Disco Queen

What every young woman with any pretentions to glamour needs right now is a long gown (preferably in a bright colour and made of chiffon) with a built-in diaphanous cloak that she can elegantly swirl around her.

Pictured here on the dance floor, today’s young lady swishes her angel wings like a drifting cloud; her feet however, are firmly fixed to earth and elegantly shod in lolly pink.

What every young woman with any pretentions to glamour needs right now is a long gown…

At some point in the 1970s the Sydney label Silver Star produced this fantastic concoction of pink and green swirls. Then it cost the princely sum of $76 – I know because I purchased the dress with the original label attached. When I bought it from Fat Helen’s in Windsor for a costume party quite a few years ago, I paid $22, which was very inexpensive for the time (the prices there are still very good).

I wondered if the dress had ever been worn before the one and only time I donned it for public delectation? It seems a pity that a few more people shouldn’t see it.

(NB. See the dress from a few more angles in the Out-takes & Extras gallery.)

Persephone’s pomegranate

Apparently, it’s all Persephone’s fault we have winter. If only she hadn’t been tricked by Hades into eating those six or seven pomegranate seeds! As the embodiment of Earth’s fertility, she was thus forced to go to the Underworld for a few months every year. In her absence, the earth is a cold and barren place, and thus we have the origin of the seasons.

Persephone lived a peaceful life before she became the goddess of the underworld, which, according to Olympian mythographers, did not occur until Hades abducted her and brought her into it. She was innocently picking flowers with some nymphs in a field in Enna when Hades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth. Life came to a standstill as the devastated Demeter, goddess of the Earth, searched everywhere for her lost daughter. Helios, the sun, who sees everything, eventually told Demeter what had happened.

Finally, Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone. However, it was a rule of the Fates that whoever consumed food or drink in the Underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Before Persephone was released to Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Hades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds, (seven, eight, or perhaps four according to the telling) which forced her to return to the underworld for a season each year. When Demeter and her daughter were united, the Earth flourished with vegetation and color, but for some months each year, when Persephone returned to the underworld, the earth once again became a barren realm.1

I can’t blame her for being tempted by the juicy deliciousness of pomegranates as they really are the food of the gods…

‘Proserpine’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Oil on canvas, 1874Those Greek gods! They were always misbehaving, causing trouble for us humans. I can’t blame her for being tempted by the juicy deliciousness of pomegranates as they really are the food of the gods, but didn't she know that very important, golden rule about eating in the Underworld? (Or maybe Hades was just really, really hot?)

Some of my readers may be aware I have a slight obsession with pomegranates myself. The one in this picture was in fact one of five, delivered to me by a handsome young man I know, straight from his parents’ farm in the country after he visited them during Easter. There were no bursting-through-the-earth scenes at the time so I’m pretty sure I’m safe from abduction. And I’m going to eat every single last seed.

1. Excerpt from Wikipedia.

The Velveteen Easter

There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy's stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming.

There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.

“It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

…

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

…

“Little Rabbit,” she said, “don’t you know who I am?”

The Rabbit looked up at her, and it seemed to him that he had seen her face before, but he couldn’t think where.

“I am the nursery magic Fairy,” she said. “I take care of all the playthings that the children have loved. When they are old and worn out and the children don’t need them any more, then I come and take them away with me and turn them into Real.”

“Wasn’t I Real before?” asked the little Rabbit.

“You were Real to the Boy,” the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.”

…

Margery Williams’ tender story about a toy rabbit’s journey from the nursery to the forest begins at Christmas time. He learns the love of the Boy will make him real, and for a time it does – until the day he ends on the rubbish heap. Yet an unlooked for miracle springs him into new life – a fitting theme for this time of the year.

I do hope your Easter has been very velveteen!

She, dark angel

She, dark angel lifts her veiled eyes
To the empyrean o’erhead, and sighs,
What sovereign light is that? in thrall
Alas her wings were of glory clipped,
She has no more the strength to soar,
And bitter, rues her untimely fall:
When from the highest perch she slipped.

~

Neither Milton nor Shelley could help me with their notions of angelic beings: they wrote of ministering angels and muses. My poor little dark angel simply finds herself in a plight; no angel of death is she.

So I wrote myself a verse from an epic in the style of these poets. I don’t know the rest of her story, how or why she fell. Perhaps all she needs is a tall mountain to climb, a springboard to launch her back into the heavens from whence she came.

I looked for quotations about angels, and found two lines that intrigued me until I discovered their context. It was interesting to learn that both poets mourn a lost friend, and Shelley was inspired during the writing of his poem by one of Milton’s – the very one I had already considered. I call that a pretty serendipity of sorts.

Maid Marian celebrates Christmas

For some strange reason I am thinking Robin Hood girl when I look at this image. Not because this outfit will certainly enable me to easily camouflage myself in the English countryside. No. I think it must be the mask combined with the jailbird stripes.

A sense of mischief inspired this dress-up. It is wholly about the graphic nature of contrasting stripes; the mad combination of red and green. And just a little bit of fun! (Of course my other noble goal was to make the picture strobe and hurt your eyes.)

Some people say you must never wear red and green together, especially at Christmas. Not me.

Just look: this outfit has so many things going for it! Cherry-red lips, mary-janes, classic black-and-white stripes in horizontals and verticals (pick your poison), the cutest striped stockings and a polka-dot embroidered silk skirt in vivid emerald green.

How could you go wrong this festive season, I ask you?