If you've heard of Arlene Dahl, you know she was a beautiful 1950s movie star primarily famous for her red hair and her beauty mark. (Her first fan letter arrived with no name, just a drawing of a pair of lips and a beauty spot, and the address: Hollywood, California.) But she's famous to me ...
I have unclean thoughts about Mr. Rogers.
I'm not kidding, or trying to be cute. (Who in their right mind would think wanting to mount Mr. Rogers is "adorable"?)
I'd like to say it started when I was a little girl, but I'd be lying. Sure, I loved Mr. Rogers back then -- and I then also ...
Sure, Helen Mirren is an Oscar-winning, Shakespeare-trained, supremely talented and thoughtful woman whose legacy includes hundreds of stellar performances on TV, stage, and screen. She holds the title Dame for her services to the performing arts, but by performing the apparently miraculous ...
I’ve been obsessed with Pre-Code movies for decades. Here’s why:
Most people believe old movies are stodgy, quaint relics of a time when asexual women did what they were told and upright, wholesome men stalwartly upheld good Christian values. But most people are wrong. Very, very ...
One of the things I love about old movies, old songs, and detective novels from the likes of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, is the great slang. It further adds to the feel that the 30s and 40s is this cool, arcane world with its own reality, its own set of rules, and a ...
There's this show on USA Network called Fairly Legal (a hilarious take on barely legal, get it?) that I've only been able to stomach watching once or twice. But to be "fairly", I came into watching the show with prejudicial feelings. Prejudicial feelings of the sort that made me want to throw ...
Being a dame is synonymous wit confidence, actually possessing it or behaving as though you did. Of course, it helps to have the goods to back up that confidence, and maybe that's what helped Hunter S. Thompson write this ballsy cover letter. Anyway, I'd love to have such balls (and ...
