Vital Viewing (Sidesplitting Siblings Edition)

 

Harold Nicholas was born on this day in 1921 (he died in 2000.)

Harold's older brother Fayard (1914-2006)

 

Here's the two of them together, but the above photo is a bit misleading, as the Nicholas Brothers were rarely seen...

  ...sitting still.

I briefly wondered if I should do this post as an "Under the Radar", my recurring feature dedicated to talented people who never quite achieved fame, but the above advertisement convinced me that the Nicholas Brothers were famous enough, at least in their day. Touring the continent--that would be Europe--triumphant appearances in England, France, Sweden, Portugal, Italy and Denmark. Unfortunately, here in North America, the continent of their birth, there were no triumphant appearances in the United States South, either live or on film. On the latter score, their motion pictures either were all-black productions (and often shorts) which never made it past the Mason-Dixon line, or mostly white pictures that featured the two of them in specialty numbers (one of which they shared with a pre-Carmen Jones Dorothy Dandridge, Harold's then-wife) that existed outside a movie's main storyline, so as to be easily edited out when it was shown in the land of Dixie. But such scenes weren't edited from the films shown in London, where Harold and Fayard became popular enough to warrant a Royal Command Performance in 1948. What did King George VI care about Jim Crow?

Produced by Jack Haley Jr (the Tin Man's boy), 1985's That's Dancing! was an offshoot of Haley's That's Entertainment! film compilations. Starting in 1974, these were themselves theatrical films that celebrated the heyday of the Hollywood musical. What made TD! a bit different from TE!, is the latter was solely dedicated to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which could give someone too young to enjoy that heyday the misleading impression that only MGM made musicals in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. In fact, all the major Hollywood studios produced musicals. It was a very popular form of movie entertainment in that era. Now at the time Metro did have deeper pockets than the other studios, and eventually was able to lure stars of the genre who had originally achieved success elsewhere. For instance, Fred Astaire first rose to fame at RKO before hearing the roar of Leo the Lion. Astaire eventually danced through enough of MGM's Metrocolor product to be featured quite prominently in all three That's Entertainment! movies, but was never seen dancing with Ginger Rogers in black-and-white. That's Dancing! redresses this imbalance by showing production numbers from all the major studios, thus giving you a more rounded picture of motion picture history (part of MGM's generosity in that regard may have had something to do with then-owner Ted Turner also owning the film libraries of several of its competitors, but I'm just speculating.) The Nicholas Brothers did do one film for Metro, The Pirate, but most of their cinematic movements were at 20th Century Fox (which I guess qualifies them these days as Disney Legends), including Down Argentina Way, which is featured in That's Dancing! Because it's a bit similar to another clip I want to show you, I'm going to skip DAW for now, but I will show you Harold and Fayard, now in their golden years, promoting the release of That's Dancing! Watch:

They seem like a couple of nice guys.

 

And they were a couple of nice kids. Their mother was a pianist and father a drummer who played in their own band at Philadelphia's Standard Theatre, which from 1914 to 1931 specialized in black vaudeville entertainment. Oldest boy Fayard got to see all the top black entertainers at his parents' place of employment and obviously was quite taken with the dancers. Entirely self-trained, he taught his sister Dorothy and kid brother Harold how to dance, and they formed their own act, The Nicholas Kids. Dorothy soon dropped out and that was when the act's name was changed to The Nicholas Brothers (of course they were that before there ever was an act.) Their combination of tap and acrobatics got them noticed pretty quickly, playing not just the Standard but now-legendary Cotton Club (though at the latter only white audiences were allowed to see them perform, discrimination at its most head-scratching.) Then came Broadway. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 (a show that also featured Bob Hope and Josephine Baker), and the very next year Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms. All well and good, but none of that meant posterity. For that you needed moving pictures, especially for those two, who, after all, moved pretty damn fast, examples of which now follow.

First up is a scene from an all-black movie about an all-black radio station none-too-subtly titled The Black Network. Fayard is 21 (but looks 15) and Harold is 15 (but looks 10.) Watch:

 

As you watched them dance, did you keep in mind that it's supposed to be a radio audition? At least it was tap and not ballet.

Finally, we jump ahead seven years to 1943, by which time both brothers were old enough to drink, not that it matters since they couldn't possibly have done what you're about to see next unless they were cold sober. Deciding to do it in the first place, then they might have been as high as a Sun Valley chairlift. Here's the preternaturally amazing Nicholas Brothers at their amplified-tapping, gravity-defying, land speed record-breaking, bone fracture-resistant best. But first you have to sit through a few minutes of Cab Calloway (and that, my friends, is hardly a hellish experience):

And to think, spandex hadn't even been invented yet!

 

 

 

 

Vital Viewing (Oral Choreography Edition)

Movie star Rita Hayworth was born on this day in 1918 (she died in 1987.) The daughter of two professional dancers, she herself became a professional dancer at the age of four, appearing on Broadway with mom and dad in The Greenwich Village Follies. The family moved to Hollywood, and before she was out of her teens, Rita had signed a contract with a movie studio that eventually became 20th Century Fox. However, it was the contract that she signed a few years later with Columbia Pictures that made Rita a star. Her considerable dancing skills, acting prowess, and stunningly beautiful features made her one of the top box office draws in movie musicals throughout the 1940s. In this clip from 1942's You Were Never Lovelier, she more than holds her own along side one of the biggest movie musical stars of all time: 

 There you have it. Rita Hayworth in her full glory singing and dancing up a storm. In this--Oh, wait, it seems I got the weather report all wrong. Rita is still dancing up a storm, but it's...

...Big Band vocalist Nan Wynn who's doing the singing, as she had done in at least two other Hayworth musicals.

It may have been Rita's dancing (and her looks) that originally got Hollywood's attention, but her acting just got better as time went on. Soon she was in as many nonmusicals as she was in musicals, including this film noir classic:

 Today, this nonmusical is musical star Hayworth's most well-known movie. If that's not ironic enough for you, this nonmusical movie about murder and betrayal and unbridled passion has in it film noir star Hayworth's most well-known musical number. Watch and listen:

 

You can blame the San Francisco earthquake and the Klondike shooting on Mame, but credit...

...Anita Ellis with the vocals that matched Rita's lip movements.

I wanted to study singing, but Harry Cohn kept saying, ‘Who needs it?’ and the studio wouldn’t pay for it. They had me so intimidated that I couldn’t have done it anyway. They always said, ‘Oh, no, we can’t let you do it. There’s no time for that, it has to be done right now!’ I was under contract, and that was it

--Rita Hayworth

So, does any of this matter? Was some big con job being foisted on the moviegoing public? Fictional movies are con jobs to begin with. Acting is a con job. Scripted dialogue is a con job. Anything not filmed on location, anything indoors, anything in a different historical period, anything on another planet, is a con job. Maybe con job is too harsh a word. How about make-believe? No more so than musicals which often have characters singing songs that they're supposedly making up at the spur of the moment when they could just be talking instead. As far as lip syncing goes, just about any musical made after 1935 is lip synced. Remember "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz? No, I'm not suggesting that's not actually Judy Garland's voice you're hearing. It most certainly is, but it's not what's coming out of her mouth at the very moment she's standing on a set designed to look like a Kansas barnyard. She recorded the song a few days earlier in a recording studio so it would sound like it was recorded in a recording studio and not a Kansas barnyard or even a set made up to look like a Kansas barnyard. When it came time for the actual filming, Garland lip synced herself, which was how they did it in movies then and how they do it in music videos now. You'd have to go back to the early days of sound film to find songs sung as the camera was still rolling. The first sound picture, in fact. In The Jazz Singer, when Al Jolsen sings "Mammy" he's doing so live on film (as contradictory as that may sound.) And frankly, Al sounds better in his later movies than he does there (he comes across as less racist, too.) Once Hollywood decided that what you're seeing and what you're hearing can best be done at two different locations at two different times, it wasn't long before it occurred to somebody that what you're seeing and what you're hearing can occasionally be done by two different people as well. Rita Hayworth was a terrific dancer with a terrific screen presence whose singing wasn't quite terrific enough. Nan Wynn and Anita Ellis were terrific singers but not dancers at all and though both appeared in movies from time to time, neither had what it took to become stars. There are only so many Judy Garlands in this world. The rest is make-believe. Or, if you prefer, con jobs.

Still, you might be curious as to just what Rita Hayworth's voice did sound like. Well, she does talk in her movies. Nobody has ever suggested that was dubbed. But what about her singing? For that we'll have to turn on the TV--early 1970s TV:

Television may be even more make-believe than the movies!

 

 

 

 

Vital Viewing (May-December Hoofers Edition)

 

Actor, singer, and, above all else, dancer Fred Astaire was born on this day in 1899 (he died in 1987.) He had many dance partners during his long career, starting with his sister Adele when they were both still kids. Besides her, there was Eleanor Powell, Paulette Goddard, Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen, Betty Hutton, Jane Powell, Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, Petula Clark, and, of course, Ginger Rogers, with whom he danced with through ten films. Yet when asked in 1973 who he thought was his best partner, Astaire named none of those well-known ladies but instead a woman who may not be as famous today as she suddenly found herself to be one October night in 1958: 

"Barrie Chase is the best partner--she's the latest partner that I've had, and believe me, that girl has got it--that girl can dance."

Fred Astaire's movie career was winding down toward the end of the 1950s. The Band Wagon (1953), Funny Face (1957), and Silk Stockings (1957) are today all considered film classics, and yet lost money upon their box office releases. Part of it was these movies were very expensively-made, and couldn't just be popular but needed to be very popular to turn a profit. Another was that teenagers were making up a bigger share of the moviegoing audience, and they wanted rock 'n' roll, not the Tin Pan Alley stuff that had provided the background music for Fred's fancy footwork. Now, these teenagers' parents did still want that Tin Pan Alley stuff, but they had stopped going to the movies, preferring to stay home and watch TV.  And TV was where the 59-year-old Astaire's immediate future lie. It wasn't going to be a regularly scheduled series, though, but one of those things that occasionally replace regularly scheduled series: a special. To make sure this special wouldn't be confused with a run-of-the-mill variety show, producer-director-writer Bud Yorkin convinced Astaire that it should be him alone with no guest stars. Astaire agreed that there should be no guest stars, but he wasn't about to dance every dance solo. So he went out and got himself a partner.

The 25-year-old daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter, Barrie Chase had appeared in the chorus lines of several 1950s movie musicals, including White Christmas, Hans Christian Anderson, Brigadoon, Pal Joey, and two movies with Fred Astaire himself, the first of which was Daddy Long Legs. Astaire later professed not to have first noticed her in DDL, but, ironically, on the set of a Gene Kelly movie, Les Girls, where he spotted her through an open door at MGM. Impressed, he gave her a small, uncredited part in the aforementioned Silk Stockings, where she momentarily performs the can-can in front of three decadent Bolsheviks. It doesn't sound like much of a breakthrough, and it wasn't, but then came An Evening with Fred Astaire. Here's Fred and Barrie in Techni--no, in early color videotape, but it holds up just as well:

                                            

I love that finger-snap of resignation at the end. For all his expensively-tailored duds, Astaire had a touch of the everyman about him.

Fred has better luck with Barrie in this clip, but it's in the oddest place. Jazzman Jonah Jones explains:

Now that's the kind of "taps" I wish they'd play more often at funerals!

An Evening with Fred Astaire was one of the great television successes not just of 1958 but the 1950s as a whole. In addition to winning its time slot in the ratings, it won an unprecedented nine Emmys, including a controversial one for Astaire for Best Actor (in his defense, Fred rhetorically asked, "I'm an actor, and this Emmy is for a performance by an actor, isn't it? When I do a difficult pantomime in a dance which tells a story, what do they think it is? Tiddlywinks?") The special was much written about in its day, and when it was rerun three months later, the rerun won its time slot! Between 1959 and 1968 there were three more television specials with Astaire and Chase. Also, the two danced on the 1960s variety show Hollywood Palace, and acted and danced together on the anthology show Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater in a comedy story titled "Think Pretty." In 2017, the then-83-year-old Chase discussed her famous dance partner in a BBC interview:

An 83-year-old woman in a miniskirt and stilettoes?! In the comment section of the YouTube page from which I snagged this video, the consensus seems to be, if she still got the legs for it, why not? You can certainly see where all those years of dancing paid off.

 

Barrie Chase's time in the limelight lasted just under 15 years. In 1972, she married for a third time to a doctor and, quite voluntarily, left show biz, left fame, to raise a family. The nearly 50-year absence has taken its toll on her name recognition, I'm afraid. Her legacy is now cemented to just one phase of Fred Astaire's legendary career. It's all they asked her about in that BBC interview. That's not the case with Ginger Rogers, who died at 83 in 1995. When she gave interviews late in life, sure, she was asked about Astaire--that was unavoidable--but there were always questions left over about the many things she did on her own, such as the Oscar she won for Kitty Foyle, her appearance alongside Katherine Hepburn in Stage Door, and the classic romantic comedies Bachelor Mother and The Major and the Minor. I suspect that if Barrie Chase had hung around a little longer, like Rogers she would have been forever associated with Fred Astaire, but not exclusively so. Barrie Chase did do things on her own. As with other dancer-singers of that era, like Ann-Margaret and Joey Heatherton, she had her own nightclub act. She danced solo on a Hollywood Palace in which Astaire didn't appear. She did a few dramatic roles, most notably, and most credibly, as an unfortunate young woman who is brutally raped by Robert Mitchum in the original 1962 version of Cape Fear. If you prefer to see her in much lighter fare, she's the last surviving credited cast member of...

...this popular 1960s comedy:

Though he was a lot closer to her in age than Astaire, the dance team of Shawn and Chase just never took off.

In Memoriam: Stanley Donen 1924-2019

Donen's show biz beginnings includes a stint as a chorus dancer in Rodgers and Hart's 1940 Broadway musical Pal Joey, where he first met the man who played the show's title character, Gene Kelly. The two were united in another show, Best Foot Forward, in which Kelly not just starred but also did the choreography, and asked that Donen be his assistant (that's a little like God summoning Moses.)  Pal Joey and Best Foot Forward were both hits, and Kelly got the call from Hollywood. It's not clear whether Donen specifically got the call as well, but he eventually moved out west himself, did well at an audition, and signed a one-year dance contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, not a bad way to start out a film career. He also reunited with another Metro contract player, Kelly, who was doing well but not yet the star he was on Broadway. Which brings us to one of the more ironic developments in the history of popular culture. The two men who would come to be seen as architects of  the postwar movie musical, and who were on the payroll of the leading architectural firm of the postwar movie musical, the aforementioned MGM, were loaned out without nary a thought to Columbia Pictures, at the time a studio more interested in copying other firms architecture than coming up with anything original on their own. Except for now. On the movie to which he was assigned, Kelly was allowed to do something he wasn't allowed to do at MGM, choreograph (and basically direct) his own dance numbers, and he again used Donen as an assistant. The film, 1944's Cover Girl, was a bigger hit than anything else Kelly had done in motion pictures up to that date. He was finally a star, and Donen's co-choreography didn't look too shabby either. Back at Metro, Kelly and Donen co-choreographed Anchors Away, and Living in a Big Way. Both hits, and the two were given a chance to co-direct the postwar film version of a Broadway wartime hit On the Town. After that they co-directed Singing in the Rain (more about that in a moment), and, finally, in 1955, It's Always Fair Weather, a box-office flop. The two never worked together again. In fact, they're believed never to have spoken to each other again.

                                                                   

So what happened? Should one flop movie really end a friendship? Well, it likely wasn't just that. Some say the breakup was over a personal matter. Donen and Kelly took turns marrying dancer and actress Jeanne Coyne. However, the nuptials were over a decade apart, and Kelly's only after he Donen called it quits. What really ended the friendship more a professional clash of egos than any extended romantic triangle. Collaborating as they did led to confusion as to exactly who did what, who should take credit for what, who should be recognized for what. Obviously, if Kelly is dancing in front of the camera, it's his feet an no one else's. But before the camera is turned on? Who came up with what dance innovation? What camera trick? Partisans for Kelly argue that Donen rode in on the Broadway/Hollywood star's coat tails (or sport shirts, his favorite onscreen attire), while Donen's partisans argue that the assistant choreographer/director was a musical muse for Kelly, and without him the latter would have been merely a freckles-less Van Johnson. I like both Kelly and Donen and rather not take sides in this debate. I will say that I've seen Donen give several interviews over the years, and he always seemed to be his own man. Also, he directed 25 movies without any help from Kelly, including the critically acclaimed and/or commercially successful films Royal Wedding, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, and the non-musicals Indiscreet, Charade, Arabesque, Two for the Road, and Bedazzled (the Dudley Moore-Peter Cook version.)

As far as the musicals go, film historians these days believe Donen's principle achievement, both by himself and in concert with Kelly, was the total integration of dance and film. What that basically means is that a movie musical can be something more than merely a Broadway show  that had a camera placed in front of it. Actually, a number of years before Donen, Busby Berkeley had created cinematic dance numbers that in no way would have been possible on the Broadway stage (even when the movie had "Broadway" in the title.) But he was more a choreographic Cecil B. DeMille, his films extravaganzas with a cast of fishnet stocking thousands. Donen took a much more intimate approach. A man dances with his reflection, a man dances on the ceiling, a man dances in a torrential downpour, a man dances with a cartoon mouse. Every so often when the mood struck him and the prospect didn't utterly bore him, Donen even had a man dance with another human being.

In a 1997 speech he made when accepting an honorary Oscar, Donen explained his technique:

    

Love that soft shoe! And did you catch Donen say the word "titanic"? That's because this was the same year the movie about the sinkable unsinkable ship smashed its way through the Academy Awards like an iceberg.

 Before I go any further, I should explain that I've decided to do these "In Memorial" posts a little differently than I have in the past. I used to do an all-encompassing review of a person's life and career with every photo and video I could find. The problem with that is, one, it can take an all-encompassing amount of time. Famous people don't always die when my schedule is free. A couple of years ago it took me a whole month and a half to do an obituary on Mary Tyler Moore (and I never did find the time to fit in Ordinary People.) Two, by revealing everything there is to reveal, I have nothing left for the future, when I might want to revisit that person. It's like I buried, or killed, him or her twice. I don't want that on my conscience!  So, what does that mean for Mr. Donen? Only that I'm not going to show you every single clip from every single film he was involved in. I'm just going to show you three. Which three? Well, what I've done is gone back and listened to Donen's Oscar speech (where he comes across as more lighthearted than in some interviews I've seen him do.) He mentions three kinds of people that a director needs in order to make a good movie, or at least a  good movie musical. Let's see who they are:

 We'll start with the screenwriter, in this case Peter Stone, with whom Donen worked with on this movie:

  
 Charade (1963) a comedy-thriller that for many brought to mind Hitchcock, a comparison that Donen found annoying, but was nonetheless meant as a compliment

 And for a musical, Donen said you need a good songwriter. Well, here's two, Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, whose songbook was turned into this musical:

The aforementioned Arthur Freed didn't just provide the songs for Singin' in the Rain (1952) but actually willed it into being. A mildly talented lyricist whose success in that field really depended on what melodies his words were put to, he made the switch in midlife to phenomenally successful movie producer. The Freed Unit, as his roster of composers, directors, dancers, singers, actors and set designers were known, is today synonymous with the MGM musical in all its alternative reality glory, responsible for not just advancing the careers of Donen and Kelly but also Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli, Cyd Charisse, Lena Horne, Ann Miller Esther Williams, Howard Keel, June Allyson, Jane Powell, Vera-Ellen, and Kathryn Grayson. So Freed can be excused for looking for some way to advance the legacy of his own former career as a songwriter. And what an advancement it turned out to be! Singin' in the Rain is today considered by many to be the greatest movie musical of all time, not just because of the Brown-Freed songs but even more for the inventive dance numbers and riotous satire of 1920s Hollywood that Donen, Kelly, and screenwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden wrap around those songs.

(I should point out that since Freed's death in 1973 a disturbing casting couch story has emerged that, if true, would mean that however great his contribution to motion picture history, it was matched, even exceeded, by an exceptionally sordid contribution to Hollywood's long history of sexual harassment. But keep in mind that he wasn't around to defend himself.)   

Let's quickly get back to Donen's Oscar acceptance speech:

Finally, Donen needs an actor. Here's one, Fred Astaire, who, like Gene Kelly, also danced a little. In fact, he both acted and danced in this:

Royal Wedding (1951) has as its backdrop the real-life UK wedding of then-Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip Mountbatten. In case you're wondering, the Sarah Churchill mentioned in the above trailer was indeed related to the famed World War II Prime Minister. His daughter, in fact.

Well, those people made the films, and Stanley Donen, by his own admission, just showed up and took the credit. But I suspect he more than deserved it.

Irresistible, You Fool

Dancer/choreographer/singer/actress Gwen Verdon was a mainstay of The Great White Way for decades, but she actually got her start on the other side of the continent as a "specialty dancer" in Hollywood musicals and even nonmusicals that nonetheless needed a dance scene. Generally, a specialty dancer appeared in only one scene, or sequence, and wasn't seen again for the rest of the film. Some specialty dancers, such as Cyd Charisse and Ann Miller, went on to become full-fledged movie stars. That didn't happen in Gwen's case, so the Californian native went east, where she became a full-fledged Broadway star, first in the 1954 show Can-Can, and, more decisively, the next year in Damn Yankees, for which she won a Tony. When it came time to turn Yankees into a motion picture, Gwen was a shoo-in to repeat her role as the satanic seductress Lola, though you might get the opposite impression from the above headline that appeared in the 1950s tabloid Tempo News. In fact, you  might have thought Hollywood was through with her. Why, exactly, was she "too hot"?

Well, according to the article, written in the wake of her Broadway success in the baseball-and-Beelzebub musical, Gwen "can't get to home base with Hollywood umpires", meaning that her scenes were either trimmed or cut out of a movie altogether by censors. Gwen herself is quoted as saying that "Boston has never seen me", but she was "...allowed in...cities where there was progressive education." The latter quote reminded me of the "communities standards" test the Supreme Court once invoked in an obscenity case. I must tell you, I was a bit surprised when I came across this article. I never knew that Gwen Verdon was once thought of as only appealing to the "prurient interest", to borrow another memorable Supreme Court phrase. She was undeniably sexy, and remained sexy for quite a long time (when she was 50, she appeared on stage wearing an outfit much like a bikini in the original 1975 Broadway production of Chicago.) But this article is from the same decade that saw the rise of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Ava Gardner, and Gina Lollobrigida. Those ladies didn't exactly come across as Taliban charm school teachers. I wonder if the whole thing wasn't written by some press agent, which was a common practice back then. Of course, censorship was a genuine threat during the homogenized 1950s, in particular, and, at the time, famously, in Boston (the joke went that the city's library system had an extra branch just for all the banned books) and the movie studios did have to be careful. However, the well-publicized threat of censorship, but one that was nonetheless successfully dodged (except in Boston), well, that could fill up those theater seats that were being increasingly abandoned in favor of television. So it was a fine line Hollywood had to walk, and someone like Gwen had to dance.

The line was often walked religiously. Literal religion. Until the advent of the beach movie in the 1960s, the greatest number of scantily-clad females could be found in biblical pictures, and 1951's David and Bathsheba is where we find then-specialty dancer Verdon, her red hair hidden beneath a black wig, playing a slave girl (as were most professional dancers in 1000 BC, at least according to Hollywood): 

       

 
Now for something a little less devout (unless you're a disciple of Anton LaVey.) In this scene from the 1958 film version of the aforementioned Damn Yankees, Lola presents a ballpark figure to Tab Hunter, who, in a brilliant bit of acting, looks as though he's just been hit with a line drive: 

Gwen Verdon, at her sexy, and, lest we forget, talented, best. As controversial as the above two clips may have been in the 1950s, were they being shown now for the very first time, I doubt there would be any calls for censorship. But even if there were...

 ...Boston can now be easily detoured.

 

She's Going to Find Out Who's Naughty or Nice

That's 1940s and '50s movie musical mainstay (and, some 20 years later, Broadway star) Ann Miller wagging her finger at that Santa mask. I'm not sure what the mask did to deserve the reprimand. Maybe Santa Mask gawked at her gams, which were put to very good use in the following clip:

Please comment? I can't. I'm speechless!

Blog Vérité: Letting Go

Many, many years ago, when I was young and foolish, I bought this one girl a drink. What's so foolish about buying a girl a drink, you may ask? Ordinarily, nothing. Except this particular girl worked at the establishment that sold the drink, and I think part of her job description was getting guys to--

I want a more romantic beginning. Let me start over.

She was a vision of loveliness as she danced across the room...

Um, she actually danced across a stage. That was the other part of her job description.

Anyway, once she was done dancing, this very attractive girl walked over to my table, smiled, and said,

"Hi, can I join you?"

"Uh, yeah, sure," I replied.

She sat down, and asked, in the sweetest possible way,

"What's your name?"

"Kirk!" spewed forth from my larynx, which I let hang in the air for a second, until it bounced off the table and hit the floor with a thud. I then asked,

"What's your name?"

"Didn't you hear the DJ? He announced it when I went up."

"Oh, well, I--"

Taking no offense, she smiled and said, "My name is ______."

Like I said, this was many, many years ago. I've tried hard to remember her name, narrowing it down to Destiny, Candy, Angel, Raven, Roxy, Porsche, Lexxxie, Nikki, Asia, or, possibly, Bambi.

"It's nice to meet you, ______. You did a really nice job up there."

"Really, Kirk? Oh, God, that makes me feel good!"

It made me feel good that it made her feel good. I was about to tell her that, when, suddenly--

"Sir, would you care to buy the lady a drink?"

I turned. Standing over us was another of the establishment's employees, this one a little more fully clothed. A waitress, she had earlier got me my beer.

"Get me the usual," said ______.

The waitress examined my beer bottle.

"Looks like it's almost empty."

"I'll have another." I said.

As the waitress left to get the drinks, ______ smiled--maybe she had never stopped--and said, "Oh, Kirk, I'm so happy you're buying me a drink. I really need a drink."

"Really?"

For the first time that night, a frown appeared on her face.

"Really, Kirk. I really need that drink."

The waitress returned with my beer and the "usual", some red-colored drink. It could have passed for Kool-aid.

Her expression now grave, ______ held up her glass, and proclaimed,

"I am drowning my sorrows!"

She was hardly the first person ever to use "drowning" and "sorrows" in the same sentence, but coming from her Maybelline-lined lips, it sounded wholly original. And, man, did she gulp down that drink, before I even had a chance to say anything. When I finally did have the chance, I asked, "What did you order, anyway?"

"Kirk, don't you want to know why I'm drowning my sorrows?"

Since that was my second question anyway, I said, "Sure."

"Ten years ago today, I lost my baby boy!"

"Oh, my God!"

She cradled her face in her hands.

"Sir, would you care to buy the lady another drink?" It was the waitress again.

"Yeah, sure, whatever." I needed to hear this.

My vision of loveliness--I don't suppose I'm the first person to use "vision" and "loveliness" in the same sentence--looked miserable. She was staring at the table and shaking her head. Delicately, I said,

"So, you lost your baby?"

"Wrenched from my arms, Kirk!"

The other waitress returned with the drink, which ______ promptly gulped down. Though she didn't seem particularly drunk, that red liquid wasn't improving her mood any. She again looked down at the table and shook her head.

"It's all my mother's fault, Kirk!"

"That you lost your baby?"

"Oh, Kirk..."

"How could that be?"

"I was 15 years old when my boy was born, and she made me give him up for adoption."

"And that's how you lost your baby?"

"Wrenched from my arms!"

Relieved, I said, "I feel better."

"Kirk, she took my baby away!"

"No, no, that's not why. I misunderstood. I thought your baby died."

"I died, Kirk! I died inside! I died a thousand times! I've been dead ever since! I lost my baby, Kirk, and I died! I died, I died, I died!"

She may have died, but it made for a lively conversation.

"Sir, would you care to buy the lady another drink?"

And an expensive one.