Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
Women Rule,
Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Dancing,high heels, dancing backwards, exhausted, weighted dress, badass, dancing backwards, sexism, jealousy, tap dance, perfectionism, mean, angry, one take
I’ve never faced before. Frankly I’m tired of love triangles. Mostly because there’s an obvious choice of who the main character’s gonna choose; mostly the reason there’s even a hint of competition is because the girl doesn’t want to hurt the non-chosen guy:
Jace or Simon—duh, Jace wins
Edward or Jacob–duh, Edward wins
Dimitri or Adrian–duh, Dimitri wins
Adam or Samuel–duh, Adam wins
Peeta or Gale–duh, Peeta wins
Barrons or V’laine–duh, Barrons wins
Bones or Tate–duh, Bones wins
Vlad or Maximus–duh, Vlad wins
And countless other I can’t even remember right now. Granted The Infernal Devices took a novel approach and has the main character get to be with both the men she loved (even though it was obvious she really really loved Will–and if forced to choose I think she would have chosen him in the end, but she got both)
My problem is: the Cassandra Palmer series.
One the one hand there’s Mircea who I admitted wasn’t in love with to begin with, but now…after everything I’ve read (including the Dorina Basarab series) I like him. I want him to be happy. I want him to be Cassie because he wants to be with her and she wants to be with him. I like him. Although I’m not too happy about where we were left with him in Tempt the Stars. I hope he’s not going to just abandon her. That doesn’t seem like the kind of man he is.
On the other hand, there’s Pritkin who I’ve kinda adored since book two, Claimed by Shadows. And my adoration for him has only gotten worse as the series has progressed. I absolutely love him. And I do think he’s gonna be the endgame. But I’m not sure.
And I’m torn.
Therein lies the problem.
I’ve never liked both of the guys for a single girl in a series. I may like a guy like say for instance Simon, but I never liked him for Clary. For Izzy, he’ll yeah, but never for Clary.
I want both Mircea and Pritkin for Cassie and I don’t know what to think.
Aaaggghh.
SO, I keep rereading this post. And I get the overall point, even those of us that “like” both the men in Cassie’s life equally have favorites. Sometimes, those favorites change from scene to scene but we have favorites. So, who do we root for? How do we want it to end…Well, I’m just gonna root for Cassie and however messily it ends up, as long as she’s happy I’ll be good…
But for the list at the beginning, I gotta say something. I am very happy for this writer that all choices seem crystal clear. For the rest of us, sometimes we don’t know who we are going to pick until after it has happened. Or, if you are me, it sometimes was one person on one read but the next time its someone else…
So, maybe, its mutable. Maybe, for some like Cat and Bones I didn’t even remember there was someone else. But for each one of those, I have an Anita Blake, or a Merry or a Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick. And there are messy crazy solutions.
And I don’t see Cassie going the way of the many loved. At least I don’t think so. But I’ll just keep reminding myself that I’m rooting for Cassie…and being mutable
Happy Passover from the White House. Sean Spicer claims Hitler “didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people.” Uh, GAS CHAMBERS anyone? Or are we reading Richard Spencer’s history books now?
This is what happens when you elect white nationalists and the alt. reich to run the country.
The goddamn Apple Store is so fucking trendy these motherfuckers don’t even use cash registers anymore. Like holy shit why would I ever want to wait in line to pay for my immensely overpriced lightning bolt-to-usb cable, when I can wander around aimlessly looking for the one bearded top knot in the grey shirt who happens to have a card reader attached to his free iPhone 6? Literally fucking walked up a dude and was like ‘Yo where’s the till?’ And guy looks at me straight in the fucking face and says, ‘Oh well, there should be one or two people walking around on either side of the store who can process your payment.’ ALL OF YOU DRESS EXACTLY THE SAME! Am I supposed to accost every single goddamn one of you until I finally find the one goddamn fucking anthropomorphisized Mac Computer who is willing to let me pay for this shit? And when I finally find the dude and let him tap his shit against the box that I’m trying to purchase, of course he gives me the smuggest fucking smile I’ve ever seen on a human face and asks, ‘Would you like to use Apple Pay?’ Like GOOD LORD can we please just take a step outside of your möbius fucking circle jerk and let me hand you fifteen pounds in cash? Cash money? Real fucking physical fucking tender? No it’s okay, I don’t need a fucking receipt. What, you mean you’re going to print me a real receipt? A physical receipt that I can carry in my pocket? You’re not gonna beam it to my fucking wrist? You’re not going to send it via dropbox to an undisclosed fucking IP Address where I have to complete a CAPTCHA and accept your terms and conditions for the one millionth time in order to check that, yes, I did just spend £20 pounds and 45 minutes on a thin wire made of plastic and metal that’s gonna break in a month anyway? I JUST DONT UNDERSTAND THIS PLANET ANYMORE
I have long been a fan of Paranormal Romance and Jr Ward has been one of my authors. All the readers out there know what I am talking about. We each have a few authors whom we adopt. We preorder their books months in advance and wait anxiously for release day. We are at Barnes and Noble when the doors open or we order from Amazon to make sure we get the book on release day. Sometimes we buy more than one copy to make sure we have the book no matter what happens. JR Ward was one of my authors. But something happened with the Black Dagger Brotherhood right around book 8 and they changed. I wanted to love the books as they came out and with some of them I was successful, with others not so much. The characters were there but the trials they faced were just so awful. Some of it felt contrived. And some of the stories had so many storylines trying to interact, it was easy to get lost in the shuffle. In hindsight, I see that the books had to change and given the strong emotional investment we had in all the characters the jumping around was necessary. Then things got worse. The Happily Ever After endings stopped coming. Some of the characters died and it was worse than the first time around. It felt like the world in the books was every bit as bad as the real world. Tragedy dogged the steps of our favorite characters and rather than resolution we got abdication.
A lot of fans left. And they were vocal about their defections. And a lot of the fans that remained were more cautious. Yes, we wanted to read it. We wanted to see how our characters were doing. But the excitement was tempered with trepidation. What big bad thing was going to happen now? So, I was ambivalent when I got my copy of the Chosen. I have to say that after reading it I am cautiously optimistic for the series. And JR Ward is back to being one of my authors. I’m a little frightened for the next book because I think its going to be about one of my favorite couples and I don’t want anything bad to happen to them.
I could write a long review of the Chosen, but since I am releasing this review on release day I will hold my tongue. I will say this, though. The Chosen has restored my faith in the BDB. So, I will wait with bated breath for our next book and I recommend that the readers who defected recently over a certain death might be surprised by what happens in this book.
Oh, Viscious! V, my man, I love you but…You have survived so much but don’t go backwards! You have Doc Jane and you have a chance with Xcor to be so much more…There was growth in helping Xcor and Layla. Yes Xcor lived the same life in the Bloodletter’s camp although the Bloodletter told Xcor he was his father…In some ways, Xcor was treated as the son V actually was…
Don’t let your past fuck your future. Don’t cheat on Jane with someone anonymous…haven’t you learned anything at all? Oh you are killing me!!!!
Trying to engage his gray matter in something, anything else, he fired up the Internet and decided to monitor some of the human news outlets. That was always worth a laugh. The shit those motherfuckers could get themselves worked up over was just incredible—and then inevitably they ended up yelling at each other through their computers. Truth was nuanced. Hysteria anything but. After idling through CNN.com , Fox News, and TMZ.com , he ended up on YouTube watching McKamey Manor videos, which was one of his absolutely favorite things to do, and which did, as usual, cheer him up a little. And it was after about a half hour of that when a notification flared on the bottom of the screen, indicating an email had come through to him.
Wrath did the duty at the security camera, finding the lens with his hand and then putting his face in its camera. “You’re a lucky motherfucker, for sure.” Fritz opened things wide, and the light from the glorious foyer was enough to leave V blinking as his retinas adjusted. “My Lord!” the doggen exclaimed. “Sire! Oh, it is good that you have arrived home before the storm! May I get you a libation?” Fritz’s smile was like that of a basset hound’s, all wrinkles and enthusiasm, and the butler had a dog’s lack of time conception, his joy as if the pair of them had been gone for five years, not an hour. “How ’bout a couple of bulletproof vests,” V said under his breath. “But of course! Would you care for the Point Blank Alpha Elites, or is this more of a bomb-detonation occasion requiring the Paraclete tactical vests?” As if the choice were nothing more than having to pick white tie and tails over your standard-issue tuxedo. You had to love the guy, V thought grudgingly. “It was a joke, my man.” Vishous put a hand-rolled between his lips and talked around it as he got out his lighter. “At least I hope it was.” “Anything for you both! Oh, and my Lord, I took the liberty of allowing George I warmed it up and served it with fresh whole carrots, pumpkin mash, and green beans. Everything was organic, of course.” “You love that dog, don’t you.” The doggen bowed so low it was a wonder his bushy gray eyebrows didn’t Swiffer the mosaic floor. “I do. Oh, I do.” “Good male, you’re a good male.” Wrath seemed like he wanted to clap the butler on the shoulder, or maybe offer his palm for a high five, but he didn’t follow through. Even though he was King, there were some things you didn’t do, and that was make contact with an old-school servant like Fritz. The poor guy was liable to mushroom cloud out of embarrassment. Instead, Wrath strode forward like he owned the place, and V fell in line.
