaces for themselves.) In Skittles' case, there was no space for a full-time man amid all the gilt ornamentation, cerise-pink silk and so much swansdown that it even covered the toilet seats.

Skittles didn’t care what the thrill seekers thought. She was going to Paris.

After years of partings and reunions, her relationship with Hartington had reached its logical conclusion after a few aimless visits and half-hearted letters between them did nothing to change things. The affair was over. (In 1892, when he was 59 years old, Hartington finally married for the first and only time in his life. His father had died in 1891, making Hartington the 8th Duke of Devonshire. The duke's bride was his longtime mistress, the Duchess of Manchester, whose first husband had conveniently died in 1890. Skittles continued to collect the yearly income Hartington provided and kept all his letters until the end of her life.)

Paris was good for Skittles. It rounded her out, helping her understand who she was—-and wasn’t. She saw that she would never be like the Parisian courtesans, with their wild flirting and emotional outbursts. The Parisians called attention to themselves with their extravagant dress and open criticism of the servants who waited on them at dinner parties. Still, Skittles studied their graceful manners in social situations. She heard how they talked about travel and politics and learned about their preferences in food, wine and perfume. She saw their ease in the world and imitated it, opening herself up to new experience.

Combining this sophistication with her British resiliency, Skittles developed a persona for herself: the refined and elegant Englishwoman of subdued taste. One memoirist wrote, “Everything was so quiet. The harness and livery of her servants and she herself dressed always in dark colors, so that no one unless he knew her would have suspected that she was of the demi-monde.”

Here she is, the Lady Skittles:

While the Parisian girls attended gambling parties and masqued balls, Skittles' poor French and homesickness contributed to her quieter ways. She rode horses and opened her doors to visitors from England. She also spent time in diplomatic circles, entertaining ambassadors, politicians and the young attachés who worked at the British embassy.

In her travels abroad, Skittles also learned the value of sleeping with the natives to learn the language. Her best French teacher was the sixty-something Achille Fould, Napoleon III’s finance minister, a skillful yet undemanding lover who showed her a few new tricks in bed as well as the importance of looking carefully after her money. A banker by trade, Fould taught Skittles the value of compound interest and provided her with an income in addition to the one she received from Hartington.

Maybe he saw himself as Skittles' savior, or a father figure who just happens to have intimate relations with his little darling every now and then, which can happen when a kind and educated man hires a prostitute. Fould was charmed by Skittles' attempts to improve herself as much as by her elegant beauty. She was his new cultural project. This suited Skittles perfectly because she was at a time in her life when she was hungry for education. She had already started to read literature and attend painting exhibits at the Barbizon School.

Just as important, Skittles was learning to be a grown woman. She found that she enjoyed her financial independence and property rights, and she had no intention of losing them to marriage. And now that finding a husband was no longer her goal, she found self-expression in sex without expectations. For a woman of her straightforward character, it was a relief to let go of the submissive poses she had adopted as a girl. She didn't have to hide her talents for arranging a seductive atmosphere, choosing the correct wines, making the first move and inventing new positions in lovemaking.

Thanks to Achille Fould, who was not a jealous man, Skittles found plenty of opportunity to practice her new talents in the small gatherings of rich, powerful and interesting men she invited to her salons. The most interesting one of all was a brooding young man with a strikingly pretty face and a poet's bearing because he was indeed a poet.

In Part 9, we meet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a converted Catholic and virgin who "still trembled at the thought of carnal sin and eternal damnation, but as a romanticist longed for the love of some earthly goddess”...

Brooklyn Blogade on March 9 in Kensington

2008-02-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

Hi, Brooklyn Blogadeers!

I'm hosting the Brooklyn Blogade on Sunday, March 9, at 12 p.m., in Kensington at the Old Brick Cafe, a little Italian/Balkan/Mediterranean restaurant on Church Avenue. Please come!

Time for "Show & Tell": Bloggers are encouraged to be brave and give a reading from one of their best blog posts. Or bring along your laptop and a screen and show us your best pics. Or just tell us about your best post. Please plan to limit your presentation to about five minutes so everybody can have a turn.

The Old Brick Cafe's owner, Eddy, and I have planned a lunch, so please arrive on time at noon.

For a cost of $15 per person (tip at our discretion), the menu includes:
--salad
--an appetizer pastry called burek
--a main course of cevapi (shish kebab), chicken cutlet or vegetarian lasagna
--dessert and coffee

We will have the place to ourselves as a private party, and you may bring in a bottle of wine if you care to BYOB.

Because Eddy's restaurant is charmingly small, it is essential that I give him a headcount. Please RSVP with me by Thursday, March 6, and be sure to tell me what you want as your main course. Send your reservation to: mybadgirlblog@hotmail.com

The Old Brick Cafe is located at 507 Church Ave. between Ocean Parkway and E. 5th Street (very close to the Church Avenue stop on the F train, and not too far from the Q stop on Church Avenue).

Bad Girls Have Daughters, Too

2008-02-03T15:00:00.000-05:00

I've just finished reading Too Great A Lady, Amanda Elyot's historical novel that details the life of Lady Emma Hamilton as if she's writing her own memoir a year before her death in 1815. I have mixed feelings about the book. It reads a bit like a Harlequin novel, with lots of busted corset stays and heaving desire, but by the end of the story, when Admiral Lord Nelson dies aboard the Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar, it had me blubbing like a schoolgirl.

I don't want to talk too much about English history's greatest love affair ever, because it's already been done to death by many writers, including me in this blog post. Though I have to admit, I'm so fascinated by Lady Hamilton, a classic bad girl, that the next book on my reading list is Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, another novelization of Emma's life, which I'm sure will be a more literary affair than Elyot's book.

What interests me now is Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia Nelson, who never forgave her mother for being who she was.

Here's England's greatest love story ever told from the illegitimate daughter's point of view:

Horatia was born in January 1801 and lived until the age of almost five with her father, Horatio Nelson, the heroic and publicly adored commander of the Royal Navy who had won the Battle of the Nile. She was never told who her mother was, and after a time, Horatia actively sought not to learn who her mother was.

Those first few years were strange yet idyllic. Horatia and her father lived on his 110-acre country estate with a married couple, Sir William and Lady Emma Hamilton, who was constantly throwing lavish parties. Mrs. Hamilton didn't sleep with her aged husband, but she did seem to spend an awful lot of time with Admiral Nelson, giving him baths and helping him dress because he had only the one arm after losing the other one in battle. When Sir William died in 1801, the widow Hamilton kept coming round to pay increasingly unseemly visits to the admiral.

Admiral Nelson died in 1805, and Horatia's life took a bad turn. The widow kept insisting that Horatio wanted her to be Horatia's sole guardian. Which meant that when Lady Hamilton went bankrupt , she dragged Horatia along with her when she got sent to debtors' prison. And once she got out of prison, she dragged Horatia off to France to escape her creditors, when all Horatia wanted to do was live with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside.

Lady Hamilton, with all her grand pretensions, spent money she didn't have for Horatia's studies in foreign languages, drama and the dance. The widow arranged for the girl's portrait to be painted as a joyful Bacchante, just as she had done when young.

Here's Horatia as a Bacchante:
And here's Lady Hamilton:

A Bacchante is a priestess or female votary of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Horatia never wanted to be a Bacchante.

Worse, when drunk and dramatic as usual, Lady Hamilton would make dark and brooding statements to the effect that she was Horatia's only true mother, and that if Horatia wasn't careful she would fall into the same life of sin that Lady Hamilton had fallen into. It was a blessing, really, when the widow died of alcoholism-related liver disease in 1815, even though Horatia was only 14 at the time and had to look after the body all by herself in France until it could be buried.

When finally freed from Lady Hamilton's clutches, Horatia ran as fast as she could to the bosom of the Nelson family, who arranged for her marriage to the Reverend Philip Ward just after her 21st birthday in February 1822 at Burnham Westgate Church, near her father’s home village in north Norfolk. Horatia and the vicar had eight unquestionably legitimate children together and led an exceedingly private life.

Till she breathed her last breath in 1881 at the age of 80, Horatia Nelson denied that Lady Emma Hamilton could ever have been her mother.

I recently found a photograph of Horatia Nelson. It's not a very good image, but it does give a solid impression of her preferred look in adulthood. Clearly, dancing as a Bacchante was not Horatia's idea. It was the woman who wasn't her mother's.

How Catherine the Great Got That Way

2008-01-23T10:15:00.000-05:00

A bad girl isn’t born, she’s made. We’ve seen it over the course of Western history: a bright and pretty yet relatively unremarkable young woman finds herself stuck in an awful situation—she may come from a crazy family or crushing poverty, or perhaps she’s locked in a disastrous marriage—and she reaches a crisis point that drives her to find an exit. As she journeys alone into the world, she discovers that the things good girls are taught to shun, meaning illicit sex, dirty money and self-serving power, are the same things that will save her.

This discovery marks the moment of her becoming a bad girl.

Catherine the Great, Empress of All the Russias, is a classic example. Until the age of fifteen, she was a sweet-natured princess from a tiny German state who spent her time going to church, learning French and entertaining youthful fantasies of love and marriage. But all that changed when Her Majesty the Empress of Russia decided that the girl was the perfect match for her first cousin, the future czar.

Married to a Mental Defective
As a result, the princess found herself lost in a far-off land and married to a mentally defective degenerate who refused to consummate their union. On their wedding night in August of 1745, the Empress Elizabeth herself led the virgin bride to the couple’s bedchamber, a pink velvet fantasyland, where servants dressed her in satin and lace and tucked her into bed. The girl waited for her new husband, and she waited, and then she waited some more.

“My dear husband did not attend to me at all,” Catherine recalled later in her memoirs. “I yawned, I suffered from boredom, having nobody with whom I could exchange a word.”

In the wee hours of the morning, Peter stumbled into the room, drunk, and collapsed on the bed with his boots on. There was no sex that night, not a tender word or a kiss, and that’s the way things went for years—Catherine would wait for Peter, and Peter would come home drunk and either collapse or train his dog in the bedroom while tormenting Catherine with talk of sexual exploits with his mistresses. After years of fruitlessly waiting for her husband to impregnate her and thus ensure an heir to the throne, Catherine took matters into her own hands and went out and found herself a lover to provide what her husband wouldn’t.

Catherine’s mother-in-law got her heir, never mind who the child’s father might be, and with this item of business finally tended to, the super-fertile Catherine enjoyed many pregnancies by many lovers. It became her custom to deposit her babies in the nursery so she could quickly return to court and keep up with the political intrigue going on at the palace in Saint Petersburg. “Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant,” Peter complained to his friends after one such pregnancy. “I have no idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to recognize it as such.”

A Good Time for Murder
Eventually, Catherine grew tired of Peter—as did Russia’s citizenry and armed forces—and she decided along with Gregory Orlov, her lover of the moment, that it would be best if she dethroned her husband, which explains why Czar Peter III was murdered in 1762. Certainly, Peter’s murder freed the Empress to live out her passions. Once he was gone, she lost any sense of shame and stretched into her true self. She discovered her talents, developed a powerful presence among her courtiers and surrounded herself with admirers.

In short, Catherine the Great was a bad girl:
• She had encountered an obstacle that forever changed the direction of her life.
• She took action to ensure that she would never feel trapped again.
• She rebelled against the established order.
• She enjoyed sex and love immensely and used men to get what she wanted.
• She found an outlet for her creative energy, which in her case involved the assumption of wealth and power.
• She defied her critics and became a star.

Catherine led a very complicated life, but she never saw it that way. By her thinking, she was merely a simple girl who needed love. “If in my youth I had found a husband whom I could have loved,” she wrote in her memoirs, “I should have remained faithful to him all my life. It is my misfortune that my heart cannot rest content even for an hour without love.”

Note: No, Catherine the Great and her horse did not engage in...erm, how you say...sexual congress. That's just a myth invented by people who like to mock powerful women--the same people who accuse Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian or Britney Spears of being crazy. True, Catherine the Great liked to ride, and she loved cavalrymen (the younger the better). So there was no equine sex, although it must be said that the Empress did enjoy dressing like a man and riding a horse astride her thighs.

Brooklyn Blogade on Jan. 20 in Clinton Hill

2008-01-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

Hello. I'm sober now. And blogging again from Brooklyn.

Please come to this January's ultrachic, supertrendy & lovelyfriendly Brooklyn Blogade, hosted by the Clinton Hill Blogger, on Sunday, Jan. 20. The Blogade will start at 11 a.m. at the Frank White Cafe + Gallery, 936 Atlantic Ave., at St. James.

According to the Clinton Hill Blogger, "Frank White isn't located on the prettiest corner of Clinton Hill, but the space inside is absolutely gorgeous. Plus, in addition to the regular coffee and pastries, they'll be serving waffles and toppings!"

Blogging and waffles! How can you resist a combination like that? To RSVP, please send an email by Jan. 16 to: clintonhillblog-at-gmail-dot-com.

I really recommend meeting other bloggers in the flesh. While in London over the hols, I stayed with a screenwriter friend who writes a blog called My Forehead Is Bleeding. She dragged me to a lunch where a group of British screenwriters all met for the first time, and it was really fun! See the sexy writeup on this LA dude's blog (he was the other Yank at the lunch, in addition to me).

Christmas in England

2007-12-22T08:13:00.001-05:00

Have tripped down the rabbit hole. Here in England for Christmas, and spent first jet-lagged weekend at a free party, properly sprinkled with happy fairy dust and ear-scorching techno beats.

Oh, you ask, do they still throw these free-party raves in London, then?

Yes, love, they do. And they go something like this, just as they did 5-10 years ago: yer mate tells you there's a party planned for Saturday, wait for details, you'll get a text. And then the organisers send word that they've busted into an abandoned Sunbeam Corp. plant in Acton, and the mob descends on the empty industrial building, hoodies, dreads, floppy jeans, girls n boys n boys n girls, no commercials, no branding, no cameras, no bouncers, and a minimum of security at the door, not a single cheap authority figure's jacket in sight, no sticks, no tasers.

The sound has assaulted your ears, painfully, even before you've entered Sunbeam, but in the main hall there's a crowd round the sound deck and speakers because this is where the party is, and off your head as you is, you want to be near the sound. In the center of the light and the smoke, and never mind the dark hooded boys wandering in the back of the cavernous space, don't really want to know what they're doing and you just want to be near the light, the music, the party & the people & the light, the light, the light.

You take a break, drift upstairs and past heaving faces in the stairwell, oh the humanity, descending into a Hieronymous Bosch hell or is it heaven, but not sure that you should seek eye contact considering the state you're in. Christ this place is dirty, and keep your eyes closed when you go to the toilets. For a change, it's lovely to see drug deals conducted so openly, which slakes one's curious thirst, but still you do make friends on the dance floor, Virginie the beautiful French girl and Kojo from Ghana, who are also there for the light and the music.

It may just be that you're feeling all loved up, but these are two of the most beautiful people you've ever met, and you're lit up by Virginie's devil nostrils and freshwater pearly teeth, and Kojo's tender nature so clearly above the brooding darkness of this transient squatters' ball. Two of the most gorgeous people you've ever met, and then you go and lose the freakin' phone number for Virginie, don't you?, that she's scribbled on a scrap of paper and you shoved in your graywool coat pocket. And now they're lost to you forever and you can only fantasise about them, Virginie's swaying moves and slouchy jumper on the dance floor, Kojo's gentle touch as he wipes the soot off a drunk boy's puss, and in return, headed back to Glen's flat near Hackney at noon, all sleeping on the train, you suddenly wake up at Bethnal Green and dash out of the car without a goodbye to him, asleep beside you.

Back at the flat, you sleep for 16 hours, eat a good meal with some lager from the off-licence, and you catch a cold.

On to the next stop, a sane and civilised place in the English countryside, where little girls decorate Christmas trees and men in tweed caps take their dogs for a walk.

The Best Costume for Today

2007-11-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

I'm a lazy cow, posting the second You Tube video in a row on my blog. I should just drop out of the writing game altogether and watch movies all day. Starting with this, a snippet from Grey Gardens, that 1975 documentary about Little Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother living in that old wreck of a mansion on East Hampton. It's a riveting film, and yet nothing happens.

You've seen it, haven't you? Tell me you've seen it. Well, I'll admit, I watched it for the first time last night, and now I'm simply mad about Edie. Did you know she's first cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? Both girls attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, which explains their shared East Coast, patrician vocal intonation.

I'd like to apologize to the Kennedy family right now for showing this clip on Bad Girl Blog because Edie herself was a very good girl indeed. She refused a marriage proposal from the richest man in the world, J. Paul Getty, most likely because he was a womanizing cad who got married five times, and Edie only ever cared about three things: swimming, dancing and the Catholic Church.

Still, Edie had some bad-girl backbone when it came to family matters. "You see, in dealing with me, the relatives didn't know that they were dealing with a staunch character," she says in another scene in the film. "And I tell you if there's anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman... S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There's nothing worse, I'm telling you. They don't weaken, no matter what."

Janis Joplin Meets Gloria Swanson

2007-11-15T09:53:00.000-05:00

This You Tube video is a beauty.

It's a meeting of two Bad Girl greats--Janis Joplin and Gloria Swanson--in the 1970s on Dick Cavett's talk show. Janis has an amazing laugh, Gloria is charmingly youthful, and Dick Cavett does a magnificent job of keeping his compusure.

Frick

2007-11-08T18:45:00.000-05:00

When I'm having nice sex, my mind tends to wander. For example, the other night I was making love with my baby, a wee bit high we were, as you do, and I was feeling so gorgeous and stretched out and free that my head floated off to somewhere else. I was all loved up, the music was playing, the lights were low, and there I was, back at the Frick Collection, 1 E. 70th St., NY NY 10021, which I had visited earlier in the day.

Images of the paintings I'd seen floated past my closed eyes in the dark, this man in particular:
Not much is known about "Portrait of a Man," Hans Memling, Netherlands, c. 1470-1475, though Memling frequently painted religious subjects and this may be the portrait of a cleric. A very intelligent and noble cleric, according to the Frick's description that appeared alongside the painting. I didn't see that. I was more interested in the stubble in his beard and the depth in his eyes. He's really very sexy. See the manly lines around his mouth and his big Gallic-looking nose? He reminds me of a French ski instructor I met a long time ago in the Alps.

There was something of a transference that night as his face floated into my head and briefly replaced the man in my bed. Mmmmm....

And then we were joined by a lady, who also came floating into my head:

"Lady Hamilton as Nature," to be specific, painted in 1782 by the English painter George Romney, who painted Emma Hamilton's portrait dozens of times at the height of her popularity in the 1780s.

Emma Hamilton was a full-on bad girl. A blacksmith's daughter born in 1761, she took full advantage of her youth and beauty to transform herself from a common brothel prostitute into a mistress for a few select men from London's high society.

Emma and the Honorable Charles Francis Greville were deeply in love, but when Charles started to look for a rich wife, he sent Emma to Italy to be the mistress of his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to Naples. Sir William liked Emma so much that he married her, and she became a party-throwing trendsetter with a love of gambling.

She also had a love of Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, a one-armed, toothless sailor whose mild brain damage didn't prevent him from leading the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, when the British defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet in the most significant naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Don't ask me for any more details than that, because military history makes my mind go numb.

"Their affair seems to have been tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, by the elderly Sir William, who showed nothing but admiration and respect for Nelson," according to the Wikipedia entry on Lady Hamilton. "Emma gave birth to Nelson's daughter Horatia on January 31, 1801, at Sir William's rented home in Clarges Street, Piccadilly, London. By the autumn of the same year, Nelson bought Merton Place, a small ramshackle house on the outskirts of modern day Wimbledon. There he lived openly with Emma, and Sir William (along with Emma's mother) in a menage a trois that fascinated the public."

Within four years, Sir William died, Nelson died at Trafalgar, and Emma spent the money she had inherited from both of them on gambling and lavish living. After a year spent in debtor's prison, she moved to France, where she died in poverty of alcoholism-induced liver failure at the age of 54.

On a happier note, the wildly rich American industrialist Henry Clay Frick, 1849-1919, had a pash for Lady Hamilton. (I examined the book titles in his mansion's library, and he clearly had an Anglophilic turn of mind.) After buying Romney's portrait, he hung it over the foot of his bed so Emma's was the first face he saw every morning. That's a nicely circular way for me to end this story. Surely, Mr. Frick was a man who would have appreciated the painterly visitations that came into my head as I made love to my sweetie.

Reviving Skittles, Part 7: An Awful American Ending

2007-11-02T15:45:00.002-04:00

Born and raised in the 20th-century Western world, I find it very difficult to understand why two people who love each other can't find a way to stay together, even if their families disapprove. I say that, and yet I once had a six-month-long love affair with a younger man who phoned me the Sunday after I met his family at a Thanksgiving weekend to say that I was too old for him. He tried to ease the blow by explaining that he was happy to have me as his lover, but that I just shouldn't get my hopes up for anything more because he could never marry me. I responded by saying that I never wanted to see him again.

I thought of this disastrous phone call when I read of Lord Hartington's offer to Skittles for the down payment on a house and a yearly allowance rather than marriage. It's a shame when two people who are well suited temperamentally and sexually and who share many interests stop seeing each other out of fear of what other people might think. According to the histories I found, an obsession with class distinction was one of Hartington's greatest weaknesses. This is what led him to tell Skittles: "Sometimes I think that it would be better for you if you could forget me because you are too good to be left in the world all alone so much, and some day you ought to find someone who will take care of you for the rest of your life…which I am afraid I shall never be able to do."

Uh, excuse me, Lord Hartington? To hell with you.

Skittles seems to have responded with wild anger, and she taunted Lord Hartington with stories of her bad behavior. Unfortunately, her side of the argument has been lost to time; the 8th Duke of Devonshire's heirs have his letters but not hers. But we do know that Hartington answered: “How unhappy it has made me this last year to think that you have been going all wrong.” At this point, I can imagine myself as Skittles, and I can see that the whole act of girlishly pleasing Harty Tarty is useless. So I might as well shock him instead.

"Good," I would say. "Let's see just how much more unhappy I can make you when I tell you all about the sex, fun and adventure I've been having without you." An innocent like Harty Tarty, with his sheltered upbringing, would have never understood the tough independence at Skittles' core. If it came to an end, she would steel herself to get over him more easily than he ever imagined. And in the meantime, she could try to make his life miserable.

When not furious with Hartington's obtuse self-righteousness, the 20-something girl from the Liverpool docks more than likely focused on the charms of staying right where she was, enjoying her courtesan's life in London. She couldn’t have relished the idea of socializing with Hartington’s boring set of country squires. Along with vaguely romantic thoughts of marriage, Skittles may not really have known what she wanted from Hartington, just that she wanted him. The dreamy gentleness of his character appealed to her, and I'm sure it frustrated her to find that he wasn't so easily bossed around.

In 1861, Skittles told Hartington that she might be pregnant. (Can't you just smell the desperation?) Though an actual birth or miscarriage was never mentioned in his letters, for a time he did accept the pregnancy as real. He wrote to her tenderly, suggesting that he was preparing himself to become a father even if he wasn’t willing to marry the mother of his child. “Mind you don’t squeeze yourself in too much,” he advised her on her corsets. “You must take great care of the little one, you know.”

Probably on the advice of family, in the autumn of 1862 Hartington escaped Skittles by going off on a six-month tour of North America. His stated reason for going was to visit his brother and see the Civil War at close range. But wasn't it lucky that the trip put so much distance between him and his darling little Skitsy?

As for Skitsy, a girl with an unusually robust constitution, she escaped to take the waters in Ems, Germany, which was the popular thing to do back then for people in fragile health. If she thought a sudden illness would bring Hartington back to her, it didn’t work. Lord Hartington sent Skittles a letter saying: “My poor child I trust you are better now, and that even if you have thought me very hard-hearted…you will begin to see that it must have been done some day and that putting it off only made it harder to both of us every day.”

Her answer was to follow Hartington to America. And I'll break in right now to say: "Skittles, don't do it!" Don't you just want to do a girlfriend intervention on her, and tell her she's making a big mistake?

It gets worse. Skittles had company, of course, choosing as her traveling companion a raffish young Irishman named Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, a young man who had abandoned his wife in Ems to run off with Skittles. An inexperienced lover, Beauclerk was the sort who nevertheless bragged of his sexual exploits. Why Skittles would have chosen such a hot-tempered fop is a mystery, unless it was simply that he was there to flatter her vanity when she needed distraction--and he served as backup to her wounded ego, which might have needed even more backing up after she saw Hartington.

Skittles was young still, just 23, and fully capable of foolish behavior. (Then again, I don't think foolishness is age-specific. We've all heard stories of old fools.) Beauclerk, meanwhile, congratulated himself on winning Skittles as his prize, and then he became smitten. As you do. Skittles was such a lovely, entrancing girl, winning him over with her natural sympathy and sexual skill. They traveled first to Italy, leaving Beauclerk’s wife to find her own way home, before heading to America. If Skittles had to give up Lord Hartington, she wouldn't let him go without a fight.

Now, you could say this episode is the tiniest of moments in the history of Victorian England. But at the same time, it reveals so much about star-crossed lovers and the end of an affair that I'm going to stretch out each excruciating moment.

So here's the end of Skittles and Lord Hartington, without apology:

Thinking to surprise Hartington, and anticipating his look of delight, Skittles showed up unannounced one day at his New York hotel. He was stunned to see her there. Though he gave her a kindly reception as best he could, Hartington kept the meeting brief. His thoughts were turned to the Civil War, politics back home and the Duchess of Manchester’s place in his life. Skittles was a mistake of his waning youth.

In an anguished conversation, a conversation that Hartington had been hoping to avoid, he made it clear that Skittles needed him more than he needed her.

I'll invent what they said:

"My God, Skitsy, here you are in New York! I never expected to see you here, my darling girl."

"Harty, my sweet, I just had to look at your face. I've missed you so much."

"But dear girl, can't you see? This is just not on. Really, you must go back home."

"Is that all you have to say to me, after I've come this far? Oh, how I hate you!"

Corny, isn't it? These conversations always sound so corny when you're not in them. At any rate, Hartington knew with utter finality that when it came to love, he would never stray again from his class.

And Skittles? She resolved that no man would ever break her heart again. Her trip to America was the worst episode in her emotional life, and she returned to England determined to lead the full-on courtesan's life. (As for Beauclerk, the little weasel, he resolved to reconcile with his wife, and the happy ending there was that Skittles never heard from him again.)

Stayed tuned for Part 8, when Skittles runs off to Paris to put Harty Tarty behind her forever--and to properly learn the artful ways of the courtesan.

Meet Me for Bellydancing at Le Souk

2007-10-29T15:31:00.001-04:00

I'm going tomorrow to see oriental belly dance by Princess Farhana and the lovely Leela. Won't you please come? No cover, and only a $15 food/drink minimum. I've reserved a table--for me and YOU? Email me to RSVP. Click the "View my profile" link to the right and it will bring you to my email contact. Last time I went to a belly dance club, the audience danced after the show!

8 p.m., Oct. 30, Le Souk, 47 Ave. B, between E. 3rd & 4th Streets, NYC. Live Arabic music featuring Maurice Chedid and Ensemble, plus a sneak preview of "Tumbao" and experimental fusion dance by Nadia Moussa Dance Theater.

Bad Girls Found Partying in Brooklyn

2007-10-29T12:37:00.000-04:00

Here I am, bangin' on again about Mae West, but this time it's not my fault. Mae went to the same Halloween party I attended on Saturday night.

Here's Mae with Brooklyn's own "Found in Brooklyn" blogger, styling a rakish 1890s mini hat (all photos by David Kaplan):
"Found in Brooklyn" recently featured me as a guest blogger! Check it out: Gleaning Pebbles in Kensington.

A few other bad girls made an appearance on Saturday night. Here's Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday (a.k.a. Nichelle Newsletter blogger):

There's me, dancing like a fool on the right and ignoring the shameless bad girl cop who's drinkin' a beer and dancing with the prisoner she's supposed to be guarding:
And here's that same cop dancing with Billie:
Finally, here's Amy again, with the Mad Hatter and a Harajuku girl. To be honest, I don't know if Harajuku girls are bad girls, because I've never been to Japan. But I'm adding this picture here because all three of these party people are so extremely good-looking!

You Decide: Paris Hilton or Mae West?

2007-10-19T10:20:00.000-04:00

I've pretty well established by now that I've got a big crush on the bad girls of history, women like Mae West and Catherine the Great. But that raises the question of who's a bad girl today.

The automatic response, of course, would be that Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are modern bad girls. But are they?

Here's what Paris Hilton had to say for herself on "Larry King Live" after she was released from jail earlier this year: "It was one of the happiest days of my life. Like -- it's hard to even describe. It was so exciting even just being in the fresh air and looking up at the sky and the stars and being outside and then it was just pandemonium and then as soon as I saw my mom I just ran to her to give her a hug."

Paris Hilton, booking photo:

And here's what Mae West (who also served a few weeks of jail time in the 1920s, on obscenity charges for writing a play called Sex) had to say about being a bad girl, in an interview with The Guardian in 1979, just a year before she died: "I was a bad girl with a good heart. I don't think things have changed so much. It's still a man's world, with men making the rules that suit them best....You've gotta have plenty of self-esteem, nerve, and be bold in life. I've been liberated all my life. I always did what I wanted to do. I was an original."

Mae West, 1927 jailbird:

OK, I think Mae West could have shown Paris Hilton a thing or two about being a bad girl. But, dear reader, I'm interested in your comments. What is a bad girl, exactly? And who's the bigger bad girl, Paris or Mae?

Craigslist Courtesan Seeks SW$M

2007-10-12T16:43:00.000-04:00

Right around the time I was writing Reviving Skittles, Part 6, a friend sent me the following exchange between two anonymous writers on Craigslist.com, New York. I think it's disturbing and funny, especially in light of what I wrote in Part 6 about Lord Hartington's offer to Skittles, proposing a financial transaction rather than marriage. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought courtesans were a thing of the past. Looks like I was wrong.

The anonymous Craigslist courtesan wrote:

Okay, I'm tired of beating around the bush. I'm a beautiful (spectacularly
beautiful) 25 year old girl. I'm articulate and classy.
I'm not from New York. I'm looking to get married to a guy who makes at
least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that
a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don't think I'm
overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could
you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200
- 250. But that's where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won't get me to
central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an
investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she's not as pretty as I am,
nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her
level?

Here are my questions specifically:

- Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars,
restaurants, gyms

-What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won't hurt my
feelings

-Is there an age range I should be targeting (I'm 25)?

- Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side
so plain? I've seen really 'plain jane' boring types who have nothing to
offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I've seen drop dead gorgeous
girls in singles bars in the east village. What's the story there?

- Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker,
doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out?
Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

- How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE
ONLY

Please hold your insults - I'm putting myself out there in an honest way.
Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I'm being up front about it.
I wouldn't be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn't able to match
them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and
hearth.

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial
interests
PostingID: 432279810

And here's the answer she received:
Dear Pers-431649184:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about
your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament.
Firstly, I'm not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill;
that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here's how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a
crappy business deal. Here's why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you
suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my
money. Fine, simple. But here's the rub, your looks will fade and my money
will likely continue into perpetuity...in fact, it is very likely that my
income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won't be getting
any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning
asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation
accelerates! Let me explain, you're 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot
for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in
earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy
and hold...hence the rub...marriage. It doesn't make good business sense to
"buy you" (which is what you're asking) so I'd rather lease. In case you
think I'm being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go
away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It's as simple
as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I
wonder why a girl as "articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful"
as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe
that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn't found
you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we
wouldn't need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you're going about it the right way.
Classic "pump and dump."
I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease,
let me know.

Reviving Skittles, Part 6: An Unsuitable Attachment

2007-10-04T13:26:00.001-04:00

Catherine Walters may have been Victorian London's most sought-after courtesan, but the greatest love of her life was a man out of reach. It was a question of class: Spencer Compton Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, later the 8th Duke of Devonshire, believed from the start that a public life with Skittles would have been social suicide for him, and he never changed his opinion about that, no matter how much he loved her.

I couldn't find any hard evidence of how Skittles and Lord Hartington met, but my guess is that because they were both horse lovers, they probably met at a hunt or on Rotten Row one day when Skittles was out riding. And I can further conjecture that Skittles was openly flirtatious with Hartington, which felt deliciously unfamiliar to him, and that he fell for her quickly because she was a beautiful and fun girl, unlike any woman from the aristocratic and repressed circle who shared his privileged background. Skittles’ open coquetry combined with a mysterious sense of hidden secrets, creating a seductive tension that was hard to resist, and Hartington didn’t.

In turn, Skittles liked Harty Tarty, as his friends called him, because he was so different from the dockworkers and sailors she knew from her early Liverpool days. He was a shy and shuffling bachelor politician of 26 when they met, very sweet in private, and his fear of other people's opinions might have seemed of little importance at the start, and certainly not a fatal flaw.

In addition to being a lumbering and well-read Englishman, very much of his time and place, Lord Hartington was a man who hid his more delicate sensibilities beneath a gravely impenetrable exterior. His portrait shows him to have a long face with a narrow and sensuous nose, thoughtful eyes that droop at the corners, and a surprisingly lush lower lip peaking out from his full Victorian beard. Educated at Holker Hall, the family’s lonely house in the northern county of Cumbria, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered Parliament in 1857 and was destined to hold a variety of posts including Lord of the Admiralty and chief secretary for Ireland before becoming leader of the Liberal opposition in 1875.

In short, Hartington was a cultured man with an impressive pedigree, and Skittles fell in love with him. And he, in his own way, fell in love with her. She got under his skin, making him excited and confused whenever he saw her. He might resolve to be cool and controlled before one of their trysts, but then there she would be, smiling up at him, and he looking down into her bright upturned face and feeling a sudden surge of passion.

Queen Victoria believed that Hartington's calm nature had a stabilizing influence on her fast-living son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, but more familiarly known as Bertie. What the queen didn’t know was that Hartington, like many Victorian men expected to display a virtuous purity they could hardly bear, had his down-and-dirty side, and it was Harty Tarty himself who first took Bertie round to Skittles’ Mayfair salon in the 1860s, when she was generally accepted as the queen of her profession. She numbered quite a few royals and several princes among her lovers, including the crown prince of Germany, a Russian prince who gave her a miniature phaeton and a matching pair of Viennese chestnut ponies, and so of course she welcomed the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, who became a frequent visitor to her Sunday afternoon parties of baccarat, an illegal yet popular card game. Skittles played her part well--she was a professional, after all, and knew just how to act the perfect sex kitten--and there was something in Hartington's animal nature that made him proud to share his girlfriend with Bertie.

Hartington was Skittles’ first big affair when she was young, however, and despite her party girl ways, she had vague hopes that it would end in marriage. Those hopes rose when her lover took her to balls, parties and the Derby Day horse races. He also provided for her, paying for her house off Grosvenor Square. Surely, her tender affection and gaiety would bring him around, and she knew he felt protective of her. He worried about the life she led, about the emotional risks she took on by being with so many men.

But Hartington's affair with Skittles was only one small part of his life. They rarely spoke of politics, for example, a subject he much preferred to talk about with his other mistress, Lottie, the Duchess of Manchester, who was very much interested in Hartington’s political career even though she was married to someone else. Her marital status did not trouble Hartington, as his previous romantic relationship had been with another married woman, the Countess of Waldegrave.

Indeed, according to historian Patrick Jackson, who winnowed through some 200 letters from Hartington to Skittles, while Skittles spent most of her time in London, Hartington traveled often. “His annual itinerary was the traditional one of his class: London in the spring season, living at Devonshire House in Piccadilly; shooting on the Bolton Abbey estates in Yorkshire in August and September; and during the rest of the year extended visits to the family houses at Chatsworth, Hardwick, Holker Hall in what is now Cumbria, where Hartington had spent a secluded childhood, and Lismore in Ireland,” Jackson writes.

With two women in his life, Hartington felt no qualms about Skittles’ other relationships, though she revealed them to him in detail. If anyone was jealous, it was Skittles. In one letter, Hartington wrote, “There are a lot of people here but I don’t look at any of them because Skits says I mustn’t.” If anything, Hartington encouraged Skittles to pursue other men. In another letter, he wrote, “It is very nice of you to say you are so fond of me but you know there is somebody you like better. Have you seen him lately?”

She was his “darling little Skitsy” or “poor little darling child,” and he spoke to her like she was his baby girl--“Cav loves oo and nobody else”--and he was her big daddy. As she worked with a governess to improve her English, he praised her efforts with this: “I am sure you will learn very quick if you take pains, for you are a clever little child when you like.”

Not only was Skittles his baby girl, she was also a prostitute by trade, and beneath Hartington's social class. True, he found her hard to resist, and they stayed together for years. But he would never marry her.

Instead, he offered her a down payment of £2,500 for a house and an allowance of £400 a year. In late 1861, he wrote, “Sometimes I think that it would be better for you if you could forget me because you are too good to be left in the world all alone so much, and some day you ought to find someone who will take care of you for the rest of your life…which I am afraid I shall never be able to do.”

Coming soon: In Part 7, Skittles gets angry at Huntington for dumping her and chases him down, with disastrous consequences.

Exiting the Rat Race

2007-09-26T11:15:00.000-04:00

My position with the Very Large American Corporation (VLAC) was eliminated last week, for the most cliche of reasons: what's left of my job was moved to India in a great globalization scheme. But speaking of India, I'm a practicer of yoga, and I had a wise teacher once who told our class: "Find something to enjoy in the position." In my case, I'm finding plenty to enjoy in the VLAC position elimination.

Goodbye to all this:

and this:

I am free, free of the NYC rat race!

I've got big plans now: to write more, to freelance, to work part time for the anarchist cafe down the street, to volunteer for a good cause, to garden, to practice yoga and belly dance more, to be a housewife for the first time in my life, to cook dinner at home for friends cuz I'll be too broke to go out to NYC restaurants. I'll have more time now to pet my cats. And read so many books! It will be lovely.

However, I will not become a dirty hippie. Last night, as Dave and I ate one of my world-famous home-cooked dinners, we watched a NetFlix movie, "Alice's Restaurant," that Arlo Guthrie movie based on his song where he and his dirty hippie friends throw a bunch of post-Thanksgiving trash over a wooded cliff in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It was made in 1969 by the same guy who directed "Bonnie and Clyde," starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty.
Anyway, there we were, eating my fabulous wheatberry/chickpea/roast onion concoction that I love, plus a green salad, as we watched these horrible, self-indulgent, dirty man hippies riding around on their motorcycles and trashing an old church that one of them had bought for a song so they could amuse themselves by desecrating a place of worship and think they were changing the world by smoking pot and balling chicks. Yuck. I can understand why women joined consciousness-raising groups in the '70s, and also why the Conservative Right despises that old-timey '60s hippie culture. Did I really ever think it was cool? I mean, it was groovy that Arlo was a Vietnam War draft dodger, but the people he hung around with just looked like a bunch of substance-abusing losers who were going nowhere and had no philosophy.

On the plus side, it did get me thinking that the U.S. government really should reinstate the draft so there would be a bigger anti-Iraq War movement and we could get out of there faster.
But I digress. The thing is, I'm careful about balancing my checkbook, for example. There's $20 unaccounted for right now in my current balance, and it's annoying me. I can't ever imagine myself throwing money cares to the wind, dirty hippie style. No way, no day. I enjoy regular showers (and yet being careful of water use due to global warming concerns and this planet's limited natural resources, etc., because I am not a dirty hippie who thinks it's revolutionary to throw trash over a wooded cliff) and bikini waxes too much. So you better believe that if I ever run out of money--and I'll admit, I'm doing OK for now thanks to my annual bonuses and paychecks saved from VLAC--I'll be looking for an entrance right back into the rat race.

Crazy Daisy

2007-09-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

I've always loved daisies. The daisy is such a bright, happy little flower. And of course, you can pull its petals and play the "he loves me, he loves me not" game with a daisy.
When I joined my co-op's gardening committee, I decided I was going to be the flower lady on the committee. Not the kind of lady who wears a fancy hat and speaks at luncheons about beautifying America, but the kind who gets her hands dirty digging up weeds and planting seeds in front of her Brooklyn apartment building.

In late spring, I did the ladylike thing and rode my bicycle over to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden so I could see the tulips blooming. And then I went to the BBG's gift shop and bought several packets of seeds, including shasta daisies:

and black-eyed susans:

Or so I thought.

I planted the seeds in the round beds on either side of the front walkway and waited for them to grow. It seemed to take forever, weeks and weeks. Finally, in late June, a few little seedlings started to pop up, and the next day more popped up, and the day after that even more. It seemed that every seed I planted was starting to come up! I checked on their progress daily, and I could see the seedlings were really taking to the soil--like weeds, practically, they were so strong and healthy. It seemed that only one of the varieties had taken--I wasn't sure whether it was the daisies or the susans--but no matter. Something was growing.

Within a month the flower beds were full of this lush, verdant growth. On walks around my neighborhood, Kensington, I compared the daisies and susans in other people's gardens to mine. Hmm. Something wasn't right. Why didn't my leaves look like theirs? Why did I not see any buds, let alone blossoms, on my plants when everybody else's were in full bloom? Oh, there was something blooming, all right, but it was a crazy, brushy thing that looked exactly like this:
Still, if you've given birth to the ugliest baby in town, that baby is yours and you planted its seed, so you're going to love it no matter how ugly it is, right? That's why I was so upset when I came home from work one evening, checked my flower beds as usual, and saw to my horror that more than half of my big ugly babies had been ripped right off their stalks and disappeared. Why, why, oh why would anybody want to attack my flowers? I felt sick and violated.

The gossip started to spread. I asked my fellow gardening committee members if they knew what had happened, and I talked to other neighbors in our building, who talked to other neighbors on our street. Kensington has a diverse population of people who come from many lands: Park Slope, Williamsburg, Chicagoland (that would be me), Poland, Russia, Uzbekistan, Albania, Israel, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico and the Caribbean. It's a lively mix of immigrants, but we don't always understand each other. There's lots of gossip (but don't just take my word for it--there's a good sampling of local gossip on Kensington Blog.)

Finally, I talked to our super, Willie, who has lived in the neighborhood for years and years.

"Joyce, do you know what callaloo is?"

"Calla-who?"

"Callaloo. It's a plant from the West Indies, and they make soup out of it. There were some ladies come by the other night and they took some of your plants to make soup."

Willie and I looked at each other, and we laughed.

I went home and googled "callaloo," of course, and here's what I learned from wikipedia: "Callaloo (sometimes calaloo) is a Caribbean dish that is most popular in Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad & Tobago. Jamaicans are known to use callaloo in a plethora of dishes. The main ingredient is a leaf vegetable, traditionally either amaranth (known by many local names including callaloo or bhaji), or taro or Xanthosoma species (both known by many local names including callaloo, coco, tannia, or dasheen bush). Because the leaf vegetable used in some regions may be locally called 'callaloo' or 'callaloo bush,' some confusion can arise among the different vegetables and with the dish itself."

Oh, there was confusion, all right. Mine. How the hell did my daisy seeds from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden give spawn to callaloo? Once I understood the misunderstanding, though, I went from feeling violated to highly amused, especially after my first-floor neighbor, I'll call her Velma, told me that she saw those West Indian ladies sneak into our flower beds late one night to take the food I'd been growing. Velma and her dog are the self-designated eyes and ears of our building.

Velma called out to the ladies to ask what they were doing, and they explained that it was harvest time. They had been watching the callaloo's growth, too, and figured they should collect some before the leaves and stalks got too tough. Velma chased them off anyway, saying they had no right to steal our plants--and they hadn't even used scissors to cut them, they were just using their bare hands and pulling any old which way. She last saw the West Indian ladies running down the street, callaloo stalks in hand, their heads surely filled with plans for the pepper pot soup they were going to make. Here's a recipe for it on the Jamaica Me Krazy web site: pepper pot soup

I just hope those ladies were wearing fancy hats when they stole my callaloo.

My New Look

2007-07-21T16:36:00.000-04:00

I've always wanted to do a glamorous photo shoot starring myself. With hair & makeup and a professional photographer who encouraged me to be myself and just have fun!! at 40 images per digital roll with retouching and airbrushing of all minor flaws. So that's what we did the other day, me and Jovanka of Bauwerks Studio in Chicago, where I spent a week running around seeing friends and family earlier this month.

Here's my new look (photography by bauwerks.com):
Cheeky, innit?

Actually, what I would really love to do is dress up as all of my bad girls and try to mimic them. Try to become them. Though it might be really bad form for me to do Bessie Smith in black face. But I'd love to look like a Hollywood movie star from the 1930s, like Mae West. Here she is:
And here I am:

Is that a bit Mae West? Or is it more Louise Brooks?
I highly recommend doing a glamour photo shoot of oneself. If I can do it, anybody can. I'm nowhere near this perfect looking in real life. You should see me now as I write this in my underpants, glasses and scrunchied hair!

Reviving Skittles, Part 5: Rotten Row

2007-07-15T11:43:00.000-04:00

Sorry about Part 4. It was really dirty. I'm going to try to regain my dignity here in Part 5 by illustrating it with black-and-white period images and by saying that I discovered Skittles while doing research for my Bad Girls Project at the British Library in London. There's nothing quite like spending days and days and weeks and weeks wandering around a grand library in search of the lost secrets of history.

I'm currently reading The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the World Columbian about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, where he combines the biographies of the fair's main architect and a local doctor who became a notorious serial killer. In his notes section, Larson says that he didn't conduct any primary research using the Internet. "I need physical contact with my sources," he writes, "and there's only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness."

With my discovery of Skittles, my match in the darkness was the glimpse I got in the library's Rare Book Room of what life in Victorian London must have really been like. The era's suffocating stuffiness was matched by the amoral decadence that all that repression inevitably created. When Skittles arrived in London in the late 1850s, its population numbered about 2 million people, approximately 100,000 of whom were prostitutes. The Industrial Revolution was well underway, and poor rural folk were crowding into city slums to work for the factory owners so despised by Dickens and Marx. Other thinkers, Darwin especially, were producing ideas that challenged the era’s stern religious values. Men were expected to be all-wise providers, and women to meekly obey their husbands. Etiquette was an elaborate art form unto itself, and doing one’s duty to God and family was an act of patriotism. In short, Victorian London was a place of terrible social rigidity, and people found ways to resist. Women sought the right to vote and other escapes from their over-furnished houses, while upstanding men prowled the nightly haunts of the demi-monde. All these factors produced an ideal climate where courtesans could flourish.

Oops. I've just started to bore myself as a storyteller. That stuff about factory owners and Darwin may be true, but it sounds like blah, blah, blah to me. I've spent my entire professional life as a journalist and editor seeking a distanced objectivity from my subject. I'm tired of it. Now I want to rip everything up and start from scratch. I want to talk about my personal relationship with Skittles. I want to say how I feel about her.

How did Skittles become a shining prize to Victorian gentlemen? She was very nice to look at, of course, but once a man started looking, she started talking with an engaging combination of street wit, little stories, sudden fancies and gossip about people they both knew. I can feel myself falling in love with her. She was light and fun, and all those words tumbling from the sweet mouth of a stylish girl made a man feel deliciously free. Oh, how I wish I could have met Skittles and heard her speak.

I admire Skittles for her passionate desire to get ahead in life. She was never vulgar in the early days of her London career, yet her bad manners and unschooled speech were apparent, and she knew it. But she was a great student of people and a quick learner, and within a few years she had smoothed over the roughest parts of her personality.

So there she is in the late 1850s, just starting out as a courtesan, and spending her nights at the Haymarket, the gaslight-illuminated center of London’s bawdier night life, with its French restaurants, oyster bars, Turkish dens and night spots like the Picadilly Saloon. Kate Hamilton’s, a subterranean club of plush and gilt, brings together high-end prostitutes and low-diving gentlemen in a swirl of noisy laughter and the hunt for pleasure. I imagine Skittles was right in the middle of it, enjoying herself.

She meets the owner of a livery stable near Berkeley Square, a man looking for a pretty prostitute to advertise his wares by driving his pony traps around town. Already, Skittles has kept up her riding skills with races at the Cremorne Gardens. Now, driving the liveryman’s hacks and open phaetons, she makes a name for herself among the high society people who ride in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row and Ladies’ Mile, at Ascot, and at Queen Victoria’s staghound meets.

Skittles became a popular London figure. Her photo appeared in shop windows, women copied the styles she created, and letters to newspapers commented on her public appearances. In July of 1862, a cheeky letter from a young man calling himself "H." appeared in The Times. It was a sly complaint about a Hyde Park roadway choked with fashionable carriages filled with snobs vying for a glimpse of a girl he calls "Anonyma." Clearly, Anonyma is Skittles.

"Last year," H. writes, "she avoided crowds, and affected unfrequented roads, where she could more freely exhibit her ponies’ marvelous action, and talk to her male acquaintances with becoming privacy. But as the fame of her beauty and her equipage spread, this privacy became impossible to her. The fashionable world eagerly migrated in search of her from the Ladies Mile to Kensington Road. The highest ladies in the land enlisted themselves as her disciples. Driving became the rage. If she wore a pork pie hat, they wore pork pie hats;
if her paletot was made by Poole, their paletots were made by Poole. If she reverted to more feminine attire, they reverted to it also. Where she drove, they followed; and I must confess none of them sit, dress, drive, or look as well as she does; nor can any of them procure for money such ponies as Anonyma contrives to get—-for love."

In Part 6, a very feeling part, we'll learn about the biggest love of Skittles' life and why he broke her heart.

This Is Not A Food Blog

2007-06-22T09:21:00.000-04:00

We all know about those beautifully illustrated food blogs written by relaxed Californians who live around Napa Valley and spend their luxuriously unlimited free time buying organic produce at the farmer's market and dreaming up new and artistic ways to prepare it. This is not one of those blogs.

Here's how my Brooklyn kitchen typically looks:

Get off the kitchen table, Donna. Donna, get down!

Once again, the dishes need washing up, especially the big dirty pot from last night's dinner, and I haven't swept the floor yet. I saw a cockroach this morning. Again.

This is just one example of how I'm always falling behind in life. Also left undone are the overdue phone call to my moms, the unanswered emails, friends unseen, books unread, writing projects postponed. Plus, I'm always running about ten minutes late for my day job. It's enough to make you mental.

There was a time in the summer of 2000 when I spent several months living in the Cevennes Mountains of France. I keep trying to get back to that time, only do it here in Brooklyn. A time of silence, hours to write, leisurely morning coffee while reading a novel, an hour of stretching and breathing, no computer, no phone, no television. Most of the time, I only had two other people for company, and we ate home-cooked dinners every night.I taught myself how to make chocolate mousse with just three ingredients: bittersweet dark chocolate, cream and egg whites.

That's my ideal. Having said that, I was practically celibate that summer, and now I'm having loads of sex, so there's something to be said for a fast-paced life.

Reviving Skittles, Part 4: Victorians vs Ludacris in TKO!

2007-06-17T15:38:00.000-04:00

In Liverpool in days gone by,
For ha’pence and her wittles,
A little girl, by no means shy,
Was settin’ up the skittles.

If you could hear the words above, set to music, you’d know that’s the way they used to sing back in those old-timey days. Our bad girl Skittles’ time. Huh. Those suggestive words were meant to shock people. Are you shocked? I’m trying to imagine the modern-day equivalent.

How about Ludacris' “One Minute Man:”
A hard head make a soft ass, but a hard d**k make the sex last
I jump in pools and make a big splash
Water overflowin, so get your head right
Enough with tips and advice and thangs
I`m big dog, havin women seein stripes and thangs
They go to sleep, start snorin, countin sheep and s**t
They so wet, that they body start to leak and sh**t

The old-timey song was written in tribute to how Skittles got her name because when she was a teenager, Catherine Walters apparently had a job setting up nine-pins in the back alley of a pub near the Mersey River docks of Liverpool. The customers were men only, so Skittles was a very popular girl. So popular that she earned extra money on the side turning tricks. Well, that’s what I imagine, anyway. I couldn’t find anything about the mechanics of her sex life in the few biographies I found on Skittles. Nothing about how her body started to leak and s**t.

And isn’t that a shame? Here I am, a serious student of history’s bad girls, and yet I can tell you it was dismayingly hard if not impossible to find any smut or porn related to them. And trust me, I’ve spent hours looking for the dirty parts in old books. As a result of my fruitless labor, I find that I’ve had to make stuff up just to keep the stories entertaining.

For example, let’s talk about Skittles’ sex life. Sometime in her teen years, Skittles lost her virginity for the right price. Why do I know this? Because Liverpool at the time had “beer brothels” with private rooms for prostitutes and their customers. And Skittles was a poor serving wench. And she had a drunk party animal for a dad who didn’t care about her chastity. And a weak mother. And Skittles was very, very sassy and bold, liked men better than women, etc. It says in one of those old books that Skittles earned the devotion of a gang of drunken soldiers when she warned them: “If you don’t hold your bloody row, I’ll knock you down like a row of skittles.”

So here’s the story: Skittles was a modern girl who didn’t value her virginity, and she forgot her first time easily because she just wanted to get it over with. Who was her first? One of the drunk soldiers, let’s say, and he was a terrible lover. Like a fermented frat boy on spring break. But Skittles did like sex, oh yes she did. How do I know this? Because she had other income to support herself, i.e., serving beer and setting up skittles. Clearly, she chose when to prostitute herself, and this allowed her to choose only men she was attracted to--good training for a proper courtesan. Sometimes, I’ve decided, if she liked a chap who had no money, she gave it away for free, and the ones she was most drawn to were her opposite, gentle and shy. Skittles may have been tough, but she was a genuinely feeling girl, and the gentle lovers brought out her sympathetic understanding. With the sensitive poets, unlike with the drunk soldiers, she could let down her guard and be girlish.

As a lover, Skittles was not easily forgotten. She was no innocent, but her simple sweetness shone from her dark-lashed eyes. As much as men might tease her and talk dirty about her fine figure and delicate features, they were powerfully attracted to her and thus protective. And considering the degree to which she was comfortable in her father’s company, each one of her men got the feeling that he was the special one. Naturally, this would provoke jealous scenes (good for business), and around the same time she lost her virginity, Skittles learned about men’s vulnerability.

Versions of Skittles’ young life vary because few people really knew where she came from, and with her steely core of dignity, Catherine Walters preferred it that way. Nobody really knows how she got her nickname, for example. The stories about the nine-pins and the drunk soldiers were made up by now-dead "biographers." My favorite story comes from A Biography of a Fascinating Woman, attributed to William Stephen Hayward, London: George Vickers, 1864.

In this version of events, a dandified London aristocrat named Trevellian walks into the “Merseyside pothouse” where Kitty is setting up skittles. Trevellian is enchanted by the girl's clever impudence, and she is equally taken with his foppish sophistication.

“Ah! My little Skittles,” he says, upon hearing her speak. “I wasn’t aware that you could talk decent English.”

“My name’s not Skittles; and I daresay I can talk as well as you any day in the year,” she responds.

Trevellian invites Skittles to run off with him to London, and she accepts. Taking on the role of mentor, he warns her: “Publichouse ways, my child, are not my ways, nor should they be yours; and your allusion to mixing it rather stiff is evidently more calculated to please a tap-room audience than myself, or those in whose society you ought to, and will most probably move [and s**t].”

So how did Skittles really get to London? Considering her tough self-confidence, chances are that she left Liverpool on her own strength and refined her publichouse ways on her own terms. She would have come across many Trevellians in the early days. And she was never in such desperate straits that she would have been forced to be a common prostitute. More likely, she was set up as the mistress of some kindly yet forgettable gentleman, who provided her with comfortable room and board while she learned to navigate London society.

If you really want to know the mechanics of sex in Victorian England, you must read The Pearl, a filthy, smutty book if ever there was one. I found it on somebody's bookshelf one day years ago, and oh boy, was I shocked! (And titillated.) Here’s a taste, from a poem titled "A PROLOGUE. Spoke by Miss Bella de Lancy, on her retiring from the Stage
to open a Fashionable Bawdy House. (Written by S. Johnson, LL.D.)"

When c**t first triumphed (as the learned suppose)
O'er failing pr**ks, Immortal Dildo rose,
From f**ks unnumbered, still erect he drew,
Exhausted c**ts, and then demanded new;

Dame Nature saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting pr**ks toiled after him in vain;
The laxest folds, the deepest depths he filled;
The juiciest drained; the toughest hymens drilled.

Our story has only just begun. Find out in the next episode just how Skittles became the most fashionable whore to ride a horse on Hyde Park's Rotten Row.

Reviving Skittles, Part 3: Living with Drunks

2007-06-10T11:07:00.000-04:00

In our story thus far, we've met Catherine Walters, or "Skittles," Victorian London's favourite courtesan, and we've learned that she liked to outrage the bourgeoisie at their fox hunts and that her finest accomplishments were the men who loved her. These included at least one nobleman, a politician and a poet. We also learned that I have a big crush on Skittles, even though she probably would have hated me. She preferred men; women just got in the way. Here, in Part 3, we learn about drunk fathers, drunk husbands and just what it was in Skittles' formative years that made her become a bad girl.

Born in Liverpool on June 13, 1839, two years after Queen Victoria claimed the throne, Catherine Walters actually managed to live through her early childhood years. This was a good sign that she was tough enough to survive Victoria's England, whose city slums suffered shamelessly high rates of disease and infant mortality.

I know this because I read a book on the subject: Blyth, Henry. Skittles: The Last Victorian Courtesan. The Life and Times of Catherine Walters. London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, 1970. I mention Blyth's biography because I'm going to quote him now. I love quoting other people's books! I often feel they have an authority that I don't have. Take, for example, Blyth's description of the circumstances of Skittles' early years: “Beauty does not flower readily amidst squalid surroundings, and a young girl does not long retain a good figure, a clear eye, a fresh complexion and pearly teeth ...where malnutrition, inadequate ventilation, lack of even the most elementary medical attention, dirt, disease, ignorance...combine together to drag her down. If she escaped a disfiguring or crippling disease, and if she avoided at least one unwanted pregnancy she was lucky indeed; and luckier still if she could retain whatever prettiness and gaiety that she had enjoyed in youth after she had reached womanhood.”

See? I would never talk about pearly teeth and gaiety.

The point is, Catherine Walters, who also went by the nicknames Kitty, Skittles and Skitsie, was indeed a lucky girl. Part of her good fortune came from having a relatively intact family. Her father, Edward, was a customs officer who became a captain in the merchant navy, and he earned a reliable living, even if he was a drunk. He was a functioning alcoholic, as they say in AA.

Not much is known about Skittles’ mother, Mary Ann. Though again, if you read the AA literature on living with an alcoholic, you can probably guess what she was all about: "In the years of active drinking, the wives of compulsive drinkers have to take on many extra responsibilities. They have to provide for the care of the children, take care of the home and get the meals. Wives of compulsive drinkers often have to work to supplement the skimpy budget or do without many necessities, as well as doing the man's chores around the house."

I imagine that Edward Walters also had an eye for the ladies, and that he and his wife had a non-existent sex life.

My guess is that Skittles watched all this going on at home, and she learned that: 1) men have more fun than women; 2) women are doomed if they get married and have kids; and 3) a woman's best bet is to retain her financial independence and shun alcohol personally but to hang around with men, drunk or sober, because they're fun.

We know that Skittles' mother was not buried next to Skittles’ father, and one biographer conjectures that she died in childbirth. Another suggests that the couple eventually separated because the marriage was an unhappy one and that Mary Ann died by the time Skittles was a teenager. Regardless, when Catherine was young the Roman Catholic family of five children were clothed, fed and educated to some degree.

Edward Walters is believed to have eventually left the merchant navy to keep an inn in Cheshire, where young Kitty took up an interest in hounds, hunting and horses. She loved to follow the hounds as they chased after foxes in the English countryside, and when the day’s excitement was finished, she served the huntsmen and their grooms in the inn parlor and heard their tales of the hunt. It was the perfect training for a courtesan.

Catherine’s relationship with her father also provided excellent training. Both had steady and direct personalities. They didn’t shock easily and in fact liked a good joke—the dirtier the better—and getting jostled in pub brawls. Seeing her father drunk as often as she did, Skittles didn't fear outrageous behavior. If she’d had enough of his rough flamboyance, she’d slap him down with some coarse talk of her own. And the next morning all would be sunny. Life was better when it was uncomplicated.

I don't think I've mentioned it on this blog before, but my first husband was an out-of-control drunk, not a fun drunk, but a classic dysfunctional AA grade drunk. An out-of-control drunk with anger issues. Now, I grew up as a child of divorce, so my home life wasn't perfect, but I didn't grow up around drunks, so living with one as his wife really freaked me out. I never learned to see the fun in it, so eventually I ran away forever.

Plus, the drunk in my life wasn't like Skittles' dad, I'm sure. And we weren't living in Liverpool in the 19th century, either, and my frame of reference as a nice, educated late-20th century girl from the suburbs of Chicago didn't help. My idea of "fun" is going for bicycle rides in the park, petting my cats, reading and enjoying a civilized gin and tonic with lime at sunset before sitting down to a home-cooked meal.

That previous statement doesn't do much to establish my own Bad Girl credentials, but the point is that I'm trying to enjoy life more, as Skittles did. I'm a work in progress.

Next time, in Reviving Skittles, Part 4, we'll learn the lyrics of a street ballad from Skittles’ heyday and what her initial forays into prostitution were like.

I Invent the World

2007-06-03T12:15:00.001-04:00

Did you know that you can take a picture with your new digital camera, download it immediately to your laptop computer and then post it on your blog in a matter of seconds? Here's a sample of my new invention, showing a nearly real-time picture of my desk:

Dave spotted the desk in the basement of our building after a neighbor had thrown it away, and we scavenged it. The Peters World Map above my laptop represents countries accurately according to their surface areas. My coffee has gone lukewarm. I'm reading Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman and listening to You Are Here, a Banco de Gaia CD. The poster in the top left corner is a picture of Christo's wrapped bridge in Paris, and the picture taped to the wall is of me, Dave and our cat Henrik. Scattered about is all the stuff I haven't done yet: ideas for blog posts, articles, people I want to contact, more photos for posting.

What a mind-blowing new invention! I have even more work to do now.

King Fish

2007-05-22T09:29:00.000-04:00

I learned how to snorkel in Mexico. It's easy. You just put on the fins, walk backward into the sea, spit into your mask, rinse, put it on your face, snuggle the snorkel into your mouth, and off you go.

It's so easy that one day I decided to snorkel into the sea alone, heading southeast a few hundred meters from shore along the coral reef. I was looking for schools of little fish, coral fans and other plant life.

As I swam out, I noticed that the sea floor was growing farther from me. Lovely. I now had a panoramic view of all sorts of colorful fish, busily streaming around the coral banks. The steady sound of my breath flowing in and out of the snorkel tube was musical accompaniment to the tropical kingdom laid out below me.

And then I spied something to the right in my peripheral vision. What was it? Whatever it was, it was floating along with me, on my level. I took a closer look. Could it be? Yes, wow. A big silver fish. A long silver...so long...maybe two, three...how the hell long was this fish? Four feet? Five? And why was it swimming up near the water's surface with me, when it should have been down there with the cute little fishes on the sea floor? Why was he (I'm sure it was a he) staring at me with those big, gaping fish eyes? Why was his snout so pointy?

"What are you looking at?" I seemed to hear him say as I spied him from the corner of my eye. I think he was smoking a cigarette, but I was too afraid to make direct eye contact.

"Glub blug," I burbled through the snorkel. Something wasn't right about this. "I have to leave now," I said.

I turned tail and swam. Swim swim swim. Suck suck suck, sucking air through my snorkel, headed as fast as I could go toward shore. Thank god I was wearing fins. Puff puff pant pant, drinking in seawater. There was something not right about this.

I poked my head above the water's surface. Damn. Damn damn damn. Still a couple hundred meters to shore. I turned my head to the left, to see if I'd lost the fish yet.

"Goin' somewhere?" he sneered.

Oh help. Surely I would have outrun him by now? But here I was, swimming like the panic-stricken fool that I was, and this evil-minded silver fish was traveling alongside me, with plenty of breath to spare and laughing in his sinister, fishlike way. What had I ever done to him?

"What have I ever done to you?" I said. Well, would have said, if I wasn't flailing my arms and legs as I hyperventilated and slurped up saltwater at a dangerous rate.

"You're in over your head, estupida gringa," he said. "Go back home to your subways and Chinese restaurants that deliver."

"I'm trying to go back home," I sobbed in a glubbing sort of way. "Or back to my little cabaña, anyway, where I can lie on the swing bed and sip a rum y coca con limón."

His menacing laughter sloshed around in my ears as I swam. Swim swim. Pant pant. Swim swim swim. Pant pant pant. I needed air and tore the estupido snorkel from my mouth. What's the onomatopoeia for "hyperventilate"? Har har har? GHARGHie GHARGHie gargle snorf snorf...huck huck huck...

I looked back. Fish still there. Still silver, still four feet long, same gaping eyes and long pointy snout. He kept up with me so easily I thought I was standing still.

Eventually, as you may have guessed, seeing as how I'm writing about it now at leisure, I did make it to dry land. And obviously, at some point, I did manage to lose the fish, probably as I got closer to the shallower, warmer waters just off shore. Having swum to land in a direct line, I landed on jagged rocks and slippery sea grass rather than soft sand, but I didn't care.

I may be amused now in the telling of my tale, but at the time, my panic was so fresh and pure that I could barely think. Strangely, though, even then there was a little corner of my brain, the distant observer, that was watching me and finding this scene very funny. I was laughing at myself along with the fish. I hope I also have that laughing distant observer with me at the moment of my death, helping lessen the pain of my demise.

Later, at the bar, a guy from Florida said it sounded like my fish was a kingfish.

Kingfish?

I googled kingfish when I got back to Brooklyn, and learned that its habitat includes both Florida and the Caribbean coast of Mexico. The kingish is a type of mackerel that can grow up to five feet long, weigh up to 150 lbs, and swim at speeds up to 60 mph. Oh, and another thing: "King mackerel are constantly feeding carnivores that can attack with high speed, powerful jaws and razor-like teeth. They feed on all and any available food but favor jacks, sea trout, sardine like fishes, ribbonfish, herring, shrimp and squid."

What about human limbs? I bet human limbs are on the list of favorite foods, too.

Now I keep expecting the kingfish to visit me in my dreams, but I haven't seen him yet. Or maybe it was a her--a bad-girl fish, since kingfish can also be female.

Or maybe my fish was a wahoo, also called a queenfish, which enjoys eating flying fish, bonito, squid, tuna, and again, possibly human limbs. According to the website: "A common feeding tactic when taking larger fish is to shear off the tail, then return to gulp down the head as the bleeding fish spirals downward."

Huh. That could have been me, rubber fins snapped off cleanly with the queenfish's razor-like teeth, spiraling downward into the briny deep and the queenfish's open, glittering jaws.

How to Eat a Mango

2007-05-18T08:34:00.001-04:00

The etiquette books won't tell you this, but the best way to eat a mango is to go to Tulum on the Caribbean coast of Mexico and find a little cabaña to stay in. Once you're a bit sunburnt and have sand in your hair, take a taxi into town, 40 pesos plus 2 to 5 pesos tip, and ask the driver to drop you off in front of the frutería that has a mural of Adam and Eve painted out front.

Pick one or two of the nicest, ripest mangos you can find. The flesh should give in generously to your thumb when you press it, and the color should be a blushing orangey apricot. A bruise here or there is a mark of character and will do no harm to your experience.

Once you've made your way back to your cabaña, find a sandy spot in the sun or shade, as you prefer, but close to the water so you can hear and see the waves. Be sure to wear a swimsuit or less.

Then take any kind of knife that comes to hand—the Swiss army knife that always travels with you, or a sharp chef's knife or a dull-edged butter knife you stole from the last hotel you stayed in—and plunge it into the point where the mango has been snapped from its stem. Run the blade all around the fruit's circumference, creating two halves, and cut into it deeply enough so you make contact with the pit of the mango. Allow the juice to cover your hands and drip down your arms into the sand, where a little family of ants awaits any bits of pulp you might share with them.

In whatever sloppy way you can manage, split the mango in two and give one half to a friend so you can laugh at how messy your faces have become as you suck up the sweet mango flesh. Scrape up any remaining flesh on the inside peel with your teeth and never mind if long stringy bitrs get caught between your teeth. When finished, pat your hair back into place with your sticky fingers, walk to the water's edge and dive in.

¡Losing My Mind in Mexico!

2007-05-11T13:10:00.000-04:00

¡Hola! de Mexico. I{ve got about four minutes left on the clock in this internets cafe so am typing as fast as possible. can{t rwrite, can only type. am in travel head and don{t remembver hgow to think anytmore. might buy beer today, and now husband is pestering me over mty shoulder, reminding nme that i{m running out of time and money on tulum road. have nothing to say, am in travel head. wish i couold attache piux pero no es possible aqui''no have el desktop con >jpegs. much love, joyce. one minute 15 seconds remiaining, must >[publicar<

Reviving Skittles, Part 2: On Becoming a Courtesan

2007-04-30T09:25:00.000-04:00

The Quorn Hunt looked something like this:

A lot of freaked-out animals--horses, dogs and foxes--with people in red jackets bossing them around. This is the hunt that is so wildly protested against these days. If Skittles were alive now, she would have no sympathy for the protesters, of course, even though she was a marginalized figure at the Quorn and knew very well that she was unwelcome by the snobs of Leicestershire.

That's what I think, anyway. Skittles was an old-fashioned girl who knew her place, and that was being a whore--Victorian London’s favorite whore. In the same way that Nell Gwynne had been the favorite whore of England’s Restoration. You know about Nell Gwynne,right? She was another courtesan who got a kick out of calling herself a whore. Nell, who lived from 1650 to 1687, was a longtime mistress of King Charles II, and of all the king’s many mistresses, Nell was the people's prostitute because she was an unpretentious girl of the streets who never forgot where she came from. There's one commonly told story about Nell Gwynne, and it goes like this: One day, she found her footman bleeding, recovering from a fight, and when she asked what it was about, the footman said: “I have been fighting, madam, with a rascal who called your ladyship a whore.” Nell responded: “Blockhead! At this rate you must fight every day of your life. Why, all the world knows it!”

Wait. Hang on. That's not the story I was thinking of. There's another one where Nell calls herself a whore that I like better. In this one she's riding through the crowded streets of London in her carriage, and she's mistaken for King Charles' wife, I think it was, who was Catholic. And Nell said, "No no, it's okay, I'm the King's Protestant whore!" I think that's how the story goes. Anyway, the punchline is definitely "I'm the Protestant whore."

Now here's me being the women's studies professor who explains all of this: Both the Victorian and Restoration ages were class-bound periods when people were expected to accept their lot in life, especially women. Respectable job options were few—nurse, teacher, seamstress. More daring women, risk-takers of special talents who had little to lose, became actresses and courtesans. The unlucky ones ended up in cheap bordellos or, worse, on street corners, while young women who succeeded usually enjoyed an unusual beauty combined with an instinctive sense of charm. Skittles and Nell Gwynne, for example, were both slum children with drunks as parents, but both had pretty faces, good figures, winning personalities and an unsentimental pragmatism that kept them from wasting their precious gifts on men who would be useless to their survival. Wealthy men were nice, of course, but so were great leaders and artists who could enhance a courtesan’s reputation with their reflected glory.

Skittles’ finest accomplishments were the men who loved her, and they included at least one nobleman, a politician and a poet. Who she became was the sum of her lovers. If she understood the aristocracy, it was because the 8th Duke of Devonshire was her first and possibly only love. If she took an interest in books and writing, it was thanks to her boyfriend the Victorian poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. (But they never called them boyfriends back in those days, did they?) If she became a refined woman of wealth, it was due to her affair with an older Frenchman, Napoleon III’s finance minister, Achille Fould.

Well, yes, that all sounds very nice, but let's face it: To live happily off the generosity of men without marrying them requires an uncommon talent, and Skittles had it. That's the big reason why I like her (even though, being a classic bad girl, I'm sure Skittles wouldn't have liked me in return). The men who knew Skittles ended up loving her more than she loved them, looking past her brassiness and seeing instead an image of a vulnerable innocent alone in the world. While this vision may have had some truth in it, Skittles was tougher than she let on. The circumstances of her birth guaranteed that.

In the next installment, watch for more on the circumstances of Skittles' birth! Can you stand the suspense? I'll be on holiday in Mexico or Belize in the next couple of weeks, but I'll try to find an Internet cafe at some point so I can do a blog post.

Reviving Skittles, Part I: Fantasia on a Victorian Courtesan

2007-04-20T09:31:00.001-04:00

And so we went our way,--yes, hand in hand,
Like two lost children in some magic wood…..
Each step was an experience. Every mood
Of that fair woman a fresh gospelling,
Which spoke aloud to me and stirred my blood
To a new faith, I knew not with what sting.
One thing alone I knew or cared to know,
Her strange companionship thus strangely won.
The past, the future, all of weal or woe
In my old life was gone, for ever gone.

The snippet of poetry above comes from the 12th sonnet of “Esther, A Young Man’s Tragedy,” an epic poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt written in 1892 for the whore he was in love with. Catherine Walters, her name was, but everyone knew her as Skittles. And back then, she was well known by everybody who knew anything about the courtesans of Victorian London.

I bring up Skittles now because she's one of my bad girls, and I've written a mini-biography about her. And yet after all the time and attention I've devoted to this girl, I've decided to kill her off, alas. She just doesn't have a place anymore in Chasing Bad Girls: My Pursuit of Wicked Women, also known as "my book." Goodbye, Skittles.

All is not lost, though, because now I can revive her right here in this blog. Hello again, Skittles! This is going to be a new thought experiment for me. Till now, I've been a bit coy in these blog posts about sharing all the details about my bad girls, because I've been saving them for the book. But now I'm free to do whatever I want with Skittles.

So, I'll get started by revealing the opening passage I wrote for her mini-bio. And let me set the record straight right up front by saying that it's extremely embarrassing for me to share this passage with you. I have, in fact, already written a mini-bio for all of my bad girls, but now when I re-read them, they make me cringe. Who the hell is the narrator in these bios? She sure doesn't sound like me. She sounds more like a freakish combination of an earnest women's studies professor mixed in with a leering, pipe-smoking early 20th-century dimestore novelist.

She sounds exactly like this:

The Quorn Hunt, that grand English institution pitting elegant horsemen and women and their hounds against terrified foxes in the Leicestershire countryside, got its start in 1696 and had certainly reached its pinnacle of greatness by the time the Victorians came along. In bright red riding jackets and black helmets, the cream of society displayed their mastery of the rules of class as they demonstrated their horsemanship. Riding to hounds, they watched to see who was best at leaping over hedges, handling the reins and navigating the social graces. Only a superior few belonged in the Quorn.

Lord Stamford, master of the foxhounds in 1860, belonged to that elite, but his wife did not. True, before her marriage Lady Stamford had been an admirable show rider at the Cremorne Gardens, a crowded public pleasure ground also notorious as a den of vice. But her riding skills mirrored her nature, and she was a woman who handled her horse with quiet dignity. Still, Lady Stamford was a mere gamekeeper’s daughter and morally suspect—who knew what kind of company she might have kept in her youth? In short, the high society Victorian ladies thought her a trollop. They were happy to join her husband’s hunt, but they also enjoyed finding mildly gentle ways to shun and ridicule Lady Stamford.

That November, another horsewoman joined in the Quorn. Her antecedents were even more questionable than Lady Stamford’s and yet, maddeningly, she made no demure effort to win the crowd’s favour. Catherine Walters, better known as “Skittles” to Victorian London, was a courtesan of the first rank and wouldn’t pretend to be otherwise. She was also a fearless horsewoman and adored going on the best hunts, even though she was unwelcome in the homes of the aristocracy. Skittles’ lover at the time, Lord Hartington, shared her love of horses, but had written letters warning her about “the stupid people in Leicestershire” and the snobbishness of the hunting set.

Whether she was a free spirit by nature or design, Skittles didn’t care what anyone thought of her. Riding in her pink swallow-tail coat and trademark chimney-pot hat, she chattered as fast as she rode and capered off, laughing, across the fields. Rather than sympathize with Lady Stamford, which she might easily have done considering her own infamous reputation, Skittles worked harder than anyone else to put the lady in her place. A fearless rider, she cantered dangerously close to the woman, scaring her horse, and made rude comments about her dark past. She kept up her relentless bad behavior until Lord Stamford called a halt and ejected Skittles, threatening to end the hunt entirely if she persisted. At the next Quorn, Skittles showed up and started once again to harass Lady Stamford. Good to his word, Lord Stamford announced that the hunt was finished for the day. When Skittles’ friends caught wind of this, they begged her to drop out so the hunt could continue. After much grumbling, Skittles finally trotted off toward home, calling out: “Tell Lady Stamford she’s not the queen of our profession. I am.”

Oh, dear. Did I really write that? Uh, yes. I did. And the passage above indicates pretty clearly, I think, why I eventually decided to insert my own, REAL voice into the narrative when I started to write Chasing Bad Girls. Next time, I'll continue to tell Skittles story, using the mini-bio as my guide, but it's not gonna sound like a demented, pipe-smoking women's studies novelist.

Verily I Say: NYC Restaurants Do Deliver

2007-04-07T13:56:00.000-04:00

Well, that's it. I can't stand it anymore: tonight I'm going to break my Lenten promise and meet my husband for dinner at a restaurant. (Note to atheists: Easter is tomorrow, the day Lent ends.) That's right, I gave up restaurants for Lent. Do you know how hard it is not to eat in a restaurant for 40 days and 40 nights when you live in NYC? Do you know how hard it is not to pick up a salad for lunch when you're at your day job, no deli bagels when you're on the run, no pizza takeout, no Chinese delivery, no Friday-night-meet-up-with-friends drinks and dinner at your favorite dining spot, no popcorn at the movies, which I also counted as restaurant eating, just to make myself more miserable? Well, do you?

And I was so good. I just broke my promise one other time during the 40 days of Lent, and that was when a friend invited me and a couple other friends to be her guest at a restaurant because she was celebrating her recent admission to grad school. Oh, I suppose I could have refused, but refusing would have meant punishing her with my Lent promise, as if I'm some kind of holier-than-thou Christian, which I am not. And I was already punishing enough people with it (see below), plus she was paying.

So why did I promise myself not to eat at any restaurants during Lent?
1) To see what the deprivation would feel like.
2) To explore the feeling of going without in a very specific way.
3) To make myself be more mindful of the food I was eating.
4) To cook more at home and try new recipes, which I did.
5) To lose weight, which I didn't.
6) To be part of a springtime cycle of repentance and preparing new spiritual ground. (In yoga class last night, we did springtime poses, and I imagined myself as a curled-up crocus bulb with shoots emerging out of the ground.)

Anyway, according to a religious web site I just googled, I got Lent all wrong this year. Lent began as a way for Catholics to remind themselves to repent of their sins in a similar manner to how people in the Old Testament repented in sackcloth, ashes, and fasting. However, according to the site, "the New Testament teaches us that our acts of fasting and repentance should be done in a manner that does not attract attention to ourselves," and then it goes on to quote Matthew 6:16-18:

16Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

17But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face;

18That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.

What a sinner I am. Here I was, whining for 40 days (OK, make that 39) to Dave and friends about how hard it was not going to restaurants and what a great sacrifice I was making, and then telling them that if they wanted to go out with me, we were going to have to do something other than eat at a restaurant, duh, which in New York City, everybody eats out all the time. I even forced my girlfriend Bella to cook dinner for me one night, for fuck's sake. And let's not even get into how much I tortured Dave. Which is why I'm going out with him tonight on a date, where we're going to have dinner and a few drinks and go listen to some live music.

Next year, I'm definitely not giving up restaurants for Lent. The bigger question is whether I give up anything at all, and if I do, whether I can just keep my big mouth shut about it.

Stranger Than Nonfiction: Meeting a Character from a Book

2007-04-01T08:57:00.000-04:00

It may be April Fool's Day, but this is no joke: I met a character from a book the other night. He appears in Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum, and I met him because he was a guest at the author's paperback release party last Thursday at the Bowery Poetry Club, where I met people such as la comedienne Jennifer Glick and the author herself, who wouldn't let me buy her a drink. Can't blame her; this wasn't a hard-drinking crowd, at least not on the night in question.

So, back to meeting a character from a book. Janice stood on the stage and announced to the assembled crowd that she had a special guest tonight, one of the stars of her memoir, a person she hadn't seen in twenty years. And then everyone's eyes went to a guy who was walking back to his seat at a table near the foot of the stage. The author carried on with her Girlbomb presentation, but my eyes stayed stuck for a minute on the guy sat at the table. Which character was he? I had to know.

After the presentation, I dared myself to approach him. This is where having been a newspaper reporter comes in handy--it helped me develop my skill at accosting strangers and asking them questions that should be none of my business. Although, believe it or not, I'm actually a bit shy in these situations, and daring myself to make the approach always feels like jumping off a high dive. But I had to talk to this guy because I would die if I didn't or, at the very least, live in eternal regret. As I crossed the Bowery Poetry Club's dance floor, headed toward the character's table, I had that out-of-body feeling of not really believing I was doing what I was doing and being clueless about what I was going to say.

I find that it's best in these situations to keep things simple, and it's important to be polite. So I simply put my face down toward his, smiled, introduced myself, and said: "I read Girlbomb. Would you mind telling me which character you played?"

"Sebastian," he said.

"Sebastian? Hmmm, which one was that again?"

"I was the boyfriend she moved in with..."

"Oh my god, you're Sebastian? You're a knockout! You're the best character in the book? I can't believe I'm talking to Sebastian!"

Sebastian! I couldn't believe I was talking to Sebastian! (I hope by now, dear blog reader, that I've sufficiently established that I couldn't believe that I was actually speaking to Sebastian.)

In real life, Sebastian looks like a small Norse god, a small, skateboard-carrying Norse god with a flash of a gold tooth in his mouth. His eyes are very clear, his hair is a shockingly whitish blond, cut close to his head, and his body has a lean and efficient look to it. He's striking--you can see how easy it would be for him to become a major character in a memoir.

Now here it is, on page 173 of the hardback edition of Girlbomb, how Janice met Sebastian as she was tripping on LSD in Washington Square Park on a summer's day sometime in the 1980s:

"Zing. There he was, on an opposite bench, this insanely beautiful platinum-haired guy. He stared at me frankly, and I stared back, taking in his fine cheekbones and strong nose, the phoenix tattooed on his wiry bicep. Who could this be? He sat near the rest of the skateboarders, toting a board of his own, but I'd never seen him before. I had an unerring eye for cataloging hot guys; I certainly would have remembered him.

"Our eyes met, and he raised his eyebrows slightly. I blushed.

"Someone hailed him--'Yo, Sebastian!'--and he turned away. I ducked my red face to my chest, tried to slow my pounding heart.

"Sebastian.

"Tripping or no, I had to meet him. He was like a unicorn, a fairytale creature, right there in front of me--if I didn't seize this impossible moment, I'd never see the likes of him again. I rose from my bench like a sleepwalker drawn to a dream, floated up to the outskirts of his group. My tongue was clenched like a fist in my mouth."

I'll tell you now why meeting this particular character in that particular book felt so fateful to me, personally. The thing is, I'm currently creating my own Sebastian in my own memoir, only my character is named Kent and in real life he is my flesh-and-blood first cousin. Janice has written her memoir in a really novelistic way, and she's one of my inspirations as I write Chasing Bad Girls. Like Sebastian, Kent is my rescuer of sorts, and he has a star-like, larger-than-life quality. (Sebastian now lives in Hollywood, by the way, and Kent owns a music recording studio in London, which just goes to show.)

Here's how I describe Kent when introducing him as a character in my book:

"He may be my first cousin, but he also is essentially my muse, and it’s not clear whether he chose me or I chose him. I’m wildly fond of Kent. He’s an artist and a materialist, opinionated, handsome, and one of my favorite family members. A big man, Kent takes up a lot of space, and I don’t care that some people call him the Duke of Kent behind his back and say he only moved to England because he’s a royalist.

"'Are you a bad girl, Joycie? Do you think you’re a bad girl?' Kent asks in the foppish, lord of the manor style that he began cultivating to compensate for being an American when he arrived on English shores twenty years ago. He wears bespoke suits around the house and gets his hair colored by a stylist, which he started doing back when he was in a New Romantics rock band."

Oh, dear. "Foppish, lord of the manor"--sounds a bit harsh, doesn't it? Cruel. Having met Sebastian, who is a flesh-and-blood human being in addition to a character in a book, I've realized that my description of Kent could very well hurt his feelings. I adore Kent and would never want to hurt his feelings. In re-reading that passage just now, I can see that I'm exaggerating his qualities as I try to boost him up to the level of being a star-like character in a novelistic memoir. It's tricky business writing a memoir involving people you actually know, especially when you're a hardcore people pleaser like me.

Speaking of which, it's April Fool's Day, isn't it? April 1st. Kent's birthday. Happy Birthday, Kentie! I love you!

The Dark Recesses

2007-03-24T18:56:00.000-04:00

I got a complaint today from a friend who told me that it's been too long since I've blogged, so this is for you, Bella. But I've got a really good excuse for my disappearance: I'm busy rewriting my book proposal and sample chapters. When my work is done, I'll re-emerge from my writer's hibernation and try to make up for it with a really great new post. Excuse me now while I dive back into the dark recesses of my mind.