APRIL 26 -- FATE KEEPS HAPPENING

 

On this day in 1893 I, Anita Loos, was born.


Anita Loos and John Emerson
by Edward Steichen for VANITY FAIR (1928)

“I've always loved high style in low company.” - Anita Loos

So of course that rascal, Clemens, suggested I take over today's posting. 

So what dreary dross does he leave me to talk about?


In 1865 on this date,

John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, is surrounded by federal troops in a barn in Virginia.

He ends up dead, although there remains some doubt as to whether he took his own life.

And in dealing with the government, darlings, when there is doubt ... there is no doubt.

On this date in 1986, an explosion and fire at the No. 4 reactor of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

results in a nuclear meltdown sending radioactivity into the atmosphere.

And Russia is still making things "hot" for the Ukraine.  At least those boys are consistent!

I joke to blunt my memory of those poor souls who entered the Shadowlands from that terrible accident.

Let us have a moment of silence for those two brave volunteers who jumped into certain radioactive death to prevent an even worse disaster:

In 1989, a deadly tornado destroys all structures in an area of 2.3 sq mi in Saturia, Bangladesh

leaving 80,000 homeless and a reported death toll of 1,300.

And there is simply nothing funny about shattered lives and anguish no matter the distance from your front porch.


In 1982, Rod Stewart, that awful singer who must sandpaper his vocal chords every night,

was mugged in broad daylight in Central Park.  If you are wondering why I am smiling -- I was that broad.

Oh, who am I you ask? 


You darlings are just so wonderful for a dead girl's ego.  I started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in my teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films,


but my most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece of comic literature."  (Even if I do the quoting myself!)

The family has always used the correct French pronunciation of our last name which is lohse.

 However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them ...

And watching them try to say it correctly made them look as if they were on the verge of a seizure! 

In his journal entry for this day in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a pleasant afternoon spent

with Henry David Thoreau, and a lesson learned:

"Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau.

At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say,

"Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience.

Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara."



The two old dears were new friends at this point, Emerson’s nearby journal references to Thoreau just as delighted:

“My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity & clear perception.

How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing quacking world."


All I can say is that old Emerson must have been acquainted with the world of agents and Hollywood!


“It isn't that gentlemen really prefer blondes, it's just that we look dumber.”
― Anita Loos

Excuse me, Anita, my dear -- but I must interrupt.  I can brook no one else to be chosen for the letter W in authors.

Allow me to introduce myself, readers. 

I am the ghost of Oscar Wilde and the star of the 1895 Egyptian supernatural thriller: DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

"Is the story about me? If so, I will listen to it, for I am extremely fond of fiction."
 - Oscar Wilde