S Is For Shoes and I’ve got more Victorian trade cards to share…it seems to have been quite a “thing” in 1880’s advertising to have a pretty shoe with a bouquet of flowers artfully arranged inside. The one above is my favorite, and was advertising the White Sewing Machine Company, with 700,000 of them in use by busy seamstresses at the time!
“Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.” Marilyn Monroe I’m totally with her, although I suspect she andI were thinking of something a lot sexier than these pretty Victorian slippers I’m showing today.
“A shoe is not only a design, but it’s a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you’re going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.” Christian Louboutin My secret wish for a long time has been to have just one pair of his shoes….don’t ask me where I’d wear them!
“I think I have something tonight that’s not quite correct for evening wear. Blue suede shoes.” Elvis Presley Oh yes, those blue suede shoes of his were something else all right.
“Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations.” Ryunosuke Satoro
“The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to talk of many things: of shoes and ships – and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings.” Lewis Carroll There was also a theme in Victorian advertising of people sailing the seas in shoes. And another theme of the ubiquitous cherubs playing in and around shoes.
The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you’re doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there’s a writing problem, it’s because you aren’t doing that. Peter Gould (Director of Breaking Bad)
I thought since we had Queen Victoria herself last week, this week I’d do “R Is for Risque Ladies” as my Wednesday Whimsy/A to Z Challenge post. I must hasten to add though that what was risque in the 1880’s, is pretty tame to our eyes.
I’m using Mae West quotes today although she’s obviously not from the 1880’s but the flavor is there…
“I didn’t discover curves; I only uncovered them.”
“Love thy neighbor – and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.”
“I’ve been things and seen places.”
“If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.”
“Cultivate your curves – they may be dangerous but they won’t be avoided.”
This one to the left’s not very risque until you realize her skirt is hiked all the way up in front…oh my 😉
And then there were the Bathing Beauty cards, usually associated with cigars or cigarettes….this lady below is smoking a cigar herself, in fact.
There were probably much racier cards in the 1880’s but those don’t show up in a price range I can afford, in the places I shop….sorry! These final two Bathing Beauties were advertising a shoe store, of all places….
Continuing with the A to Z challenge, when I came across this Victorian era trade card, I thought I had to have it. It’s entitled “Queen Victoria at Home – Balmoral Castle” and was one of a series of six from Clark’s Spool Thread. (The US entry in the series was Mrs. Grover Cleveland.) I didn’t make this a Wednesday Whimsy because I don’t think of “whimsy” when thinking of this Queen, do you?
Here are a few quotes from Her Majesty:
The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.
Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.
I feel sure that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all. (Veronica sez: I think that one has been pretty well disproven LOL.)
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
Actually, I like the version of Queen Victoria that was presented in the movie “The Young Victoria”, with Emily Blunt.
This week’s Wednesday Whimsy is all about the parasol….couldn’t find too many quotes about them, other than this one from author Anne Sexton, in a poem entitled “The Kite: “The parasol girls slept, sun-sitting their lovely years.”
When I interviewed steampunk author Gail Carriger for my USA Today/HEA column awhile ago, of course she has written an entire series entitled The Parasol Protectorate. Here’s one quick Q&A from the interview:
Veronica: Which piece of steampunk “technology” in the series is your favorite invention and why?
Gail: I like the really silly ones. So I’d probably go for some of those in the Finishing School series, like Bumbersnoot (a steam-powered mechanical sausage dog), which are a bit more whimsical. In the Parasol Protectorate books, I’d have to choose Alexia’s third parasol, the one Biffy decorates. It’s the ultimate Swiss Army knife of parasols.
I don’t have any Victorian trade cards with parasols that multi-purpose, but some fun-to-look-at nonetheless. And I love the dress this lady to the right is wearing….
Humans weren’t the only creatures who needed parasols in the late 1800’s, as you can see from the cards below. (The one with the chickens reminds me of my author friend Pippa Jay, not because she writes terrific science fiction romance (although she does) but because she keeps “chooks”, as she calls them, in her Colchester UK home.
I think the lady mouse on her “slow coach” with her leaf or flower petal parasol is very endearing….I like the way she’s keeping her sang froid on that less than secure perch!
And two more photos below, although it almost seems the couple has a beach umbrella rather than a parasol but it fits my theme (almost), so there you are!
More Victorian 1800s trade cards from the collection today! They seem to have really loved owls in their advertising.
There was an entire series of these cards to the left, featuring the mother-in-law owl, who seemed to be perpetually disapproving, and then the two owls who were in love, plus random frogs. I like this one the best because even if the old lady owl doesn’t seem happy, the young lovers clearly are. Even the Moon, peeking out from behind the tree, seems ok with the romantic pair. The card was advertising Sweet Home Soap.
Here’s what Ernest Hemingway thought about the birds: “A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” Okayyyyy…..
I like this proverb: “The owl of ignorance lays the egg of pride.” And also this Greek proverb: “The rabbits’ eye differs from that of the owl.” Yes, yes it does.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said: “Alone and warming his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits.”
I’m quite bemused by the next card. The lady seems rather shocked by the owls. The owls are dressed for a party apparently, whereas she looks ready to turn in for the night. And I wish I had some of that Ladies’ Tonic, the sure cure all, just $1.00! Any why a huge blue and white vase? Maybe I’m searching for too much deep meaning and sublimity in ads that are over 100 years old.
Tell me you don’t love this dress below! I think she’s supposed to be wearing a costume and is an Owl. And then of course there’s a thoroughly modern owl that I’m sure almost no one can forget!
Given that I write a series of paranormal novels set in ancient Egypt and the Nile appears in all of my titles, how could I pick anything else for my letter N in the A to Z challenge?
I’m not sure why this Victorian trade card for the Newby Evans Piano company has a Nile crocodile and a fox chatting, but I thought it was charmingly comedic.
Here’s wonderful quote from John Keats’ Sonnet to the Nile:
Son of the old moon-mountains African!
Stream of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing’s inward span.
And another from an American Poet, Bayard Taylor, in his To The Nile:
Mysterious Flood,–that through the silent sands
Hast wandered, century on century,
Watering the length of great Egyptian lands,
Which were not, but for thee.
This week’s Wednesday Whimsy is M for Muse. I’m always talking about mine and how finicky she is, and how she absolutely refuses to plot things too far in advance LOL.
Here’s what famed film maker Franco Zefferelli thought about the Muses: “I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.”
I have a lovely set of six trade cards from 1910, from Italy, with the nine classic Muses, to share with you today. These young women were thought by the Greeks to personify knowledge and the arts, especially music, dance and various forms of literature. I put Clio and Calliope at the top because Clio represented history and Calliope specialized in epic poetry. Hesiod, a Greek poet who lived around the same time as Homer, said: “Happy is the man whom the Muses love: sweet speech flows from his mouth.” Or as James Broughton, a precursor to the Beat Poets said, “The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.”
Yes, just hope the Muse doesn’t dictate too fast for the poet or author to scribble the notes!
Then we have Polimnia for geometry, grammar and hymns, walking with Euterpe, the Muse for music. Thalia protected comedy and Erato lived for love and love poetry and weddings. She’s the lady of Happily Ever After, I think!=>
Melpomene (shown below) was the opposite of Thalia, being the Muse who sponsored tragedy. She carries the mask of Tragedy and a bat (to bring tragedy if there isn’t enough already???)
Urania inspired the astronomers and protected the stars…As Mary Ritter Beard said, about a hundred years ago, “It’s only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks.” We’ve made progress since Ms. Beard was writing but much remains to be done.
There’s another quote I loved, before I get to the ninth Muse and my big finale. This is from an ancient Roman scholar and writer named Marcus Terentius Varro: “The number of guests at dinner should not be less than the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses, i.e., it should begin with three and stop at nine.” I guess he liked very small gatherings…So here are the Three Graces, or Daughters of Zeus, for you, although I know them as Faith, Hope and Charity myself:
OK, now the ninth and final Muse was Terpsichore, the protector of dance, inventor of the harp and a lady who liked to have fun while dancing. I saved her for last because I’ve got a wonderful, fun music video for you from the old 1980’s musical “Xanadu,” wherein the Muses come to life to the music of Electric Light Orchestra singing “I’m Alive”. Olivia Newton John played a girl named Kira, who was a Muse in human form and inspired a roller rink among other things in this fun, candy-colored film. Gene Kelly danced in it, although not in this youtube clip I’m putting below!
I have always loved irises. To me they’re one of the most beautiful flowers around, except for roses, and they’re also a variety I can actually grow. I have a terrible “black thumb” (or whatever the opposite of a green thumb would be). I have a sentimental attachment to them as well…
Years ago, my late husband brought home a huge pile of iris plants that had been thrown in the dumpster where he worked, victims of a new landscape design. We planted them all around the house and hoped for the best. Apparently the bulbs did as they were supposed to do, split and survived the trauma of being uprooted and replanted, because over a year later the first fragrant purple velvet iris bloomed. It was the day of his funeral, completely out of season for iris, and let me tell you, I took that as an absolute sign he was still watching over us. Yet another reason to adore purple iris!
Before the bicycle accident that took his life at much too young an age, we’d been on a trip up north to visit friends and happened to stop in at a place called Bluebird Haven Iris Garden, which was every bit as charming as the name implies and which I’ve discovered still to this day sells bulbs of the most amazing varieties of iris. My husband and I had planned to order enough bulbs to lay down a huge bed of iris along the back fence, but of course we never got the opportunity. Fate had other ideas. In his honor, a year or two later, I did place the order and my best friend and I dug the iris bed and did the planting. I got to enjoy the many flowers for quite a few years.
During that time, a very dear friend of mine who is a talented painter came out to photograph the iris in bloom. Later that year, she presented me with a lovely painting she’d done of one of the purple iris. I really treasure the painting, not only because it was from Mary, but also because we no longer own the house and the iris bed is long gone, but I can still look at her work of art and remember.
I also – of course! – collect various pieces of bric-a-brac with the iris theme. (You’re not really too surprised, are you?)
The A to Z Challenge continues on my blog! At this rate, I’ll probably be wrapping up with Z about the time every other blogger in the world starts up again. I’m having fun though and I hope you are too.
The first thing that comes to my mind for the letter “H” is Hamunaptra, mostly because
I spend entirely too much time cruising eBay and look what I found and HAD to have! It’s only a resin replica of the Key to the Book of the Dead (in the movie) and doesn’t actually open (so no treasure map inside) but the 1999 “The Mummy” is one of my all time favorite movies. And the invented-for-this-movie “city of the dead” Hamunaptra was the destination everyone in the movie was going to, for better or worse. My younger daughter and I watched the movie at the theater on opening day, went outside, bought another set of tickets and watched it again immediately. SO good! All that adventure, hints of ancient Egypt, Brendan Fraser in his prime, Ardeth Bey the Medjai leader, with the long hair and the big gun….mummies, cats, scarabs….what more could I ask??? I try to capture that spirit of adventure, magic, romance and anything-is-possible in the “Gods of Egypt” novels I write, which are set in ancient Egypt.
H would also be for the goddess Hathor, of whom I’m very fond. She appears in “Magic of the Nile” at a critical point and I have an unfinished novella where she’s very key to events. She was the Goddess of many things, but particularly of love, beauty, motherhood, music, joy and dancing, and could appear as a cow, a cow-headed woman, or a woman with curving cow horns.
Or, H can be for honeybee. Those little guys are so important to our food supply….plant flowers for them if you can, ok? This site seems to have a good year round list of what flowering plants the bees prefer. We need the bees! (Yes, the bees are a total non sequitor from the subject of Egypt…)
So I’ll leave you with this photo from “The Mummy” – can’t talk about all that Ardeth Bey goodness and not have his picture anywhere. In our house we also quite loved Jonathan as portrayed by John Hannah.
I’m combining my ongoing “A to Z Challenge” with my occasional reviews of old and/or favorite movies. As I’ve said before, when I was a kid, my brother and I would stay up late to watch old SF movies in black and white on the TV. The movies were always much cut up to allow for noisy used car dealer commercials and we sometimes fell asleep before the end.
“The Giant Gila Monster” of 1959 (“Devouring people as if they were flies!”) was one of the favorites of whoever programmed movies at the little station we watched, so we saw it fairly often. It was a typical 1950’s movie with giant creature bent on devouring the world (ants, spiders, crabs, you-name-it became giant people-eating beasts in those old flicks all the time) and plucky teens who defeat it when no one else can. Actually this Gila monster apparently just wanted to eat the local townspeople and had no further ambitions. I always rather enjoyed the scenes of a real Gila monster rampaging through model train sets. The hero, Chase, hot rodder with a heart of gold, was portrayed by Don Sullivan, who also got to sing three songs in the course of the movie. (Don’t tell him, since I believe he wrote the songs, but the station we watched as kids cut about one and a half of them every time as best I can recall.)
One staple of 1950’s SF movies in this genre that always amused me was the heroine with the random, charming foreign accent that usually went unexplained (although in one of my alltime favorites “The Killer Shrews,” the heroine asked the hero why he wasn’t curious about her accent!). My family had a theory going that these actresses were former Miss Swedens, who had won a role in a “big Hollywood movie” as one of their prizes. Turns out the lady in this Gila movie was Miss France 1957.
At any rate, I recently stumbled across the 2012 remake, a made-for-TV movie entitled “Gila!” I had to watch it so I ordered the dvd. The tagline on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is “Hot Music, Hot Cars, Hot Chicks…and One Big Monster.” I don’t know if that was the official tag or someone’s plot summary but the cars at least were hot. The cars were the best thing in the movie – beautifully restored, shiny 1950’s vehicles that drew your eye every time one was in the scene. The characters drove quite an odd assortment of cars, probably based on what the film makers were able to find. It was glaringly obvious to me how extremely careful everyone was being not to get a scratch on the perfect paint. Anytime there was a “car wreck” the camera would cut away right before the actual collision and then you’d get a scene where the car was obviously still in pristine condition.
So when the cars are the eye candy, that’s probably not a good sign overall. The movie seemed to be trying to be in the 1950’s without really being there. It was shot in a washed out color palette that approximated black and white (except for the cars, which almost glow). The costumes were suggestive of the 1950’s at best and glaringly wrong at other times. One dress the heroine wore briefly looked like she’d sewn it herself the first week in Home Ec class. I kid you not.
Throughout the ENTIRE movie I was annoyed every time the sheriff showed up, not because the actor wasn’t doing a good job (he was) but because the costume person couldn’t be bothered to find a matching shirt and pants for his uniform.
The bad boy (human, not the monster) was named “Waco Bob,” which at first I assumed was a joke but no….
Frankly when it came to the monster, I preferred the 1959 real one and his destruction of train sets to the cgi thing that lumbered through this movie…
This movie seemed to be largely following the plot of the original, with a few differences. They had a scene at a burger joint which appeared to primarily allow the heavily accented car hop to explain she was a foreign exchange student, which I took as a wink to the 1950’s trope I mentioned above. She wasn’t the girl friend in this version though.
I’d forgotten the subplot in the original about the little sister with polio…
And actor Don Sullivan reappeared, as a professor who is an expert on – you guessed it – giant Gila monsters!
Another fun bit of casting was Kelli Maroney from “Night of the Comet” (a movie I personally love) as the Deputy.
And our 2012 version of hero Chase, played by Brian Gross, got to sing the main song at the end. Known as “Laugh, Children, Laugh”, the real title was apparently “The Mushroom Song.”
Here’s the original version (song starts at about :45):
I think, all in all, I prefer the approach Steve Latshaw and James Best took with “Killer Shrews”, where they did a modern day sequel rather than rework the original. (Here’s my review of “Return of the Killer Shrews”.)
S Is For Shoes and I’ve got more Victorian trade cards to share…it seems to have been quite a “thing” in 1880’s advertising to have a pretty shoe with a bouquet of flowers artfully arranged inside. The one above is my favorite, and was advertising the White Sewing Machine Company, with 700,000 of them in use by busy seamstresses at the time!
“Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.” Marilyn Monroe I’m totally with her, although I suspect she and
I were thinking of something a lot sexier than these pretty Victorian slippers I’m showing today.
