Movie Millisecond: Gracious

B @ T’s (Blake Edwards, 1961).

Movie Moment: That one little movie and confession — the vanity

The source of these screencaps is a tiny little-known film from which you’ve likely never seen stills. I will not trouble you with the title, as even the star’s name escapes me.

So here’s how shallowly I am capable of behaving even after recovery from some serious illness, in case you get the impression from my tomboyishness or my interest in peace studies and nonprofits that I have a diminished capacity for the same cripplingly pathetic vanity that plagues us all — when they gave me the word yesterday that they were going to release me from the hospital later in the day, the very first thing I did is I called in a hair appointment. Like, literally, from my bed at the hospital I called the salon. I hadn’t washed my hair in fifteen days except for this weird dry-chem showercap full of shampoo and setting lotions that one of the nurses gave me twice. I kept brushing my bizarrely slick, pomaded hair in to this hideous half-ass poofy chignon and pinning flowers in it to distract from how filthy it was and keep myself cheerful. Then on top of this they’d told me it would be at least three to four days before I can safely shower. I have some sutures, etc., from various tubes I’d had put in for dialysis and then had jerked out waiting to close up, and getting the wounds wet I’m told is a Very Bad Thing.

Related anecdote.*

Also, they didn’t have to do it, but since I was already in there getting all kinds of stuff done anyways, I had them switch my boobs around, too, so I have to heal from that procedure as well. I just needed a change, you know?

So, yes, the first thing I did on hearing I was going to be sprung was call up my stylist and tell her I desperately needed a wash and blow out. When I was fidgeting, waiting on the paperwork and worrying about whether someone was going to snatch up my freedom on some flimsy whim and stall my discharge, keeping me away from my dear kidlet and my own bed and toilet yet another night, I was secretly mainly fretting over whether I’d be out in time to keep that all-important hair appointment. In the mouth of recovery from death, I was mortified and primarily motivated by my hair. Oh, the vanity.

Looks really good, though. I keep touching it and stroking it like it is a pet from which I’ve been separated. My god, the vanity. I’m about thirteen years old, I think. I can only laugh at myself.

On the e. coli thing, I checked in to it, and I guess it’s okay and not uncommon to have a little e. coli. I guess it will go away? The More You Know.

*Related to this still, my mother and I invented a game during my stay called Saddest Stripper. We tried to top each other with descriptions of sad strippers — e.g., vertical caesarean scars, visible scurvy, leaky dead eye. I thought I won with my vivid description of a foaming syphilitic with a full head and neck-cage collar thing, but Mom swept when she thoughtfully said, “One leg and an IV.” Horrible, horrible joke but for some reason it really worked. Perhaps because of all the time I’d just spent on IV, it was the idea of dragging the single leg and the IV about the stage in a g-string while attempting to bump and grind that slayed us. I hope none of that offends any sad stripper readers; sorry. Also, glancing over the brief list I gave, it looks like the attributes I best remember us naming are those a stripper might share with a pirate. Intriguing.

Daily Batman: Fans everywhere

Bat-Mania sweeps every corner of society.

via scandyfactory and comicallyvintage on the tumblr.

See? Girls like comics, too.

Post-Holiday Pick-Up Day! : Miss December 1992, Barbara Moore

Thought I’d help you beat the weird post-holiday slump today (unless you are in Canadialand in which case you’re opening all your Boxing Day gifts and hoarking down the moose jerky and Molson’s today in front of a hockey game anyway, so you hosers wait and check it out tomorrow!) with some lovely and talented Miss Decembers of yore.

Unlike the NSFW November fiasco, I got no intention of doing every single Miss December ever: I have instead culled the herd to a manageable flock of interesting favorites. Enjoy!

Photographed by Stephen Wayda.

Besides having managed to keep quite a tenacious hold on the D-list spotlight of sorts (really it’s more like a kid shining a flashlight under their face at summer camp) over her career, the lovely and talented Barbara Moore, Miss December 1992, had quite the “electric” magnetism — she was struck by lightning three years before her Playboy appearance.

It was a rainy night in Nashville when the lights went out. Barbara Moore was walking down Acklen Avenue when it happened. Zap! A bolt of lightning whams down about 12 inches from her pretty ankles. Streetlights are blinking and so is she, tiptoeing down the avenue, thinking, “I almost didn’t live to turn twenty-two.”

Miss Moore was born in Spokane, Washington, which is where a lot of my cousins live. Those who abandoned Priest River, the small town we’re all from in the top of Idaho, and were drawn to the siren call of the sinful Big City — for shame! Spokane is the Sodom to Boise’s Gomorrah! (This probably means nothing to you, but trust me, it’s really funny. Would it help to add that neither Spokane nor Boise has over 210,000 people?)

Who else do you know who has worked a slime line? Barbara did, at a salmon cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska, where she gutted fish as they passed on a conveyer belt. She has been a flight attendant, a tournament polo player, a model and an actress who has made videos with Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Jr., and Reba McEntire that have aired nationally on TNN and CMT. Now she is Miss December — a woman you’re sure to love if you desire a little excitement. (“The Moore, the Merrier,” Playboy, December 1992.)

More excitement than working at a cannery in Ketchikan? The hell you say! God, sometimes I miss the Pacific Northwest. Then I go to the grocery, in the sun, in regular shoes with no galoshes, and there are no crazy people with carts of cans raving front-door-side that AIDS is the lord’s punishment for homosexshualls, and no relatives with missing teeth working the register and reminding me of the time I fell in the crick and my bra came undone (worst. hike. ever.). There is just sterile, spray-tanned, PTA propriety, with small smiles and simple “Merry Christmases.” Mmm. I like you, Cali. I will keep you.

Barbara Moore’s celebrity rose in 2004 when she began dating actor Lorenzo Lamas. Ironically, she had met Lamas through her friend and fellow Playmate Shauna Sand, who was married to Lamas at the time. They were scheduled to marry in July 2005, however the wedding was called off at the last moment, reportedly after Lamas discovered Moore in the company of a male stripper at her bachelorette party. (the wiki)

No way! Lorenzo Lamas, you are a man whose sound and sober judgment I would normally implicitly trust, but I must ask: are you sure?? Because Barbie just doesn’t seem like the type to promote nor enjoy nudity!

Well, that’s it for your first Post-Holiday Pick-Up entry. I’ll schedule a few more of these for later in the day, so stay tuned!

Unlikely G: Anna Karina “Look, Ma, no gag reflex!” edition with bonus ménage à trois

The only thing more attractive to a man than demonstrating for him your lax gag reflex is doing so with a negative pregnancy test. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Love it.

Anna Karina as Angéla with Jean-Claude Brialy as Émile in Une femme est une femme, 1961, directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

A naughty cabaret dancer/singer—one of these days I will track down a scene on youtube and put it up here, she does this one in a sailor outfit that is hilarious—wants a baby (cause you know us women), but her boyfriend is not going for it, so she decides to hook it up with his friend Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is always claiming to be in love with her, and sort-of hijinks ensue. It’s actually very witty and offbeat, and it has some fun music in it, too.

Alfred: Answer yes, and I owe you 100₣. Answer no, and you owe me 100₣, okay?
Bar Owner: Okay.
Alfred: Okay. Here’s the question: Can you loan me 100₣?