Driving up to San Francisco! Very excited to read, sign and talk to people in the city by the bay tonight. Come on out and say, hi!
Yearly Archives: 2013
Crazy double exposure picture of mother, on the landing strip in Morocco right before we left in a private plane to cross the Zagora desert, to Ouarzate. Love the English gent behind her…
Once the movie camera in her hands turned on in her purse. It made for a very funny movie of her lipstick and compact in the dark interspersed with glimpses of the bright sky when she opened the purse. Wish I had it but, as we know, there were very few survivors.
<a href=”http://www.hypersmash.com”>Hypersmash.com</a>
<a href=”http://www.hypersmash.com”>Hypersmash.com</a>
Robbie and me in our playclothes from Dayton’s…
Every summer our dad would meet our plane at the Minneapolis Airport. He’d take one look at our Florence Eiseman dresses and polished Mary Janes and take us straight to Dayton’s Department store (where Mary Tyler Moore tosses her hat in the air) to buy Garanimals, Keds and dungarees that we could get dirty and muddy and wet and be kids in.
One minute and 45 seconds of LAS FLORES DEL VICIO, and believe me, that’s enough.
Mother ran off to Spain with her pals Win Wells (here in the blue and white shirt, and heavy eyeliner) and Silvio Narizzano (Director of “Georgy Girl”), to write songs for the movie. Carroll Baker sings one while she drowns in a fountain during a wild party. Dennis Hopper also starred.
Oh, and quiz for the day: Who was originally cast in the Carroll Baker role but fired when she arrived in Spain too big to fit any of her costumes?
Spotify Playlist Added to Chanel Bonfire!
The first half of the list is 60s New York and early 70s London — my mother’s music. Then we transition to the glam and glitter of my London experience and into the punk and new wave Boston rock scene of the late 70s that we listened to on WBCN.
I hope you like it. Feel free to make your own variations on Spotify!
USA TODAY! Today!
Chanel BonfireBy Wendy Lawless
Gallery Books, 295 pp.
*** 1/2
Gallery Books, 295 pp.
*** 1/2
Wendy Lawless’s biting memoir recounts her unstable childhood under the care — if you’d call it that — of her neglectful socialite mother, Georgann Rea. With Wendy and her sister Robin as props in her glamorous world, Georgann is a larger-than-life terror in a string of darkly comic anecdotes. She locks her children in a closet for hours, forces them to give back their Christmas presents and kidnaps them from their father, and that’s all before puberty. Then mommy dearest gets overly friendly with the first boy Wendy says she has a crush on. Colorful locales, from Minneapolis trailer parks to lavish London town houses, flash by in this shocking story of two sisters’ survival despite their mother’s mental illness. It’s a quick but powerful read that you can only wish was fiction. — Lindsay Deutsch
