The Dance of the Bashful Bride
Wow, Julie Gibson made it to 106!
My grandfather used to talk about seeing her
at the Coral Room in DC.
He lived nearby in the Congress Park Apartments
when he worked for the FBI.
Said he’d even seen the Vice President,
Dick Nixon, in the audience once
when she did her signature
Dance of the Bashful Bride,
which started out with Julie in a wedding dress.
This was after she’d been arrested
in Massachusetts, on obscenity charges,
for doing the same striptease act.
Born in 1913. I’d forgotten all about her.
I assumed she’d been dead for years,
until I read her obit in the Telegraph –
“a foil to the Three Stooges,
played Helen of Troy for Orson Welles,”
the headline read.
She once sued a Bucks County producer
for replacing her in the cast of a production
of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Sued him for slander for saying she wasn’t sexy enough.
Grandad said he saw her
in other clubs in the District,
like the Bayou, and also clubs in Philly.
Performed at a club called The Wedge
frequented by engineers working
on submarine defense systems.
They loved her so much they named
their “listening buoys” system for detecting explosives
“the Julie,” even invited her aboard
the USS Valley Forge aircraft carrier!
"The face that launched a thousand anti-sub sorties,"
Grandpa quipped, and Grandma rolled her eyes.
"Bashful bride, my foot," she muttered.
No Garden of Eden
Born in Somerset, the cider county,
the bittersweet apples the envy of Eve,
though no source of knowledge,
whether good or evil:
I lost my innocence in the big city, London.
Working as a stitcher in a shoe factory in Somerset,
my dream to be a fashion model,
at seventeen, I answered an ad from ToCo –
Town & Country – recruiting models.
Soon I was posing in my knickers
for their magazines, Spick, Span and Beautiful Britons,
the longest-running and most successful
post-war pin-up magazines in Britain,
only a shilling a copy in 1963,
not a high price for adolescent dreaming.
Specializing in girl-next-door models –
though Anita Ekberg featured in some –
the mags appealed to average male fantasies,
us “girls with unknown faces” naughty-but-nice.
My friend Shirley Eaton won international fame
as the girl James Bond finds dead in Goldfinger,
covered in gold paint from head to toe,
but otherwise none of us glamourous stars.
When I hit the pages of Beautiful Britons
in 1957, I changed my name
from Rosa Domaille to Eve Eden.
My cup size E, my measurements 38-23-36,
I had no problems getting work,
posing for nudist magazines like Health and Efficiency
and downright porn, like QT, Kamera, Carnival,
Escapade, Playboy and Solo.
Had roles in Aladdin (Genie of the Ring),
Operation Bullshine (an ATS Girl),
a girl playing tennis in Only Two Can Play,
Peter Sellers in the lead role;
but my uncredited part as the High Priestess
in the Beatles movie, Help!, my absolute favourite.
Living in Las Vegas now, in my eighties,
my husband of forty years, Claudio, no longer with us;
Nevada is okay, even if it's no Garden of Eden.
Take the Tanager
Called sexual dimorphism,
male and female birds
display different plumage,
the males usually more flamboyant,
strutting around – muy macho! –
cloaked in colorful feathers
trying to attract mates,
females in shorter supply
because of all the extra work,
incubation and child-rearing,
the females’ duller color
less visible to predators.
Not true with birds of prey –
like raptors – males and females
dressed alike, unimpressive shades of gray,
brown, black – sharp talons and eyesight,
but nothing stunning in their coloring.
Not like the eye-popping tanager,
models of what evolutionary biologists
call “honest signaling in sexual selection.”
The female picks the male –
invites him into her nest, as it were –
because the brilliant colors
mean he’s been eating healthy food:
he’s got the genes for food foraging.
What could be more attractive in a male?
The Judgement of Elderly Parents
I was on the crew of sanitation workers
who discovered the bag of body parts
at the Shahrak Ekbatan apartment complex
in Tehran, when we collected the trash.
Khodaye man! It smelled to high heaven!
Forensic experts got fingerprints
from a piece of a hand,
discovered the victim was Babak Korramdin,
an obscure film director.
Surveillance footage from a building elevator camera
showed an elderly couple transporting
large plastic trash bags the night before.
Babak’s parents! Akbar Khorramdin, 81,
and his wife, 74-year-old Iran Mousavi.
Turned out they’d killed
their daughter Arezou three years before
and their son-in-law, Faramarz, too, same way –
drugged, suffocated, stabbed and dismembered.
The couple confessed to their crimes.
“I have no guilty conscience for any of the murders,”
Khorramdin, a retired army colonel, declared.
“I killed people who were morally corrupt.”
Newspaper photographs showed him in prison pajamas
flashing a victory sign. “They were drug addicts,
alcoholics. They had promiscuous sex.”
The last thing my parents said to me
before they passed on to the next life?
Ghorbunet beram. I’ll sacrifice myself for you,
a traditional expression of affection.
“Red is never boring”
Professor Rose began his Medieval Lit. lecture
the way he always did, a statement
he'd spend the rest of the class proving.
"It's such a dramatic color.
It's all about strength and desire, physical needs.
In the Bible, it represents life, blood, sin, flesh.
"In China, red stands for luck, prosperity.
In Japan, happiness; hence, the red kimono
brides traditionally wear on their wedding day.
"Red is either Cupid or the Devil.
Which brings us to our topic of the day,
its uses in Medieval literature.
"In Greek mythology, the red rose
was said to have sprung from Adonis' blood,
as he died in Aphrodite's arms after being gored by a bull.
"This obviously became associated
with Christ's blood at the Crucifixion.
Dante uses the red rose as a symbol for Mary.
"In The Roman de la Rose, the famous French allegory,
red becomes a symbol of female sexuality.
Red, my friends, is never boring."
Professor Rose paused then,
sipped like a hummingbird
from his bottle of water.
We all turned at the sudden snoring
in the back of the room,
watched the drool slide down Jackie Boyd's chin.
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