Daily Batman: Girl Talk

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I think there was a board game called “Girl Talk” when I was young but if it was ever played at a party I was either not invited or in some other room reading Bunnicula. Probably both. I think there was a game called that, at least … shoot. Now that’s bugging me … I’m giving it a googly-moogly.

Girl Talk was one of a rash of “teenage girl-themed games” that appeared on the market in the 80s and 90s based around boys, talking on the phone, dancing, having parties and sleepovers, and other “girl-ish” themes.

Like, omgz! Gag me with a spoon! Math is hard!

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It was similar to Truth-or-Dare. … Each action (or question) is worth a certain amount of points. If you did not perform the action or answer the question, you had to wear a zit sticker. Some people actually thought the zit stickers were fun as well.[citation needed]

“Citation needed.” I should fucking well say so! None of that sounds fun even at all: it just sounds like junior high gym class.

Guess who likes you in this talking telephone game. I’m guessing that boy who threw the music stand at me and keeps riding his bike by my house wearing black socks with teva sandals. I always attract the sanest, winningest dudes on the planet.

All that is missing from that game description being my eighth grade P.E. period is me trying to grab my clothes and get them on as quickly as possible before Jamie Sawyer [not her actual name but in case she has turned her life around I do not want her to feel persecuted] gets done in the bathroom (having no need to change clothes, as she refused to dress for gym class, she would merely use the changing time to reapply her layers upon layers of black under-eye liner) and starts roaming the locker room looking for things to steal and people to punch.

This is strikingly close to Jamie’s middle school “look,” including the hickey from specious older sources, only she also teased her hair up very high in the front.

The first several weeks that my old friendoh Tweaky Lawn was at our school, she had transferred from Texas as a pre-established rather badass bully and all-around riot grrl and needed to establish herself in the ladies’-prison-yard-style pecking order of the middle school ne’er-do-wells, so she had winning scuffles with some scattered pretenders to the crown of All Time Baddestass Girl.

I heard a rumor one Friday morning on the bus that Tweaks was going to fight aforementioned thief, boxer and brigand Jamie Sawyer (basically a girl pirate in Doc Martens) but found that too incredible to be true. She had only just got here, and who would invite flannel-fist enclosed, painful death by pummeling like that? To voluntarily choose for that half-inch of eyeliner and, I shit you not, nearly-foot-high mound of teased bangs to be the last thing I ever saw?

Like this only shitty and too much so that you look tired and cheap.

No, thank you. I told the person who told me they’d heard from reliable sources about Tweaky Lawn’s intention to fight Jamie that Tweaks was smarter than that and it couldn’t be so. Jamie was more than a bully or tough girl, she was heading toward being a full on junior psychopath who regularly terrorized people she considered weaker than she with more than normal relish, like, picking on the special kids and working herself in to a froth cussing out teachers who were like 100 years old. She also liked to set fires. (I know, right? Aileen Wuornos much??) I figured Tweaky wouldn’t get herself tangled up with that, even if she had mentioned that “that bitch” needed “her attitude adjusted.”

Shortly after lunch the news came down through gossip channels that both girls had been suspended, and I wondered over the weekend what the outcome had been. I really liked Tweaky by then and I hoped she hadn’t been hurt too badly and wouldn’t be embarassed.

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I found out those fears were in vain when Jamie came in to our first period gym class that following Monday. She haughtily refused to look at anyone but actually went to her locker and pulled out sweatpants and a properly labeled “‘J. Sawyer,’ S__ Tigers” shirt that I did not even know she had and started putting them on like it was something she always intended to do. Two of her fingers were taped together with a splint. For once she wore no makeup, because not only was one eye black, but the other was nearly so and was also entirely red from the outer corner to her pupil — Tweaky had broken the blood vessels. I’ve always viewed her as a kind of lady Hercules since then.

The story has to do with this.

The story of how Tweaky and I met, when I gave her a bloody nose and shockingly lived to tell the tale, I will save for another day. I told it to my eighth graders when subbing last February and it apparently made the rounds of the small private Catholic school at which I substitute teach — where you have a conference with your teacher and the principal if you have below a B in a subject — and was such a popularly horrific tale of the gritty public school world that when I subbed in the seventh grade a few weeks later, I was scarcely done with attendance before they demanded to hear the story firsthand.

Wow. All donesies. This has been your Girl Talk edition of the Daily Batman.

The Girls of Summer: China Lee, Miss August 1964

Dazzle your friends with correct pronunciation! Say “China” so it rhymes with “Tina,” not the clinical term for bajango.

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

During Spring Fever!, in the post on Gwen Wong, I mentioned Ms. Lee and promised to give her a post all her own in the future. Happy to say that the future is now.

Ms. Lee is a real trailblazer and true intellect. She was the first Asian-American Playmate of the Month. Not lovely Gwen Wong, and not PR (name removed at model’s request).

Extremely athletic, bright, witty, and outspoken, China (née Margaret) was totally busting up stereotypes well before it was chic to do so. Get it, girl!

Like past-spotlighted comic genius Laura Misch Owens, China Lee began as a Bunny in New Orleans before winding up at the original Chicago Playboy Club. Due to her winning combination of unique looks, well-above-average intelligence, and friendly, talkative nature, she quickly worked her way up to Training Bunny.

As the Playboy empire expanded and Hef opened Clubs in other cities across America, China got to travel and show new Bunnies — and club managers — the ropes all around the country.

Her teaching duties take her to a different location with every new Playboy Club opening — a job which suits her peripatetic nature to a T.

“If I had to describe myself in one word, it would be ‘active,'” China says. “I love to roam, and I love to keep busy!”

(“China Doll.” Payboy, August 1964.)

“Despite the fact that I’m always on the go, success has come to me without my seeking it. I didn’t even apply for my Bunny job — I was discovered in a New Orleans hairdresser’s shop.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Lee was quite the jock at this time, enthusiastically describing the various sports she participated in:

High on her sports agenda is softball: Last season she pitched and won 12 games (“My windmill pitch is unhittable”), leading the New York Bunny softball team to the Broadway Show League championship.

(Ibid.)

Screeeee. What?! The NYC Club Bunnies had a softball team in a league?! And they were champions? Anyone with more info and especially pictures needs to be my hero and send it along, stat! That sounds wonderful and fun beyond anything the imagination can conjure.

Like icy-eyed Finnish novelist Kata Kärkkäinen, Miss December 1988, China Lee cheerfully reported in her interview that she traversed traditional gender/sports lines not only with that killer windmill pitch but also by handily mopping the floor with the competition at bowling.

“Miss August is also a pin-toppling bowler (she ran up a 217 at the age of 13), prize-winning equestrienne and jumper, expert swimmer and ping-pong player, as well as champion twister of all Bunnydom.

(Ibid.)

Twister like the party game or twister like “Shake it up, baby, now, etc,” with lots of cheerful shimmying around a dance floor? I’m guessing the latter. Seems more her speed!

Very little is made in the “China Doll” article of the fact that Ms. Lee was not exactly your garden variety gatefold WASP model. There is no deliberate, faux-innocent oversight of her heritage in some effort to prove super-open-mindedness, either, which I also consider a point in the magazine’s favor. A good balance is struck.

A native of New Orleans and the only member of her family of 11 not now in the Oriental restaurant line, China says: “Though I was born in America, my folks still follow Oriental ways: They speak the old language, read the old books, and follow the old customs. In this sort of environment, the men dominate and females are forced into the background. I rebelled, and I’m glad I did.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Lee does not denigrate “Oriental”* tradition, merely comments on the aspect of that traditional environment that displeased her and from which she walked away. It’s done in a respectful and confident way. Very cool.

*When people use this word now it kind of makes my eyes itch for a second. I feel like it’s so high-handed and colonial. It’s like when people say “colored.” The original word meant no offense and is way better than a racial epithet, but we have even better ways of expressing that now, you know? It is a long-running joke with me, Paolo, and Miss D because we all lived in the Bay Area in the ’80’s when “Oriental” and “Hispanic” were leaving the vogue vocab in favor of more specific, group-elected terms. So when we see “Oriental” restaurant or “Hispanic” lawyer on a sign, we all eagerly point it out to each other the way hillbillies’ kids laugh at their grandparents for saying “Worsh.” (I can say that because I am one.)

After her Playboy appearance, Ms. Lee kept her ebullience and poise and continued to make friends and influence people. She is the dancer in the credits of Woody Allen’s first film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, a part which she supposedly lobbied very hard for with Allen, who was a friend of hers. The film itself is a farcical redubbing of the Japanese movie International Secret Police: Key of Keys; in Allen’s version, the intrigue surrounds the case of an egg salad recipe. China performs a striptease at the end credits for Allen, who plays himself, several dubbed voices, and the projectioner screening the film.

Here is a link to the clip of her dance on the youtube.

Ms. Lee also appeared on television series such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and alongside Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate in 1967’s beach movie Don’t Make Waves. The publicity campaign for Don’t Make Waves was of unprecedented size and ubiquity — though the film failed to live up to MGM’s box office expectations, the cultural impact was still very lasting.

As an example, the character Malibu, played by sunny and curvy Ms. Tate, is generally cited as the inspiration for Mattel’s world-famous “Malibu” Barbie, and several Coppertone tie-in ads for the film are still reproduced in text books for marketing classes. I will go deeper in to Don’t Make Waves in August, during Sharon Tate’s ACTUAL LIFE Awareness Month.

Ms. Lee dated Robert Plant for a while, but ultimately she settled with political comedian, activist, occasional Kennedy joke-penner, and all around cramazing dude, one of the Comedy Greats, Mort Sahl.

Sahl’s influence on aspects of comedy from modern stand-up to The Daily Show is basically immeasurable. You have probably seen Fred Armisen on SNL perform a political comedian character he created named Nicholas Fehn who is not a send-up of Sahl, himself, but rather a send-up of Sahl’s admirers who can never quite touch the master. It’s the guy with the pullover sweater and Armisen’s own glasses, an army surplus coat and a light brown longish wig, who shows up on the Weekend Update with a newspaper in his hand and tries to make jokes of the headlines but can never quite finish his sentences: this using the newspaper as a jumping-off point for humorous discourse was a trademark move of Sahl’s.

China and Mort Sahl married in 1967 and remained together until their divorce in 1991. They had a son, Mort Sahl, Jr., who passed away in 1996. R.I.P. to him and condolences to both of them. I’m glad I got to share about some really cool, interesting people in this post. I’m feeling more upbeat than I was. Thanks for coming along!

I suspect that cover is another Beth Hyatt/Pompeo Posar pairing. Note how the pose and her dress make the trademark, cocked-ear bunny silhouette, mirrored by the small logo sketched in the sand by her right hand. It’s similar, though not as racily sexy, to the rear shot one they did where her dress was open at the back and the straps snaking around her shoulders formed the ears. This time it’s her legs and kicked-off shoes. See it?

Daily Batman: Poisonville’s Dinah Brand, of Red Harvest, edition

Excellent photographs are titled “Batwoman” and come from maanuuu on the deviantart. Words, by pulp king and detective fiction master Dashiell Hammett, come from Red Harvest, the only published, novel-length account of one of the Continental Op’s cases.

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. New York: Knopf, 1929. Print. (30).

The widely-imitated plot of the book — in which an initially disinterested outsider is called in to help settle accounts in a small town beset with the strife of several disparate groups in a power-struggle for control of the town’s assets, then manipulatively turns the groups upon one another while attempting to remain detached himself — has inspired, among other works, the films Blood Simple, Yojimbo, Last Man Standing, and A Fistful of Dollars.

via Mark Sutcliffe books.

My life will only be complete when the Coen brothers just plain make this movie, with a screenplay adapted directly from the book by, say, James Ellroy. Please. You guys, I will gladly help you with whatever — ad copywriting, finances, and even craft table shit. Make my dreams come true, Coen brothers.

I think every geek has a secret list of ultimate-collaborative-fantasy movies that have never been but ought be made. This one is mine.