A big Rough Legged Hawk is hunting around Flathead Valley Community College today. The "big sky" is battleship gray, but it's not even minus 5 (C), unlike last week.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Winter decorates for the Holidays. Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I contacted the Minnesota Historical Society about their Great Northern Railway archives. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: Complicated Women and "pre-code" Hollywood movies on TCM -- Sex, drugs, alcohol, divorce, seduction, Busby Berkley, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlot uh -- Harlow, the young, sexy Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo & John Gilbert, Mae West, the great Joan Blondell, and all sorts of good fun. Billy Sunday and the Catholic Legions of (sic) Decency may have closed down this era in movies, but not the human stories they told. One strong point made by this documentary was that women's roles were much more restricted, less interesting, and stupidly fantastical under censorship. I'll mention a couple of exceptions -- The Good Earth and Gone With The Wind. Read a review of Mick Lasalle's book HERE.
Topsy Turvy was a movie about W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan creating The Mikado for the Savoy Theatre in 1885 London. This comic operetta says more about Victorian fantasies than it ever says about Japan. My father sang the part of Pooh Bah and my uncle Max sang the Mikado's role in the only live version I saw of it, when I was six or seven years old. Japanese outfits were VERY cheap and common in suburban USA during the 50's, because of the occupation of Japan and the Korean war, so this local church production was brightly costumed at least. A decade later I watched an entertaining TV special which featured Groucho Marx as Ko Ko, the Lord High Executioner.
I can't say I know how much of Topsy Turvy is fact or not, but I always give backstage dramas a second look. This one had some scenes that were crazy enough to be true -- like the chorus successfully pleading for the Mikado's song to be left in the show, despite Gilbert's desire to remove it. The Victorian costumes were a hoot, but I find it hard to believe that gentleman kept their overcoats on all the time, or posed so much while conversing. There WAS social stratification to an absurd extent, but ... I dunno.


Here is a fun "pre-code" animated clip from Busby Berkeley's By A Waterfall sequence near the end of yet ANOTHER backstage musical, Footlight Parade thanks to: classicmoviefavorites.com