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dwellordream · 2 years

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“...While men in skirts roles hark back to the Renaissance past, women adopting men’s roles was an entirely new phenomenon on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage. Women decked out in “small clothes” rather than hooped petticoats, then, paradoxically figured as a modern, avant-garde moment in contrast to the earlier single-sex theater. In the progress of the play there is often an attempt to recuperate the cross-dressed woman into a stricter regulation of gender, and thus nostalgically to evoke an earlier time, while actresses in travestied dress consistently resisted close association with outdated assumptions about women and became instead harbingers of freedoms yet to come.

…Peg Woffington’s biographical history reveals that her character onstage and in public life, projected as an interiority effect, involved a complicated web of referents. Her gendered identity was confusingly signaled through her anatomy, costuming, and sexual reputation, but also through her identity as a private individual whose activities were closely monitored in the periodical press. There was conflation not only between the actress onstage and off, but also between the dramatic character and the new freedoms she embodied. Crossdressing enables dramatic characters to merge and diverge from their private personalities and actual bodies over the course of the play; playing a man, even fleetingly, allows them to exercise greater mobility than most women, something that was easily conflated with actual actresses’ greater access to public space than previous generations had possessed.

The cross-dressed Woffington, resonating with a cluster of real gender disguises at mid-century, could be regarded as a signifier of both political and sexual liberty. Actresses and other women masquerading as soldiers were perceived to be simultaneously erotic and patriotic, for sexual freedom paralleled other kinds of dangerous independence. Among the many examples, actress Charlotte Charke achieved greater mobility when cross-dressed in real life as Mr. Brown who cohabited with her “wife” Mrs. Brown; Mary Hamilton masqueraded as “the female husband,” Dr. Charles Hamilton, but came to trial in 1746 for having married Mary Price; and Hannah Snell published her story as the female soldier in 1750. Even David Garrick’s wife-to-be, Viennese dancer Eva Maria Violette, disguised herself as a man to enable her to travel by sea from Holland to Harwich in 1746.

Breeches roles in the theater, in addition to increasing nightly receipts because of the audience’s wish to admire women’s curves in pants, facilitated a variety of plot consequences in which the disguised heroine pursues her elusive lover whom she serves incognito; or she may act as liaison to a rival mistress. In other examples, a cross-dressed actress, tinged with homoerotic overtones, becomes the mistaken love object of another woman. A third category of cross-dressed figure is immediately recognizable as a woman: she wears male dress while remaining openly female in order to take up an occupation, such as a military officer, from which she is ordinarily restricted. Cross-dressed or travestied roles heighten attention to the constructedness of gender categories in the real world.

As Elin Diamond put it, “When gender is alienated or foregrounded, the spectator is enabled to see a sign system as a sign system. The gender lexicon becomes so many illusionistic trappings to be put on or shed at will.” It is no surprise, then, that moral conservatives at the turn into the eighteenth century imagined cross-dressing onstage and off to be a threat to Godgiven sexual difference. Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring Anglican clergyman who had refused to pledge allegiance to William and Mary, and who evidenced strong Jacobite sympathies, asserted that clothing must correspond to anatomy. In The Conduct of the Stage Consider’d (1721), for example, Collier argued that apparel should not be exchanged between the sexes, even for seemingly harmless amusement.

He wrote, “Men putting on womens Apparel, and Women Mens apparel, as they do in the Masquerades,is a Practice condemned by Revelation, and the Light of Nature. The Holy Scriptures tell us, The Women shall not wear that which pertains to the Man, neither shall a Man put on a Woman’s Garment; for all that do so are an Abomination to the Lord: Deut.22.5 . . . . Nature has made difference not only between the Sexes, but between the Apparel of Men and Women.” In short, the heterodox cross-dressed figure represented an artificial difference that competed with nature. It was, then, a clever ploy to use the character of a cross-dressed woman to call anti-Jacobites to arms later in the century, as Woffington did, and as late as 1745 swapping gender, even in costuming, was regarded with suspicion in some quarters.

A letter in the Daily Advertiser urged Charlotte Charke—who flagrantly dressed as a man in private life and played Macheath, George Barnwell, Lord Foppington, and Lothario in travesty—to resume playing female characters so as to appear in “her proper Sphere” by “laying aside the Hero,” which Charke had justified as occasioned by a scarcity of actors. Charke’s equivocal sexuality offstage invaded her stage persona and became troublingly real. The eighteenth-century audience’s pleasure in cross-dressed roles, as many critics have argued, was aroused partly through its recognition that the character was in camouflage, and that the woman’s body beneath the disguise could readily be distinguished. Indeed, Stephen Orgel believes that the whole point of Renaissance boys pretending to be women was that the audience could easily see through the impersonation to admire their budding masculine anatomy.

Many critics have argued similarly that in the Restoration and the eighteenth century the delicious ambiguity of breeches evoked pleasure because the woman’s figure beneath the male disguise was satisfyingly perceptible. Considering breeches roles in the eighteenth century Dror Wahrman, drawing on and extending Kristina Straub’s arguments, has maintained that penetrating the disguise to make out the female anatomy beneath the clothing signaled a larger historical shift from an ancien régime belief in a flexible, constructed identity to a fixed, essential gender identity as man or woman. But the steady historical progression from an unstable to a fixed gender identity at the end of the century is perhaps not as straightforward as Wahrman suggests, and in travesty roles no unveiling occurs.

Contemporary observers, for example, were quite divided in their opinions about the extent to which Peg Woffington succeeded in fooling the public into believing she was a man. Commentators like Thomas Davies thought that Woffington acted male parts perfectly and without a hint of femininity, while other observers, such as her manager, costar, and sometime lover David Garrick, maintained that she was indeterminately gendered as a sexual impersonator. Still others thought her acting as a man was so convincing it could teach male spectators proper gentlemanly conduct. In her cross-dressed theatrical roles at mid-century, Woffington by many accounts behaved as if she were a virile, heterosexual man; her interpretation of male characters was applauded for avoiding the excesses of femininity labeled “effeminate,” a term best understood as men’s exaggerated rendering of conventionally feminine mannerisms that regularly provoked satirical responses to foppish characters.

When Woffington impersonated a man, her effortlessness in inhabiting the parts, described as uninhibited and free, catapulted her to the top of her profession and established her reputation. Robert Hitchcock noted her natural ease in assuming a male character, for Woffington offered an “elegant portrait of the Young Man of Fashion in a stile perhaps beyond the author’s warmest ideas” (1: 108). James Quin compared Woffington’s breeches roles to Ned Kynaston’s impersonation of female characters but preferred her rendering to the Restoration actor’s because she was happily “dispossessed . . . of that aukward stiffness and effeminacy which so commonly attend the fair sex in breeches.” He continues, “It was a most nice point to decide between the gentlemen and ladies, whether she was the finest woman, or the prettiest fellow.”

In Quin’s view, the would-be opposites became indistinguishable from one another rather than antipodal, and the androgynous middle ground suggests a blending that made it difficult to discern the female form beneath the male costume. Francis Gentleman, too, remarked on her admirable blending of the sexes when he writes that her deportment in travesty as Sir Harry Wildair was “free and elegant, whose figure was so proportionate and delicate.” The “raison d’etre” for the breeches role rested “in the imperfect masculinity of the performer” (Rogers, “Breeches Part,” 257), but many of Woffington’s contemporaries strongly praised instead how “well made” she was as a “model of [male] perfection” without differentiating between breeches and travesty roles: “Indeed when she assumes ye man there is such a freedom in her air, such a Disengagement from ye woman, with ye happiness of Being perfectly well made, that it is by no means surprising that she has been followed with uncommon & universal applause.”

In short, to stage a convincing man whether in breeches or travesty meant, for many viewers, that Woffington separated herself completely from the gestures associated with female form and persuasively affected the style and manners of a gentleman; for others it involved combining the sexes in a harmonious fashion. As we shall see with reference to specific travesty or cross-dressed parts, Woffington represented the tensions for eighteenth-century Dublin and London audiences that Diana Taylor has found to be characteristic of modern identity with its “entangled surplus subjectivity, full of tugs, pressures, and pleasures.” Woffington’s popular characterizations in male dress also legislated against the idea that national identity rested on strict sexual difference, though her studied affectation of robust masculinity may have countered the nation’s fears of contamination from French effeminacy.

Yet while her transvestite impersonations and speeches rejected effeminacy, they also ambiguously incorporated women, of a certain sort, into the definition of nation: in her public performance as a man or a cross-dressed woman, Peg Woffington refuted both the idea that women should remain exclusively within the private domain and the belief that the female sex was entirely peripheral to the nation’s interests. Woffington’s surplus of identities in performance might be described, then, as creating a kind of value-added onto the commodity that she had become.

That is, the incremental increase in her value as a result of the very marketable identity-effect she produced could be converted into an economic surplus that resulted in higher net receipts for herself and the theater. In short, her simulated identity is the commodity that Woffington purveyed through the gaps and fissures exposed in her cross-dressed and travestied roles. That surplus of identities, created not only through reiterative performances but also through the varied sexual, religious, and national alignments they evoked, proves to be an index to modernity and key to the aspects of her interiority effect that produced her value.”

- Felicity Nussbaum, “ he Actress, Travesty, and Nation: Margaret Woffington.” in Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater

#gender #history #georgian #english #theater #felicity nussbaum #rival queens

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nellygwyn · 2 years

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hi liv, i was wondering if you know of any good books on theatre in 18th century britain? i'm particularly interested in the overlap between theatre and sex work, though i'm struggling to find many sources on the subject. thank you so much in advance!! i love your blog <3

My first recommendation would be 'The First English Actresses 1660-1700' by Elizabeth Howe. It's obviously slightly out of the 18th century proper, but it sets the groundwork for attitudes towards actresses and women in theatre that prevailed well into the 18th century and discusses why there seemed to be such an overlap with sex workers/courtesans and acting (and why the idea that there was stuck, too). It was an invaluable source for me when I wrote a short paper on the topic (the idea of the actress and the sex worker being one and the same) during my undergrad.

There are two books on 18th century actresses in general that might be helpful for you: 'Rival Queens' by Felicity Nussbaum (honestly, anything by Nussbaum on this topic tbh) and 'Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth Century Stage' by Helen Brooks. I'd also recommend seeking out sources, primary and secondary, on specific actresses who straddled the line between sex worker and actress: women like Dorothea Jordan, Sophia Baddeley, Lavinia Fenton, Fanny Abington, Mary Robinson, Anne Oldfield, Elizabeth Barry, Peg Woffington, Hanna Norsa, and Anne Bracegirdle. You could also seek out sources on women who actually DISPROVED the idea of the actress and the sex worker being one in the same, either by their long-term marriages or because they deliberately put out a "virtuous" image: women like Eliza Farren, Elizabeth Inchbald, Sarah Siddons, Hannah Pritchard, and Susannah Cibber.

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annelapedusbrest-blog · 5 years

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MY MEMORIES OF JOHANNESBURG - City of GOLD.

article published 4 Feb 2009. Written and compiled by Anne Lapedus Brest.

MEMORIES OF JOHANNESBURG, CITY OF GOLD

Written and Compiled By

On the 4th February 1961, when I was 14 years old, and my brother Robert was 11, our family came to live in Johannesburg.

We had left Ireland, land of our birth, leaving behind our beloved Grandparents, family, friends, and a very special and never-to-be-forgotten little furry friend, to start a new life in South Africa, land of Sunshine and Golden opportunity…………… The Goldeneh Medina…...

We came out on the “Edinburgh Castle”, arriving Cape Town 2nd Feb 1961. We did a day tour of Chapmans Peak Drive, Muizenberg, went to somewhere called the “Red Sails” and visited our Sakinofsky/Yodaiken family in Tamboerskloof.

We arrived at Park Station (4th Feb 1961), Jhb, hot and dishevelled after a nightmarish train ride, breaking down in De Aar and dying of heat.

We lived in Becker Street, Yeoville, Robert went to K.E.S and I went to Barnato Park (aka Johannesburg Girls’ High) in Berea. Robert was in Cadets , I played hockey, and bunked school (with Gilda Goldblatt!!) Our next-door neighbours were Michael and Sandra Golding, Zena and Teddy Cohen lived in Becker Street also and Ronnie and Nigel Baskin lived in Yeo Street near the Richters - Selma and Charles Richter,.

Girls at Barnato Park lived in mainly Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville, Bellevue, Houghton, Orchards, Melrose and Dunkeld. After school, many of us would catch the 19 bus from Tudhope Avenue Berea to Raleigh Street, Yeoville, but many girls were collected by beautifully coiffed and bee-hived mothers with long painted nails, arriving to collect them in huge fancy Chevrolets, with big cats’ eye tail-lights.

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA …………………………….

Oy, but I had to get used to so many new expressions ……..

“ See you this arvy, Hey? “ and “See you just now, Annie” (I learnt the hard way that “Just Now” didn’t mean immediately)

“There’s the new girl in Form 3, …….. Shame!!” “My sister’s baby is so cute, …… Shame!

People would give me directions and tell me to turn at the robot.

Can I Lend your book?

Whatever I said, the girls would answer “Is it” ?

The shul is full of KUGELS……………….

Why did the bus-conductor call us all “Donkey” when he collected our tickets???? “Thank you,… Donkey” and the Klippies would say it in a high-pitched voice. “Thank you, donkeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyy”

You MUST come visit this arvy, see? You MUST go and see Cliff Richard at the Collosseum. You MUST buy the latest Elvis Presley record. MUST, MUST, MUST (only in South Africa! Say that “MUST” to people overseas, they think you are a control-freak). (took me a while to get used to it!!)

G.C. EMMMMM

Girls would talk about great talent at a party, and they talked about Chracks , boys talked about “good stock” .

It’s a blerry gemors!! Stoep. Goeie Môre , Lekker Bly,

My skat. Klop Dissel Boom gaan! Klappies. Lappies.

Wag ‘n bietjie. I’m Gatvol !!!! Deurmekaar.

Yislaaik! Herrrrrrre ! (Yurrah) Magtig!! …..Maggggggtigggggg !!! Vragtig! …….Vragggggtigggggg !!!!!!

Where’s the jol tonight, hey? Do youse know?

Don’t tune me kak, hey? Ag! Yes no fine. Stovies. He’s fab - such a doll !!!, He thinks he’s such a big Bok. It’s not so lekker.

Howzzit, my China. I smaak you.

Don’t chaaf my cherry, hey! Don’t grip my cherry…

Who do you think you’re looking at, China?

Don’t tune me grief, ek sê. Voetsak! Sies! Ag! Siestog, Jong!

My bike is buggered.

Bugger off !

He donnered her.

She Bliksemed him

They Revolting!

Sommer so …………………..

Don’t talk to them, they are all such Rubbishes.

Stiffies.

It’s Kwaai……..

Well, yes , no fine, Those were the days my friend we thought they’d never end …...

SUBURBS

In those days a majority of the Jewish community seemed to be living in Hillbrow, Berea, Bellevue, Yeoville , Cyrildene, Observatory, Dewetshof, Judith’s Paarl, Highlands North, Houghton, Dunkeld, Melrose, Hyde Park.

Suburbs where a lot of Jews also lived were Kensington, Emmarentia, Greenside, Doornfontein, Mayfair. Remember Fordsburg (Fitas). Also a Jewish area once upon a time.

Robert and I went to Yeoville Chader (The Bernard Patley), - Mr. SHATCHAN was the headmaster, and teachers I remember were Miss AARONS (Bella Golubchick) , Mr. Solly GOLDBERG, Rev. HIMMELSTEIN, and the Shammas was a Mr. CHAZEN (His daughters, Gertie and Hannah both went to Barnato park) and Mrs. MAGID

Chader Children I can remember the names of some of the “ Chader children”. Colin Koransky, Dorian Hersch (Shear), Terroll Hersch (Z”l), Gilda Goldblatt (Galvad), Brenda Goldblatt (Spitz) (O”h) Frances Taylor, and her older sister, Sharon (now in Israel), Carmella Shapiro, Marsha Furman, Gerald Pokroy, Philip Eliason, Harry Sacks, Alan Kaye, Susan Kaye, Dorothy Lewis, Harry Sacks, Philip Sacks, Ada Freedman, Ilanah Himmelstein, Julian (Julie) Kaplan, Meyer Kaplan, Brian (now in Oz) and his sister Jewel Rosenthal, Eugene Klatzko, Martin Chaitowitz, Hymie Symanowitz(Z”l), Ruth Seeff, Sandra Katzen (Pokroy) Robert Hershfield, Mervyn Gerszt, Bernard Kromelick, Derek Hammerschlag (I think that was his name) Wolfie Tepper, Marlene Tepper, Stanley Chitiz, Manny Magid, Melanie & Beverley Segal.

I must have been a real “chrack” in those days, coming from Ireland, funny clothes, and even funnier out-of-control curly hair, and an accent nobody could understand. I found it hard to make friends, but I eventually palled up with Gilda Goldblatt (now Galvad) , (daughter of Leslie (Z”l) and Mona Voloshen Goldblatt (O”h), from Webb Street. Leslie (Z”l) was a Choirester in Wolmarans Street Shul) and Gilda and I have remained friends to this day.

Girls at Barnato Park whom I remember offhand, Pam Ginsberg (Melzter) Pam Gladstone (Nathan), Denise Seeff, Ruth Seeff, Susan Simon, Molly Robinson, Rhona Shroder (aka Rhondie Shrondie) (Ullman) , Phyliss Goldblatt (Rubin), Geraldine Blumberg, Debbie Rabinowitz, Jacqui Hotz, Sharon Rafel (Rubin), Leah Smith, Ann Kaiser, Ann Moscow, Barbara Diane Levy, Barbara Levy, Lynette and Jennifer Margolis, Carol and Margaret Kowalsky , Gloria (Gola) Levine (Ash), Gilda and Brenda Goldblatt, Eugene Klatzko, , René Mazelle, Jill Gonski, Felicity Nathanson, Avril Kaye, Jackie Susman (Woolf) (her sisters Helen and Andy went to Athlone) . Pam Kohn, Lydia Burstein, Ada Folb, Sharon Cooperman (Fehrer) Beryl Andrews, Heather Round (Levy), Joan Gracie, Merriel Pratt, Hilda and Charlotte Brinkman, Ann Mullins, Susan Simon, Doreen Simon, Marilyn Silansky, Carole Silansky (Sands) Verite Hirshowitz, Ruth Samuel (Segal), Vivien Alexander, Renée Kunz, Lorraine Goldberg, Marilyn Silansky and her sister Carol Silansky, , Yvonne Shochet, Janet King, Pam Kewley, Adah Ben Yehuda, Roslyn Abramovitz, Joan Cooper, Bernice Frid (Vunck), Suzanne Lutrin (Resnick) (O”h), Helen Rothschild, Joyce Tischauer, Helen Leftin, Maureen Nagel (Ruskin), Gabriella Albrecht, Sharon Smith (Munitz), Pam Levy, Deborah-Ann Fanaroff, Jacky Centner (Cannon), Lydia Burstein, Ronelle Shepherd, Cynthia Muller, Marsha Sosnovick, (Jansen) Karen Israelsohn, Joan David (Elkon), Sheina & BatSheva Romm, Lorraine Nussbaum (Silver), Susan Hommell, Kela Saltzer , Barbara Beira, Shoshanna Kaplan (Kaplan) , Myrna Katz, Isobel Strasbourg (Mehl) , Isobel Thomson, Vivienne Lee, Meryl Michaelmore, Vivienne Fritz, (Head Girl) Patsy Coetzee, (Vice Head Girl) Philla Moller, Gillian Coleman, Sheena Haarhof, Glen Marshall, Naomi Tabachowich, Ailsa Bowley, Sheena Hayworth, And some girls from Mrs. Oppenheimers extra Afrikaans lessons class were, Vasiliky someone from Greece, Daria someone from Italy, Jean Smith (?) from Rhodesia, Jacqueline someone from England, Marilyn Patricia Myers from England, and teachers, Miss Todd, Roberta Evans, Miss Cohen (later Mrs. Gevisser), Miss Miles with DOG - George, Miss Langley (head), Miss Rosewarne, Miss Walmsely , Miss Hodkin, Miss Jones (Vice Head), Miss Horn, Miss Dankwerths, Miss Martin, (later Mrs. Gold), Mrs Morrison, and one or two Barnato Park Dogs, who came along to school with teachers. I think Miss Evans had a little Muttie trouping along next to her?

SCHOOLS Athlone Girls , Athlone Boys, Waverly girls, Highland’s North, Parktown Girls and Parktown Boys, Northview, Greenside High, King David Linksfield (King David Victory Park was to follow later on) Yeshiva College, Rodean, Brescia House, St. Vincents (for the hard of hearing). Helpmekaar, Damelin College, Yale College (Marcus (Marky) Luntz) , Regis College, Princeton College. Yeoville Boys, Observatory Girls, , Hyde Park, The Tech. K.E.S (King Edward School), St. Johns, Redhill, St. Stithians, Marist brothers, Yeoville Convent, Hirsch Lyons, Yiddish folk, Jeppe Boys, Jeppe Girls. H.A Jack, Jewish Government.

SCHOOL UNIFORMS. Mc Cullogh @ Bothwell.

Remember Yeoville? The Yeoville Post Office in Raleigh Street, C.N.A, the Picadilly Bioscope the Bug House (Oi) next door to Yeoville Home Industries (owned by Simon and Leah Kaufman), Kenmere Pharmacy (owned by the Marams) (next to the fruit shop in Kenmere Rd) and Yeoville Pharmacy (owned by the Joffes) (diagonally opposite the Yeoville Baths in Raleigh St.,) Yeoville Fruit and Flowers (Jorge aka George), Hill Fisheries, Crystals, Yeoville Baths, (and a swimming coach there called Bernard Green) and the Apollo Café across the road where they played pinball and the ducktails always hung around there with their chains, and motor bikes, all the Brekers. Theo Hommel (fabrics), Fitz Bakery where the OK Bazaars in Yeoville built their new shop, corner Raleigh and Bedford, diagonally opposite the Yeoville Library. And opposite where the 19 bus went into Berea and town), Hub Stores, Emdins – Haberdashery – (one or two shops down from the Apollo Café,) Denbo Jewish Bookstore, Scotch Corner! Billy’s Hairdresser in Rockey Street (near Raymond St) Faigels and the Dae-nite Pharmacy Rockey Street, cor. Bezuidenhout, Squires (clothing, school uniforms/shoes)

Portuguese Fish and Chip shop in Rockey Street, all the Tailor shops going down into Rockey Street, and Jekisons Tailors, and a guy called Bokkie Jekison who was the Tailor there (great looking bloke, with a great looking brother, I think his name was Eugene) both so easy on the eye!). Bokkie recently told someone that on the 7th April he will have been at the shop for 55 years California Tailors, and the Yeoville Recreation Center in Raleigh St, where Sandra Stein won the “Miss Yeoville” competition in about 1962 .(Bokkie Jekison died before the 7th April, suddenly, whilst out on a walk)

Water Polo at the Yeoville Baths. Richard LEE was a water-polo player, he lived in Yeo Street, Yeoville, I think. Had a brother Eric LEE. They were Highlands North school boys. Lionel GILINSKY, another water-polo player.

And does anyone remember the Purdy Boys, Neville and Leonard?

Some MORE of the YEOVILLE, CYRILDENE, OBSERVATORY people …… Jeff Wittles , Linda Shapiro, Rex Schwartz, Sharon Schwartz , Ivan Sabbath, Arnold Messias, Ivan Sandler, Louise Lazersohn , Barry Sacks, Barry Bloch, Barry Black, Michael Walldorf (Vorsie), Sonia Barsol, Gerald (Jake) Fox (Z”l) Jonny Grossmark, Vivian Stillerman, Charmian Clayton, Max Gur, Ruth Margolis, Elaine Margolis, Heather Garrun, Yvette, Esther & Naomi Sofer. Sharna & Nadja Isaacs (aka Lerman), Colin Opwald, Frances Siegenberg, Nicky & Costa Kapitanopoulos, Alfie Wood and his sister Margie Wood (now Horn), Locky Lockstone, Shirley Shtub (probably Sztab), Reuel Kaplan, Geoff (Geoffrey) Landsman (Z”l) , Reina Cohen (O’h), Sandra Stein (Ezra) , Nola Stein (Fox), Charmion Clayton, Ivor Cohen, Sandra Deitz , Spencer Hodgson, Heather Garrun, Linda Chitiz or Chitters , Marlene Teper, Leonard Kahn & his sister Maureen Kahn. (now Puterman) Maureen and her husband were one of the first people to move into a new block of flats called “La Contessa”, in Yeo & Bedford St. Yeoville) Arnie Jones, Jennifer Jones, Bernard James, Abel de Freitas, Sandra Tucker. The Griffith Girls (Virg, Bernice (Bunny) and Diane –still great friends of mine) and their brother Cedric) The Matthews Girls Hazel, and Norma, there were more sisters but I can’t remember the names) .

GREENSIDE/EMMARENTIA People, - Clifford Price, Howard Price, Brian Ruskin, and I think Barry Pillemar , Suzie & Gaby Henshel, (de Groen), June and Yalta Gervis, Suzanne & Linda Myers, Aubrey Gamsu Ada Gamsu, Maurice Hockman, Margo and Peter Philips,

HOUGHTON people. Michael, Brian & Jennifer Lever, Molly Robinson, Harry & Philip Sacks, Sharon Smith (Munitz)

HIGHLANDS NORTH People. - Brian, Stanley & Karen Feinstein (Joseph), Max Schiff (O”h)

WHO REMEMBERS - Hymie Brest, (Mayfair/ Kensington) and his friend (to this day) Alec Ross (Bez Valley). Certainly part of the “Main Manne” crowd.

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA …………………………………

Where’re you okes jolling to? Jollers. Lekker Jol.

Where are your folks tonight.

Volkspeeler. The Sakkie sakkie

I’m only chaafing, man? Sweet Obeet.!! Lekker soos ‘n krekker (cracker)

Wat ‘s goedkoop is duur koop. Stille water – Diepe grond,

Eina! Skyfies. Veldskoene. Breekers.

Don’t tune me Chandies

Check that little lightie, he’s two bricks and a tickey high

Ever since Pa fell off the bus.

Give me a bell, hey? Bell me. Love you stax. I’ll fetch you just now

African women sitting on the street corners calling out HEY Mielieeeeee - Tickey Mielieeeeeeeee.

Vrystaat!

Vat hom Fluffy.

I’ve got Sut.

They’re so larnie!

My ou’ man is giving me uphill

My Skattebol.

I feel up to Paw-Paw. I feel up to Maggots.

‘Strue’s Bob…?? No….. You LIE !!!

SHOT !!!!!!!! (SHOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT)

Skit ‘n donner (donder) (the movies)

And Observatory café where boys played pinball and they had ‘Pennyline Sweets’ where you could buy 2 for a penny and cafés had Jukeboxes . Remember the old 78 records (those were in the fifties though) and then the LPs - wow, and when those came out we thought we’d died and gone to Heaven, and the 45 speed records. Cassettes, and tape recorders, reel-to-reel tape-recorders (I still have one).

Boys had a way of walking, hands in pockets, only the thumbs visable and rolled from side to side with a sort of rolling gait, and the more they rolled as they walked, the more macho they felt!

Who remembers ????…… Debras (Schmaltz), and when a tub of Yoghurt cost 8c, and an Appleltizer cost the same, a bar of Cadburys chocolate cost 5c and there was a chocolate bar called “Honeycrisp” also for 5c, and you could get a Toasted Cheese for 15c. Stamps cost 2½ cents . If you left the envelope open, it was cheaper… Airletter forms in green, airmail writing paper, airmail envelopes and Basildon Bond writing paper.

STREETS in Yeoville/ Bellevue, - Raleigh St, Rockey St, Bezuidenhout St., Isipingo St., Raymond St , Hopkins St, Yeo St, Kenmere Rd, Fortèsque Rd, Becker St, Cavendish Rd, Bedford Rd, Webb St, Natal St, Isipingo, St. Georges Rd, Ellis St.,

YEOVILLE BOXING CLUB - Sammy Samson and his son Cedric who sang as a child, and he had a group at some stage called “the FireFlies” I think Alan Goldstein who was also a child singer may well have been part of that band ( later known as Alan Gold) .

How many people remember……. The Black Steer in Yeoville - fab apple crumble and double thick cream and in the 1960s the price of a Steerburger, with Pickled Cucumber, fried onions and salad was 45c ……….but at the Golden Spur, the Burger would cost you 50c and the Yeoville crowd felt that was too expensive!) Norman’s Grill (for Prawns!) in the Jeppe Hotel. East Africa Pavilion (well known for it’s curries, where the waiters wore a red “fez”, The 252 Tavern. His Majesty’s Cellars, 69 Grill.

and Kosher - Connoisseur Hotel,(Gloria Rootshtain) (long gone)

And remember- The Rosenkowitz 6 from Cape Town, first surviving Sextuplets in the World

And when Arcadia (Jewish Orphanage and Home for Jewish children) was in Forestown

DAENITE Pharmacy, Orange Grove. Owned by Chookie BRENNER . and the okes that worked there, Mervin Rappoport, Issy Peimer, Cecil Chweidan (O”h), Ivan Dorff, Solly Branstein, and a girl called Lola but I can’t remember her surname. And Dr. Chris Barnard, (Heart Transplants Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town)

And the …… the motor racing at Kyalami Race Track

And the Motor Rallys?. Anyone remember Lionel Gilinsky? He raced something called “Production cars” in “Endurance Races” at Old Grand Central Circuit ( Halfway House, now called Midrand) in the late 60’s and 70’s - and later “Historic” Cars at Kyalami Race Track. He was known to be amongst South Africa’s Top 3 Racing and Motor rally drivers in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Not bad for a boy from Welkom!!

Attorneys. - Moss Morris & Ettlinger, (Lennie Ettlinger, Max Levenberg, Selwyn Cohen, Hilliard Gordon, articled clerks then - Rodney Berman and John Gilbert, Also a Selwyn someone articled clerk). Routlege Douglas Wilson Auret & Wimble, Wides , Chain & Berman (Cyril Wides, Inky (Ian) Chain and Rodney Berman), Edward Nathan. Israel, During & Kossuth

Tour Operators - Springbok (Atlas) Safaris, (Julie Lapedus).

Accountants. Sussman and Lange (Trevor Sussman and David Lange) (cousin of Myron Lange, the Surgeon) later known as Sussman Goddard.

HILLBROW. We always went to The Curzon and Clarendon for 7/6- , ( later 75c,) and then a Bioscope called the International (owned by Herman and Maxwell Youngelson) was opened at the top of Pretoria Street and there it would cost you between 90c and R1.00, but the seats were so comfy and the whole bioscope was so plush, that the Yeovillites felt it was well worth the extra.

Anyone remember The French Hairdressing Saloon (a Mrs. Sher was the manageress) and the OK Bazaars and Carnival Novelty.

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA ………………………….

I’m going for a goof this arvy. ‘Scopes, Flicks, Flik, What’s the “Aggie”?

Hy het haar uitgeskop, verstaan jy my?

Check my new jammy!

We going to Durbs with the car, probably see lots of ‘Vaalies there, all the ou toppies, tannies and ooms, nie waar nie?

My ol’ lady! My ol’ man.

My broer ! My sussie. My Ouma, My Oupa

Knobkerrie. Sjambok

It’s so hot, I’m vrekking off here.

D’is Baie Mooi

He lives in the Gramadoelas….

She lives in the Bundu…

The Dingas

I was with Ruth, Heather and them

Drink your SUP !! there’s a plate on the Zinc

Let’s make a plan…..

Cows give us MULK!

My one aunt My one leg, My one arm, My one finger My one toe

Broekies

The word “THE. ” I learned in school that before a consonant we say “THE” . “THE” bed, “THE” table, “THE” book. And before a vowel the have to prounce the “the” as “THEE”……………. “THEE” Apple, “THEE” elephant, “THEE” egg.

So why then, do we hear (only in South Africa) people saying “THUH” apple, “THUH” Elephant, “THUH” egg. Please hold for “THUH” Operator. And why do some of us say “the PHOTA” when it is clearly “PHOTO”.

FOLKSINGING Era . Who remembers the Nite beat, run by Abe (who ran the tuck shop at the Yeoville Swimming Pool), and the folk-singers Ian & Ritchie ( Ian Lawrence and Ritchie Morris), Des and Dawn (Lindberg)(“And the Seagull’s name was Nelson”) (Dawn wore her hair in two pigtails then) Colin Shamley, Dave Marks (“Mountains of Men” and “Master Jack”) Cornelia, And The Troubador, The College Set - Andy Levy, Hugh Solomon, Norman Cohen) Keith Blundell and the Baladeers, Aubrey and Beryl Ellis. Mervyn and Jocelyn Miller (from Potch). Mel, Mel and Julian (Mel Miller, Mel Green, and Julian Laxton.

BIKERS and the Hell’s Angels, wearing black leather jackets, chains and the peace sign often around their necks, roaring down Pretoria St and Kotze St on Harley Davidsons making a helluva racket, some of the more nervous Biker girls precariously hanging onto their boyfriend’s backs, but “the in girls” didn’t hold on, they somehow balanced themselves by placing their hands nonchelantly behind the seat, looking around, throwing their hair back, with a “don’t- sig–with- me” look, lazer- beam- eyes, -looking–out- through- thick- black- fringes, and a tattoo here and there.

And nobody did “sig” with them, either.

The FLYING SAUCER is where they all met. Pretoria Street, Hillbrow.

Hillbrow’s Eateries and Coffee Bars Doney’s coffee bar for the best cappuccino in town (who remembers Jeftah and George, the Duke) Café Wien (later on), with the most comfortable seats, it was like sitting in your own lounge, Café Krantzler, Dunk-a-donut, The Milky Lane, the Florian (where the bus turned to go down Twist street to Town). Mi Vami, Lucky Luke (Steak House in the 70s), Fontana, open 24 hours a day, (famous for their chickens roasted on a spit,) Pikin-a-chicken, Porter House (Frulatto and the best Pink Sauce in town) not to mention the steaks (not that I ate them being one of the Kosher Kids, but I was sorely tempted, HA HA HA) and the German Beer Keller, The Hamburger Hut, Golden Egg, Bella Napoli. Kiss-Kiss.

The CHEZA in Jeppe Street. Famous for Muesli.

HAIR STYLES and fashion. We dyed our hair black with Palette where you dropped a white tablet into some black gunky muck and we all had pitch black hair. The Blacker your hair, the more “sharp” you were. We teased it and wore it in Wings, and the bigger the Wings were, the more “with it” you were. And remember the stiff petticoats under your many Flared skirts, and cat-eye glasses? Helanca stove-pipes, in all colours. Studded Belts, Box Pleated skirts, and ID Bracelets (with your boyfriend’s name engraved on the inside), Plaid pinafores came later on, and a ridiculous little narrow velvet bow on a clip or hairgrip which we found a space for in the teased bird’s nest, usually just to the back of the fringe. And also a thin chiffon scarf tied around the hair. White high-heeled shoes (I wouldn’t be seen dead in half the things we wore then)

My Mom always said that my hair was like a Bird’s Nest at the back, but then I didn’t have eyes at the back of my head, (just as well). Boys wore their hair sleeked back with Brylcream and Vitalis and all bought their t-shirts from the Skipper Bar. (Arnie, Mervyn, Earle and Barry Sacks) Black t-shirts with thin white and red stripes around the neck. And a corresponding white tee-shirt, with black and red stripes. If you didn’t have one of those, you were not one of the “in” boys!!!!

And then girls started to iron their hair. I remember my Mother used to plonk my head onto the ironing board, and put a brown paper bag on top of it, and iron away until I had sleek straight hair, but then the minute it rained, I looked at though someone has plugged me into an electric socket…. Durbs did the same to all those who had out-of-control hair - Frizzed them out in 2 mns flat, in fact as soon as you got to Van Reenen’s Pass into Natal, you knew you were there because your hair suddenly was on its own mission……..

and who Whirled their hair????? Oy - a bittereh gelechter….. We whirled it One way, then the other way, and you had dead straight hair (until you hit the 505 Club and the first thing you’d notice is that your fringe was just “not there” anymore) and the rest of your poor hair style was all moving in different directions. If it was raining, and you opened your front door, bang went the straight hair.

Remember those little DOEKs we wore on our head when we went to Durbs. I have a photo of myself wearing one.

COME ON GIRLS - who used to sleep with curlers/rollers in their hair!! and who remembers using the inside of a TOILET ROLL as an emergency roller??????? And all this lot would be covered over by a hairnet. Of course morning brought a splitter- of- a- headache from the curlers digging into your head. Anyone remember? Bet you do!!! I DO!! There you are, the big ADMIT………. What on EARTH did we look like? I don’t even want to think about it …………………

I always say that if I have to come back in another life, I want to come back as ME but with dead straight hair. Second choice, I wouldn’t mind coming back as one of my spoilt-out-of-control Dachshunds either (but the straight haired type, not the wiry haired) (ha ha)

GYM: Bodybuilders, weight-lifters and wannabes came strutting out of Gyms such as Sam Busa and Monte Osher all fit and glistening, with huge shoulder muscles, and killer smiles - carrying black gym bags. And Reg Park’s Gym, ALSO somewhere in Hillbrow.

YOGA: Mannie and Alan FINGER, Nina OBEL

MODEL AGENCIES: . Stella Grove and Gianna Pizanello

DANCING STUDIOS and DANCERS: Natalie Stern the late Mercedes Molina, Jeffrey Neiman (Enrique Segovia) & Rhoda Rifkin, Bernice Hotz , Gitanella (Spanish, Ballet,) Shirley Klitzner (O”h) (later in the 70s Hilary Etkind - taught with Rhoda and Jeffrey) (anyone who ever loved Spanish dancing, will remember Mercedes Molina/ Jeffrey Neiman as a brilliant dance duo) (and will remember the very sad passing away of Shirley Klitzner (O”h) when she was barely into her twenties).

PHOTOGRAPHERS. Maurice, Kurt Slesinger, Karklin, when it was fashionable to stand your wedding photo on an small easel on the floor. Either carpet or parquet flooring. Stella Nova .

RUGBY. Alan MENTER Springbok Flyhalf, and Sid NOMIS Springbok - Center, and later Wing), Alan is married to Pam (ex Pretoria) and his Brothers are Brian, Robert (Robbie) and Mandy (Malcolm (Z”l)) Menter. Their Mom Esmé (O”h) grew up with mine, in Dublin. Syd is married to Ann.

CRICKET. Dr. Ali BACHER former South African cricket captain and one of the greastet cricketers in South Africa. Ali BACHER received South Africa’s Sports Merit Award, the country’s HIGHEST athletics honour. Ali is married to Shira (I am friendly with Shira’s sister Marsha KARKLIN,) and I remember their daughter Ann being a Tennis champion when she was just a little kid of 11 in the days of the “Jewish Guild” Other well known South African Jewish cricketers came later on, Mandy YACHAD , and later Adam BACHER, nephew of Dr. Ali Bacher

TYPEWRITERS. My first memory of a type writer was that old black thing with with a keyboard with round circular lettering and a typewriter ribbon. My Mom used one in Dublin, Then I remember the Olivetti and also a swiss typewriter, but the ones where you would have to bash a silver thing on the upper right to go to a new line. I remember electric typewriters, and using a white powdery Tippex thing for covering up mistakes, except that they never quite covered them up, particularly on the carbon copies. And remember the carbon copies.. HA HA, and when I worked for lawyers, they didn’t allow those tippex rub-outs, so one little mistake and you had to start all over again. Remember STENCILS and Roneo-ing various blurb. I can remember using a bright shocking pink liquid with the stencils, I think. We wrote to “Messers. So and so”, and we’d end off with “ I remain, Yours Faithfully”

WEDDINGS and when the Bride/Kallah would change into her “going away outfit” and the blissful couple would leave the wedding to go off on their honeymoon. When Bride’s kept their vails on the entire night. When there were only 4 pole-holders and the Bride’s parents paid for the entire wedding, and the Groom/Chossen’s parents would pay for the booze, the photographer and the flowers.

THE CIRCUS Boswell-Wilkie. I hated the circus, terrified of the animals and sorry for them at the same time, a hypnotized crocodile once got out- of- control and strarted climbing out of the ring into the screaming audience. Clowns clowning around were never my scene, and when the trapeze artists or the tight-rope walkers did their act, my heart was always in my mouth, terrified they would fall or something. One did once, I can never get that memory out of my mind.

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA ……………………………………

I dopped my exams and my folks are having a cadenza - *Snot ’n trana all round ….. (*Yiddish Equivalent is Vainin ‘n Kloggin, well, that is the Yiddish we used in Ireland).

Chips, here comes the Teacher.

I’ll have a dop of brandy.

Ops me a pencil.

Baie Dankie…….. hoor! Aseblieftog!

Plaasjapie.

Safe my mate !!!! (and the hand movement – very important) - forefinger/little finger pointed up while thumb was holding middle/ ring finger down) - done with a wag-type-movement, like fast- mode windscreen wipers.

We’re Chommies

Cheers!

There’s a Miggie in my room.

Kyk daai (Daardie) Goggoh (as in insect, not as in “GOGO” - Zulu for Granny)

Boeremeisie. Mevrou, Mejuffrou/Juffrou, Meneer

Kyk na daardie lelike ding………………

Kombi

Gooi

Waneer u die syn hoor, is dit agtien uur, twee en vyftig minute en dertig sekondes…………..

Around 1964 came the Beatles, (“8 days a week”, “Love Love me do” and later, “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s club Band” “Hey Jude”) The Rolling Stones, (Angie) the Mini Skirt era and Mary Quant and the birth of the Discothèque . Op Art earings in gaudy colours and the skirts continued to get shorter. Girls wore double breasted Pin stripe suits which made a come back. The Boutiques were born. I remember the BENATER family had a great boutique “Carnabies”, at the top of Rissik Street, or near there. It was, I think, the first shop of it’s kind. Very modern, trendy and for the young (20s and 30s). And the Pink Panther was in Hillbrow - Also very trendy gear.

Remember Twiggy?………. She was on every Magazine cover, often holding her Teddy Bear, feet pidgeon-toed, with beautiful big brown eyes, and a body so thin, she could fit through a crack in the wall. She started a trend, her, and “the Shrimp” - (Jean Shrimpton), and Mary Quant.

AND Op Art Earings in strange shapes and gaudy colours, shorter skirts, and flattie shoes.

The First Disco was at the Summit Club, Marrakech, (around 1966) with Go-Go dancers Dixie, Felicity Fouché, and Christine all dancing away in the micro-est of Mini-Skirts. Johnny Martin (previously known as Martin Raff) was the owner, and I heard he also owned a club called 007.

Someone called Neville Peacock was the Marrakech DJ and there were psychdelic and ultra violet lights and if you stood under the latter, all your “klein-goed” shone like a beacon for all to see.

And the 505 also in Hillbrow. Eddie Eckstein and Paul Ditchfield - The Bats played there on a Sunday ), and the Diamonds and Gene Rockwell (Heart!”) as did the Basemen (Ronnie Cline on Keyboard, Ralph Simon – Singer, Rodney Caines – Bass Guitar, Leon Bilewitz – drummer and Irwin Kalis – Lead Guitar) and Clive Calder, (Les Markowitz on drums) also played at “Club-a-go-go” and also they toured around the countryside and played at various venues.

Also Johnny Congos (“Sealed with a Kiss”), Johnny and the G-Men, and Johnny Sharp, 4 Jacks and a Jill. The Staccatos. Did I mention Manfred Mann? (“pretty Flamingo”)

MORE CLUBS - TJ’s (town) and The Yellow Submarine (Hillbrow) (owned by Martin HART) and the Boat (Buccleuch) were in the latter part of the sixties and the Downstairs later called The Purple Marmalade somewhere in Hillbrow. Another Disco was owned by George McCauley, brother of Ray, opposite Joubert Park (Club-A-Go-Go), His Granny worked in the tuckshop and was always so nice to everyone. The Band there was the “Falling Leaves” and George was in the Band. The Electric Circus, And Raffles , a very fancy disco/restaurant but that was in the late 70s. Owned by Dave Kerney. (I think). The Stable in Jan Smuts Avenue. The Out of Town Club

And who remembers the other Bioscopes - The Colosseum with the twinkling lights, Cliff Richard sang there once, and a few girls from Barnato Park were expelled for bunking school and going to his concerts. His Majestys, Monte Carlo (French Movies), The Empire, 20th Cen. Fox - Pritchard Street, Cinerama (Claim and Noord) In those days there was an interval after the News and the Cartoons, and Usherettes would be standing at each exit with a tray with all the Munchies and Chocolates, cold-drinks, etc. The Apollo in Doornfontein. I’ve already mentioned the Yeoville Bioscopes earlier on. Who remembers the “Midnight Shows” the Astra and the Victory in Orange Grove, The Rex in Greenside. The Plaza, the Bijou in town and some flea-bitten run down Café Bio which no decent self-respecting girl would touch with a barge-pole, but I can’t remember it. A lot of the Yale College boys went there. But not the girls!!!!

People smoked in the bioscopes (“scopes”) then and when you looked up, you saw it all swirling around in smoke from the projector. Nice and healthy!! but nobody ever noticed it. It was just a part of life in the sixties.

REMEMBER WHEN ………. we went to Bioscope on a Saturday night, dressed up in your A-line dress, or a Box- Pleated skirt, or tiny hound’s-tooth straight skirt in black/white and your black patent high-heeled shoes, with a Black Patent leather bag to match, and your gloves (which you carried in your hand). And later you wore your Dress with the shorter hemline, Mini-Skirts, and your “A-line evening coat” (Jackie Kennedy), just on the knee, and your flattie shoes, the hair teased up to the high heavens and lacquered so heavily that if it rained, you looked like glue. (Boys hated teased and lacquered hair)

And the boys wore jarmins and Elvis Presley hair-styles with thin ties made of nylon or similar in a machine-crochet style. (Later when the Beatles came in, boys’ hairstyles changed forever, and no boy would be seen dead with Brylcream or Vitalis plastered on his head). Boys would never previously been seen in pastel colours, but the Beatles changed all those dark shirts for pink, mauve and lemon, with a pin collar near the tie.

Boys would buy you a 75c box of Black Magic chocolate at Interval. If you put it into your black patent leather handbag and never offered him one, then your name was mud, and girls judged boys by whether they opened the car door for you …. or not!

AND SOME OF THE MOVIE STARS …., Natalie Wood, Kathryn Hepburn, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Steve McQueen, Sohia Loren, Alain Delon (the heart-throb of the 60’s) (who remembers him in “Purple noon”) Gina Lollobridgida, Raquel Welsh, Bridgitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Shirley McLaine, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Sal Mineo, Suzanne Pleshette, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Omar Sharif, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck (to die for?) James Dean

POPULAR MOVIES. West side story, King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Exodus, Dr. No, *From Russia with Love, * (Remember in that movie, the Russian woman (was her name someone KREBBS?) who had a knife come out of her boot and it shot straight into poor Sean Connery’s shin bone. EINA! Just thinking about it, hurts me) Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, Goldfinger, (it had a great theme song in it by I think Shirley Bassey) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Annie Get your Gun, Dingaka.

And the DRIVE INs Old Pta Road - Jhb Drive in, The 5-Star (Eloff St.Ext), The Velskoen (If a girl was seen at the drive in with a boy, she got a “bad name” and the same for the Café Bio’s. It was just not for a nice Jewish girl!!

REMEMBER WHEN ….. there was NO Bioscope on Sunday nights

THEATRES. Alhambra (Doornfontein) , Brian Brooke (Braamfontein), Market Theatre ( Newtown), Alexander theater , Jacques Brel, Apollo (Doornfontein).

Remember the Adverts for all the Cigarettes, Players, Craven "A", Dunhill (remember the maroon Rolls Royce?) Benson & Hedges (Gold) , Lexington (That’s the one!), Gunston (remember him on a raft, all macho,manly, unshaven and rough and ready tumbling through impossible rivers?) Horseshoe Tobacco, Gold Dollar, Texan, (which the boys would hold between their thumb and middle finger) Lucky Strike, Gauloise and Peter Stuyvesant (for the fun lovers, remember the wonderful places they went to and the great clothes they wore, swimming in glorious lagoons, skiing down snow-capped mountains, all the beautiful people,all having wonderful fun?) I never smoked,(well, I have to say that, in case my family read this article, ha ha) but after I watched the Peter Stuyvesant adverts, I really felt like buying a packet , so that I too, could go to all those magical places, and I’d look glamerous too, HA HA - (the power of advertising!) (A Bittereh Gelechter!!)

But it just looked so “in” to see people smoking, and girls would hold the cigarettes at the tips of their fingers, and waved their hands for effect as they spoke, shaking their fringes out of their eyes. People who didn’t smoke, were “squares”.

I remember Celeste GREENBLATT, taught me how to apply black pencil inside my eyelids, and ‘base” onto my face and to wear white lipstick and I taught Sandra STEIN (later Ezra) to dye her hair black, and the blacker the better, (her Mother had a FIT) - Golda (née Kaufman) (O”h) whom I saw yearly in LA and she never failed to remind me !

FLORA and FAUNA in South Africa. I remember once being enthralled by the most magnificent yellow creeper we had growing on the fence in Becker Street. I took photos of it, and sent it to my friends in Dublin to show the exotic flora and fauna is this beautiful sunny South Africa, until Michael GOLDING next door, laughed his head off and said “but that’s only Canary Creeper, it’s not much better than a common garden weed”!! African Violets, Jasmin, Golden Shower, Begonia Sherera, Bougainvillea, Pointsettia, Birds of Paradise, Cycads?. Maybe they do grow overseas too.

PARTIES in Observatory, Cyrildene and Dewetshof. We rock ‘n rolled to Elvis Presley’s “Jail house rock” & “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes”, “Rock around the Clock” in our flared skirts with stiff petticoats underneath, the more the better, and huge belts around our waists, and we wore flat shoes (75c at Maram’s chemist, and 95c for the leopard skin ones). And later we twisted with Chubby Checker (Let’s Twist again, like we did last summer ) We also did a dance called the Shake – anyone remember the song “I’ll do the Shake, the hippy- hippy shake” and also a dance called the Madison.

The Bez Valley Ou’s, on a Sat night Jol, and the Lebs would sometimes gatecrash. Usually a Scuffle and the girl’s father would have to ask them to leave. Sometimes, in stubborn cases the police would have to be called in to skop them all out. And then the party continued on, Little Richard, Cliff Richard, - sometimes a few of the kids would have a bit of “dagga”, (a zol), on the stoep or in the back garden when they thought nobody was looking, and the only way anyone kopped on was because they would come back to the party with a manic laugh, and red eyes. (and of course the smell, but if you admitted to knowing the smell, then it meant you were a dagga smoker yourself!) Trini Lopez. “If I had a hammer”

SOCIALS at Oxford Shul, The Vrede Hall, Yeoville Recreation Center, Temple Shalom, and Bands like “Dinkie and the Deans” - Jake (Gerald) Fox (Z”l) (rhythm Guitar), Barry Sacks (Lead Guitar), Spencer Hodgson (Bass guitar) and Errol Sack on the drums, would play, they also played at the Club 505 in “the Brow”. Peter Lotus well known Jhb Disc Jockey, I think he sang as well. Lots of singers used to go to Margo’s on a Sunday Afternoon, and the crowd would all hot-foot it out there after them to hear music. I think it was Bapsfontein, or near there). There was little else to do on a Sunday, so many places were closed. Just remembered another band, Dave Levine and the Swinging Angels. Les Gutfreund was one of the band and made a name for himself as Les Goode. “Dickie Loader and the Blue Jeans” Gene Rockwell – Heart.

NIGHT CLUBS and Bands. Bennie Michaels, Archie Silansky and his daughter Carole Sands The Coconut Grove at the Orange Grove Hotel, Dan Hill (Ichilchik), The Colony at the Hyde Park Hotel, Sardi’s, The Mediteranean (I Cinque di Roma), Diamond Horseshoe, The Greek Taverna, Ciro’s (Kruis Street)

STORES. John Orrs, The Belfast, Greatermans, ABC Shoes, Dodo’s, Barnes Shoes, Ackermans, Ansteys later Garlics, Katz & Lourie, Mr. Man, Man about Town, Stuttafords, Woolworths, Deans Mans’ shop, Skipper Bar, O.K Bazaars, Cuthberts, Markhams, Millews, K. Marks ( curtains), Juta's, Bothner & Polliack (records, Henri Lidji Gallery, Derbers Furs, FDF (Fruit & Dried Fruits) Vanité (Ladies clothes) Bradlows, Geen & Richards, Shepherd & Barker (Furniture), CAN, Jaffs (Fabrics), Mosenthals, Dicks (Sweets) - Rissik Street, and later on Morkels, your two year guarantee store! Putzys. McCullogh & Bothwell (School Uniforms).

REMEMBER WHEN we would get all dressed up to go to town, to have tea at Ansteys sitting alongside Ladies in beautiful outfits, white gloves, smart, elegant, men in suits, with white shirts and ties

MUSIC Soul music was popular in the 60s, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding (“sitting on the Dock of the Bay”), Percy Sledge (“ Midnight Hour”, and Music from Brasil, Sérgio Mendes, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana brass.

And of course, Johnny Mathis, Charles Aznavour, Simon and Garfunkel, José Feliciano

And …. REMEMBER WHEN , our Mothers would ring a little bell at suppertime, and the “servant” (oi, how COULD we have??) would come in with the next course. And when your “boy” did the garden and the “girl” cooked.

SHULS Lions Shul (Doornfontein), Wolmarans street ( Rabbi Rabinowitz 50’s and 60’s, then Chief Rabbi Casper) Yeoville Shul (Rabbi Lapin), Adas Yeshuran (Yeoville) , The Bnei Akiva Shul (Raleigh Street), Greenside Shul, Emmerentia, Fordsburg, Sydenham Highlands North, Mayfair (Rabbi Zagenov) , Kensington Shul (Rabbi Rabinowitz), The Curve (Observatory), Berea Shul (Rabbi Bender and Rabbi Aloy), Oxford Shul (Rabbi Bernhard), Chassidic Shul (Rabbi Lipskar) Cyrildene, Temple Emanuel (? and Rabbi Assabi), Temple Israel (Rabbi Super), Temple Shalom, Temple Beth-El (Rabbi Ben Isaacson) Sandton Shul (BHH) Rabbi ZS Suchard (but that was in the 70’s) Yeo Street Shul. Reverend Symanovitz from Yeoville Beth Din. The Beth Din was in Raleigh Street then.

CHAZONIM. Chazen Hass, Chazen Bagley, Chazen Dudu Fisher (1970s early 80’s), Chazen Johnny Glück (Wolmarans) in the eighties (Choirmaster Prof. David Cohen). Chazen Hasdan, (Warmbaths) Chazen Badash, (Yeoville, Choirmaster *Malovany) Chazan Mandel (Berea Shul) – Gus Levy choirmaster. (* a world reknowned Chazen - I did attend a concert of his here in Jhb a number of years ago), Chazen Berele Chagy

Yeoville Shul Choir, Lionel Levin, Kenny and Colin Koransky and their father, Natie Koransky, Martin Harris, Len Bobroff, Stanley Feinstein, Brian Feinstein, Robert Lapedus, David Shapiro. The Choirmaster was Mr. Himmelstein, I think his son Lior, was in the Choir too. Colin Opwald. Benny Lipchick (Z”l)

KIDS at the Yeoville Shul…. Percy Suntup, Fivie (Phillip) and Hymie (Z”l) Symanowitz, Olga Berelowitz, Joan Morris, Karen Feinstein, Linda and Stanley Chitiz, Wolfie and Marlene Teper, me and my Boet, Robert Lapedus, Gillian Erster and her brother Moishe Erster, Naomi Shapiro, Marilyn & Sheila Atkins, David Shapiro, Rhoda Shapiro, Jenny Winnick, Alan Kaye, Philip Eliason, Sheila Hahn and Irma Keifer I remember David and Daniel Lapin, ( Rabbi Lapin’s sons) being at the Shul .

Beni Akiva and Habonim Camps. Betar. Hashomer Ha’tza-ir (spelling, whoops!!)

AND REMEMBER WHEN the only children at a barmitzvah function were the Barmitzvah boy and his siblings, who were allowed to stay up for the night. The entire Simcha was for adults and the only time you heard the Barmi boy, was when he made his speech. Robert’s Barmitzvah was a Kiddush at home after Shul, and a “tea” that evening for a few friends of my Parents. Many kids had that kind of Barmi. Who knew then from Theme Barmitzvahs.

AND …..When Children were children, and played snakes and ladders, and ludo, dominoes, monopoly, yo-yo’s, and they read out of the Local Libraries and they played Cowboys and Indians, ( just entertained themselves. No Video games, computers, cell phones, I-pods, Electronic everything… and No TV then either.

BANKS and Building Societies. Barclays, Volkskas Bank, Allied Building Society, SA Perm(inent) The UBS (United Building Society) SA Perm, NBS (Natal Building Society) Trust Bank

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA ……………………………….

J’’’’enesburg!

Ag Shame, man, were you home stokkies aleen??

Wikkel. Sikkel. I’ve got no tom, hey?

Koeksusters. Konfyt. Biltong. Vet-koek. Braaivleis.

Boerevors en Pap. Poitjiekos. Mielie. Rooibos Tea.

Grondboontjiebotter

Ouma se Rusks. Fanny Farmers

“Hau”

The Tokoloshe is coming… Dorp ! Pandotjie!

He rocked up in an old Skedonk.

Question. Hallo Meneer………. Hoe Gaan Dit met jou vandag?.

Answer. Ag , No….. Fine ….Jaaaaa,………. Kan nie Klaar Nie !

My Oom se Bakkie

My Gran did the “Charlston”, but that was back in Nineteen voetsak

Why are you still Gaan-ing on? you Poepal !!

He is so Grotty….. A real Dweet …….A Drip.

It’s …Kwaai. It’s …. Skarm.

HOTELS : The Carlton (original Carlton) , Moulin Rouge, The Chelsea Hotel (Hillbrow) (I think this is where the Jacques BREL theatre was) Casa Mia, Langham , Gresham, the Jeppe Hotel (Norman’s Grill) Victoria ( Plein Street near Station), Criterion , Landrost hotel (Anabelles nightclub). Tollman Towers – (next to Jeppe Street Post Office), The President Hotel (Eloff Street), Anlar Hotel (Hillbrow), Courtleigh Hotel (Berea), Jocelyn Residential Hotel (Claim Street Joubert Park), the Quirinal, Waldorf , and Balalaika which was then way out in the “country” - Sandown, which is today, a hub of activity. The Skyline, The Capri and The Park Royal

SQUAD CARS. HOT RODS and the name Buddy Fuller comes into my head for some reason.

MOTORTOWN. Remember when all the motor dealerships were in Eloff Street, Ext. Motortown. And names like Rillstone Motors (Agents for the Simca), Lawson Motors, (Agents for Volvo), Lucy’s Motors (Katz) (Agents for Fiat), Curries Motors, Grosvenor Motors ( Agents for Ford), Sydney Clow (Agents for Peugeot), and a dealeship in Anderson Street called T.A.K. Motors, (Agents for Lancia and Ferrari), Ronnie Bass, (Sigma)

And then Main Street became the used car center for Jhb. Austin , Chevrolet, Mercury, Buick, Dodge, Morris Minor, Mini Minor, Hillman Minx, Ford Fairlane, Vauxhall Victor, Ford Cortina, (Ford) Zeyphyr, Sunbeam. Killarney Toyota. Lionel Gilinsky (Pilot, Motor Rally Driver/Racer) Brenner Toyota in Braamfontein, Chookie Brenner

PETROL Shell, BP, Mobil (Engen), Sasol, Trek, Caltex, Total,

REMEMBER WHEN Milk was delivered to the house????, in proper Milkbottles with red tinfoil caps, and the cream would be all at the top of the bottle? And Nel’s Rust Dairy in Victory Park.

DOORNFONTEIN. – Apollo Cinema near Crystals, Crystals, Beit Street (who later moved to Yeoville) Wachenheimers, Goldenbergs, and Nussbaums, all in Beit Street, and Dairy Alhambra (Zama Levine) - opposite the Alhambra Theatre in Beit Street. Zama Levine had the shop for about 40 years (according to his daughter Gloria Levine Ash). Gloria’s mom was from the ICHILCHIK family (Dan Hill and Gloria’s Mom, Emma Ichilchik Levine (a cellist) were siblings. Dembo’s in Beit Street. The famous sculptor Anton Von Wouw lived next door to the Alhambra and opposite Gloria Levine’s (Ash) Grandfather, Mr. Ichilchik in Doornfontein. American Café for ice-cream, Sour Kraut, Hot Dogs, Millers Antiques on Simert Road. Campbells. Cohen’s Café. And Ellis Park.

Doornfontein Streets Beit Street, Siemert Road, Siveright Avenue.

And Segall’s Sausages (Alf Segall) (spelling?). Kerk Street, York House.

ROADHOUSES. Dolls House (Highlands North), Casablanca (Nugget Hilll) Dakota (Crown Mines), and Uncle Charlies.

Ice CREAM. Papagallo.

WITS RAG Down Eloff Street, with the floats, remember? and the Rag Queens and Princesses. I remember one particular Jewish Rag Princess of 1971, and still a beautiful girl to this day - Blond hair, gorgeous and looks like she just stepped out of vogue magazine - June Gervis ( - two sons, Grant and Richard Reichlin, both of whom were at school with my children, Angela and Gregory Brest)

ONLY IN SOUTH AFRICA ………………………………..

“She took me around” Around where?

And what about “See that ou?? - he threw me with (wif) a stone”

The Spanspek is Vrot!

Takkies.

Ag Dame! …………………..

Listen, Lady ………………

And how many South.Africans when they first arrived in America, England, Australia, Israel etc talked about taking their “costume” or “Cozzie” to the Beach.

She’s the most prettiest girl.

My ou’ man caught me smoking dagga, hey, and I got such a SKRIK.

I bumped her on the corner of Cavendish and Becker Streets

I didn’t scale anything

*Spek and Eiers ( *Just because I know the name, doesn’t mean I’ve eaten it, see !)

Ek is a Ware Suid Afrikaaner.

Melktert! Guavas, Grenadilsh!! Marmite, Anchovette Paste, Jungle Oats.

Comment - That bike is Kwaai, so lekker…. Answering comment - MOH-SELFFFFFFF

YIDDISH/Jewish sayings - In alle Schvartze Yohren, He lives in Alle Drerderin, Meerskeit, Fahrpackt, Fahrkakte, Fahrkrimpt, Fahrbrempt, Fahrshtunkender, Farrible (Litvak word, in other countries they talk about a “Broigas”) He’s a Shlemazzel, He’s a Hundt, He’s a Chaleria, He’s a Peruvian, He’s a Shlemiel, … a Chazzer …. a Mamzer, She’s a plapper…. a Yenta, Gei n Drerd, Vos Macht Tzu?, Shreklich, Chader (not the Chader where we learned Hebrew or Barmitzvahs) , Kitke, Lax (lox in the USA) I need that aggravation like a loch in kop? I’m chalishing for some Petzah (In Dublin, we called it “Calves Foot Jelly”) Alter Kakkers , Bobbe Meises, Ebberbottled. She’s such a kochelefel.

Question - How are you today Bobba ‘Chuma ???

Bobba’s answer - Nu, does it do any good to complain???

RADIO. LM Radio who remembers the signature, “Aqui Portugal Moçambique, fala-voz do Radio club em Lourenço Marques, transmitindo ondas curtas e médias

(This is (here is) Portugal, Moçambique, the voice of the Radio club in Lourenço Marques, transmitting in short and medium wave) with Evelyn Martin (Martins) . David Davies and the LM Hit Parade and was it a little prayer ending off at midnight ? With a sort of mournful depressing music to accompany it. Peter de Nobrega… not sure which station..Bob Courtney Eric Egen Springbok Radio , Paddy O’Byrne, David Gresham (Gruesome Gresh) and Clark MacKay (Clackie MacKay) and Esmé Euverard (not sure if she was Springok Radio or what) Charles Fortune (Cricket commentator) Programmes like “Pets’ Parade”, and “the Creaking Door” –skriklig !!!! David Gresham - Gruesome Gresh - (keep your feet on the ground ,and reach for the Stars) Everyone remembers “JOHN BERKS” !! - “Long John Berks” - I always listened to the Talk shows and one show in particular has stayed in my mind. The Jhb Station Master, complete with an Afrikaans accent, (guess who) called a Yiddishe guy living somewhere in Killarney, to tell him that his consignment of chickens were on their way over. You could hear what sounded like a few thousand chickens all clucking their heads off and the poor fellow was protesting, saying that it was the wrong number, it wasn’t him, some mistake and besides, he had a small balcony, and he didn’t have room for crates of chickens, but The “Station Master” kept on saying that he has nowhere for them either, the fellows’ name and address were on the crates and the chickens were going to be on their way, shortly.. What a “lag” that was. Although this article is about the 60s, I can’t help but mention my fellow countryman, John Robbie, and John, if you ever get to read this “Go mbeanna Dia Duit” and enjoy Lá na Pádraig.

AND the Requests – I think It might have been Esmé Euverard who ran a programme, was it called “Forces Favourites”? with Messages from girlfriends to their ou’s in the army, with requests like this “ Poppie, het jy ‘n boodskap”??? Poppy, are you there? Speak up Poppie……., Poppie?? Crackle, crackle….. Hallo, crackle crackle ……….. Hallo, ja, D’is Poppie wat praat, Ag, man, I’d like to send a message to my boyfriend at Voortrekker Hoogte?????? Daw-ling, I love you Verrry much???????? , ek het jou lief, my skat??? I hope you are orite and I cawnt wait til you are home again awready, Vasbyt en Baie Liefde, van Poppie, hoor? En Frikkie says howwzit. LOURENÇO MARQUES. Polana Hotel, Avenida 24 Julho (July), o Zambi, o Cisno Negro (Black Swan), Xai Xai, S. Martinho de Bilene (aka San Martino) wonderful beaches, prawns to die for (*just because I said that, doesn’t mean I ate them!!!) “Cerveja” at sidewalk cafés, Caldo Verde (soup), wonderful buildings, Pregos.

BUILDINGS such as Palace Buildings, Rand Club, Old Arcade, Markhams Technical College, Manners Mansions. Broadcast House, Essanby House, Ponte - Harrow Road, Rissik Street Post Office, Union Grounds – Twist and Claim,Joubert Park. The City Hall - Rissik Street. And in Jeppe Street the Medical buildings ... Jenner Chambers , Lister Buildings, * Drs. Jacobson, Broer and Smith, later “and Barnard”, and later still, “and Kaplan”, Pasteur Chambers , Medical Centre , Archie Jacobson, Ivor Broer, Mervyn Smith. Michael Barnard and Neville Kaplan (not all at the same time.)

HOSPITALS: the Lady Dudley, Florence Nightingale, Princess, Marymount, Franklin, Queen Victoria, Garden City Clinic Parklane Clinic. Fever Hospital, Jhb Gen. (General Hospital) The Childrens’ Hospital, Baragwanath. The Frangwyn –(Maternity )

ARMY. The Drill Hall in Joubert Park! Voortrekker Hoogte (Pretoria) The first 3 months you were a rookie, and after you got out 9 months down the drag, you went to Camps for about 3 weeks a few years later. Boys went meshugah when their hair was cut so short.

And Polio – two major epidemics in 1947 and 1954/55, when schools were closed, and public swimming pools too, children in iron lungs and leg braces. Infantile Paralysis, they called it. (I wasn’t here then but I know about it)

Around the late fifties, a movie came out with Danny KAYE and Barbara Bel GEDDES (Miss Ellie in Dallas) , called the “FIVE PENNIES”. Story of Red Nichols, and his young daughter (played by both Susan Gordon and Tuesday Weld) who contracted polio. .

And “Interrupted Melody” Another polio movie about the Opera singer, Eleanor PARKER. Terrible epidemic, wiped out today, as far as I know . And then they found an immunization against Polio.

WHO REMEMBERS …... Gilooly’s farm, Boksburg Lake, Zoo Lake, Florida Lake, Wemmer Pan - Wembly stadium Ice rink , The Wilds, The Snake Park, Melville swimming Pool, Hillbrow Indoor Pool (at the Summit Club), and the Squash courts there, Brixton Swimming Pool, Rand Show/Skou, Milner Park, Tower of Life.

THE ELLERINE brothers, Sidney (O”h) and Eric

RESORTS. Lover’s Rock in the Magaliesberg, Little Roseneath (Ndaba, Fourways). Margo’s (where the bands all played on a Sunday afternoon. I think it was near Bapsfontein). And lazy days sitting on top of the Wilds, admiring the Flora and Fauna and watching the world go by (not today!) Linksfield Ridge.

ADVERTS.. Mac Phails - Mac won’t phail you

NAMES CHANGES Jan Smuts Airport – O.R Tambo , Halfway House - Midrand, Verwoerdburg – Centurion,. Hendrik Verwoerd Drive - Bram Fischer Drive, Hans Strydom Drive Malibongwe, DF Malan - Beyers Naudé, Harrow Rd - Joe Slovo Drive - , Sandown Square - Nelson Mandela Square. Transvaal – Gauteng, Eastern Transvaal – Mapumelanga. Warmbaths - Bela Bela, Pietersburg - Polakwane

NEWSPAPERS/magazines Rand Daily Mail. Die Vaderland, Die Beeld, The Star (still going strong) Sunday Express, Sunday Times AND Back Page of the Sunday Times… Scope Magazine

I thought I’d end off with a little song ………………….. anyone want to sing along? You all know Sarie Marais? Here we go. Een, twee, drie……..

My Sarie Marais is so ver van my hart,

Maar’k hoop om haar weer te sien,

Sy het in die wyk die Mooirivier gewoon,

Nog voor die oorlog het begin.

O bring my t’rug na die ou Transvaal,

daar waar my Sarie woon

daar onder in die mielies by die groen doringboom

Daar woon my Sarie Marais.

Lekker Bly Skatties, and Alles van die Beste.

Anne Lapedus (Brest)

one of the “SIXTIES ROCKERS” … still ROCKING ON !!!!

Uitlander, no more

!!!!

Contact details.

[email protected] or [email protected]

082.452.7166 .

DISCLAIMER. This article has been written from my memories of S.Africa from 48 years ago, and if a Shul, or Hotel, or a Club is not mentioned, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist, it means, simply, that I don’t remember them. I can’t add them in, either, because then the article would not be “My Memories” any more.

more.

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stephensdesk · 3 years

Video

vimeo

Vogue - ‘I Love New York’

Cast: Paperboy Prince, Julia Fox, Paloma Elsesser, Emily Ratajkowski, Richie Shazam, Misty Copeland, Sean Bennett, Tashawn “Whaffle” Davis, LeeRock Starski, May Hong, David Byrne, Dara Allen, Ceyenne Doroshow, Tyshawn Jones, Raquel Willis, Akira Armstrong, Nicholas Heller, Tic and Tac, Ari Serrano, Naomi Otsu, Indya Moore, Bella Hadid, Erma Campy, Parker Kit Hill, Soul Tigers Marching Band, Kitty Kitty, Josephine Giordano, Ashley aka bestdressed, Eman Abbas, the Rockettes (Jackie Aitken, Tiffany Billings, Katie Hamrah, Alicia Lundgren), Joan Smalls, Leiomy Maldonado

Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin

Edited by Will Town at Modern Post

Production Managers: Hye-Young Shim, Hayley Stephon Wardrobe Coordinator: Leo Becerra Location Manager: Miles Sobeleski Production: Andrew Carbone, Andrew Gowen, Auguste Taylor-Young, Ben Elias, Francis McKenzie, Hased Ike, Henry Pskowski, Jacob Gottlieb, Liam Wahl, Lucas Veltrie, Luis Jaramillo, Matt Nussbaum, Max Thuemler, Zach Berry

Hair: Mustafa Yanaz Hair (Indya Moore, Joan Smalls): Hos Hounkpatin

Makeup: Emi Kaneko

Set Design: Hans Maharawal

AD: James Woods

Main Unit 1st AC - Camera A: Philey Sanneh Main Unit 2nd AC - Camera A: Emma Penrose Main Unit Loader: Helen Cassel Main Unit Key Grip / Gaffer: Iain Trimble Main Unit Grip / Swing: Greg Waszcuk B Camera Op: Sam Ellison B Camera - 1st AC: Carolyn Pender B Camera Loader: Olivia Kimmel B Camera - 2nd AC: Alex Dubois Sound Tech: Matt Caufield 2nd Unit DP: Mika Altskan Exquisite Human DP: Jac Martinez Exquisite Human 1st AC: Alice Boucherie Exquisite Human Camera PA: Royce Paris

Casting: Sergio Kletnoy, Felicity Webb, Nicholas Heller Movement Director: Vinson Fraley Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic Assistant to the Fashion Editor: Austen Turner Medic: Paradocs

Color: Tim Masick at Company 3 Stills Post Production: Dtouch Music Supervision: Jessica Gramuglia, HiNote Sound Design: Raphaël Ajuelos Music: “Rhapsody in Blue” performed by Philharmonia Orchestra; “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” performed by Moby Title Design: Naomi Otsu Motion Design: Rinaldi Parungao for Mango Motion Design Visual Effects: Ilia Mokhtareizadeh at The Arcane Collective, Zdravko Stoitchkov at ZeeFX Assistant Editor: Lauren Friedman Archival Research: Maggie Reville

Filmed At: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Radio City Music Hall, Top of the Rock

Special Thanks: Kodak, Millennium Hilton New York Downtown, The Smile

Vogue: Mark Guiducci, Creative Editorial Director; Robert Semmer, Vice President, Head of Video; Marina Cukeric, Executive Producer; Samantha Adler, Visual Director; Sergio Kletnoy, Entertainment Director; Felicity Webb, Bookings Director; Janelle Okwodu, Senior Fashion News Writer; Jenna Allchin, Producer; Olivia Horner, Visual Editor

#Vogue

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vm4vm0 · 4 years

Video

vimeo

Vogue "I Love New York" from Peter Spark on Vimeo.

Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin

Edited by Will Town at Modern Post

Hair: Mustafa Yanaz Hair (Indya Moore, Joan Smalls): Hos Hounkpatin

Makeup: Emi Kaneko

Set Design: Hans Maharawal

AD: James Woods

Casting: Sergio Kletnoy, Felicity Webb, Nicholas Heller Movement Director: Vinson Fraley Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic Assistant to the Fashion Editor: Austen Turner Medic: Paradocs

Filmed At: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Radio City Music Hall, Top of the Rock

Special Thanks: Kodak, Millennium Hilton New York Downtown, The Smile

1 note · View note

iami0 · 4 years

Video

vimeo

Vogue "I Love New York" from Peter Spark on Vimeo.

Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin

Edited by Will Town at Modern Post

Hair: Mustafa Yanaz Hair (Indya Moore, Joan Smalls): Hos Hounkpatin

Makeup: Emi Kaneko

Set Design: Hans Maharawal

AD: James Woods

Casting: Sergio Kletnoy, Felicity Webb, Nicholas Heller Movement Director: Vinson Fraley Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic Assistant to the Fashion Editor: Austen Turner Medic: Paradocs

Filmed At: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Radio City Music Hall, Top of the Rock

Special Thanks: Kodak, Millennium Hilton New York Downtown, The Smile

1 note · View note

anastocio · 4 years

Video

vimeo

Vogue "I Love New York" from Peter Spark on Vimeo.

Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin

Edited by Will Town at Modern Post

Hair: Mustafa Yanaz Hair (Indya Moore, Joan Smalls): Hos Hounkpatin

Makeup: Emi Kaneko

Set Design: Hans Maharawal

AD: James Woods

Casting: Sergio Kletnoy, Felicity Webb, Nicholas Heller Movement Director: Vinson Fraley Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic Assistant to the Fashion Editor: Austen Turner Medic: Paradocs

Filmed At: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Radio City Music Hall, Top of the Rock

Special Thanks: Kodak, Millennium Hilton New York Downtown, The Smile

1 note · View note

artwalktv · 4 years

Video

vimeo

Created and Directed by Bardia Zeinali Written by Jeremy O. Harris Fashion Editor: Jorden Bickham Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg Produced by Peter Spark and Natalie Pfister for One Thirty-Eight Productions Cast: Paperboy Prince, Julia Fox, Paloma Elsesser, Emily Ratajkowski, Richie Shazam, Misty Copeland, Sean Bennett, Tashawn “Whaffle” Davis, LeeRock Starski, May Hong, David Byrne, Dara Allen, Ceyenne Doroshow, Tyshawn Jones, Raquel Willis, Akira Armstrong, Nicholas Heller, Tic and Tac, Ari Serrano, Naomi Otsu, Indya Moore, Bella Hadid, Erma Campy, Parker Kit Hill, Soul Tigers Marching Band, Kitty Kitty, Josephine Giordano, Ashley aka bestdressed, Eman Abbas, the Rockettes (Jackie Aitken, Tiffany Billings, Katie Hamrah, Alicia Lundgren), Joan Smalls, Leiomy Maldonado Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin Edited by Will Town at Modern Post Production Managers: Hye-Young Shim, Hayley Stephon Wardrobe Coordinator: Leo Becerra Location Manager: Miles Sobeleski Production: Andrew Carbone, Andrew Gowen, Auguste Taylor-Young, Ben Elias, Francis McKenzie, Hased Ike, Henry Pskowski, Jacob Gottlieb, Liam Wahl, Lucas Veltrie, Luis Jaramillo, Matt Nussbaum, Max Thuemler, Zach Berry Hair: Mustafa Yanaz Hair (Indya Moore, Joan Smalls): Hos Hounkpatin Makeup: Emi Kaneko Set Design: Hans Maharawal AD: James Woods Main Unit 1st AC - Camera A: Philey Sanneh Main Unit 2nd AC - Camera A: Emma Penrose Main Unit Loader: Helen Cassel Main Unit Key Grip / Gaffer: Iain Trimble Main Unit Grip / Swing: Greg Waszcuk B Camera Op: Sam Ellison B Camera - 1st AC: Carolyn Pender B Camera Loader: Olivia Kimmel B Camera - 2nd AC: Alex Dubois Sound Tech: Matt Caufield 2nd Unit DP: Mika Altskan Exquisite Human DP: Jac Martinez Exquisite Human 1st AC: Alice Boucherie Exquisite Human Camera PA: Royce Paris Casting: Sergio Kletnoy, Felicity Webb, Nicholas Heller Movement Director: Vinson Fraley Tailor: Cha Cha Zutic Assistant to the Fashion Editor: Austen Turner Medic: Paradocs Color: Tim Masick at Company 3 Stills Post Production: Dtouch Music Supervision: Jessica Gramuglia, HiNote Sound Design: Raphaël Ajuelos Music: “Rhapsody in Blue” performed by Philharmonia Orchestra; “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” performed by Moby Title Design: Naomi Otsu Motion Design: Rinaldi Parungao for Mango Motion Design Visual Effects: Ilia Mokhtareizadeh at The Arcane Collective, Zdravko Stoitchkov at ZeeFX Assistant Editor: Lauren Friedman Archival Research: Maggie Reville Filmed At: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Park Avenue Armory, Radio City Music Hall, Top of the Rock Special Thanks: Kodak, Millennium Hilton New York Downtown, The Smile Vogue: Mark Guiducci, Creative Editorial Director; Robert Semmer, Vice President, Head of Video; Marina Cukeric, Executive Producer; Samantha Adler, Visual Director; Sergio Kletnoy, Entertainment Director; Felicity Webb, Bookings Director; Janelle Okwodu, Senior Fashion News Writer; Jenna Allchin, Producer; Olivia Horner, Visual Editor

#Videos & Films

0 notes

dwellordream · 2 years

Text

“...As older forms of social interaction continued to coexist along with increasing commercialization, both actresses and ladies of quality created their own dramatic moments by curtseying to friends and patrons, and engaging in cross-talk or verbal outbursts that competed with the play and could even bring it to a halt. For example, Susannah Cibber as Ophelia in Hamlet reportedly “rose up three several times and made as many courtesies, and those very low ones, to some ladies in the boxes,” according to the Volunteer Manager (24 April 1763), and a reviewer mocked Mrs. Cibber for stepping out of character: “Pray, good Sir, ask her in what part of the Play it is Said, that the Danish Ophelia . . . is acquainted with so many British ladies?”

In addition to addressing audience members, the actors onstage also engaged in chatting amongst themselves: “Not only the Supernumeraries . . . or Attendants, mind nothing of the great Concern of the Scene, but even the Actors themselves, who are on the Stage, and not in the very principal Parts, shall be whispering to one another, or bowing to their Friends in the Pit, or gazing about.” Actors or former actors in the patent theaters sometimes attended performances as members of the audience and often in disguise. David Garrick reports that “Mr Barry & Mrs Cibber came incog[nito] to see Us,” after having played the lead parts in Romeo and Juliet themselves. Furthermore, the comments of audiences attending a premier performance could actually spark revisions to the script for subsequent productions.

In rehearsal but also in performance, actors “responded to the audience on their level, answering the regular (and expected) heckling, but also making points in propria persona about the nature of the performance itself. . . . Audiences were actively involved not simply in approving or condemning a play, but in revising it.” As we have seen, epilogues offered special opportunities for actresses to spar with the audience and sometimes to suspend theatrical illusion by breaking character or interjecting improvisational comments. Their comic speeches—addressing coquettes or fine ladies or calling out to pit, gallery, and boxes—could specifically implore the ladies in the audience to approve the play, or, on occasion, could cause the audience to respond with disruptive retorts. At many levels, then, the full assembly participated in determining the nature of the performance onstage and off.

In another example of lively theatrical interactions, when Colley Cibber’s enemies booed the 1727 adaptation of Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Husband, legend has it that actress Anne Oldfield was forced to contend with the rude hissing of a disorderly playgoer as she delivered the prologue: “She fixed her eye upon him immediately, made a very short pause, and spoke the words poor creature! loud enough to be heard by the audience, with such a look of mingled scorn, pity and contempt, that the most uncommon applause justified her conduct in this particular, and the poor reptile sunk down with fear and trembling.”

The London Daily Post reported an even more spectacular disruption of Mr. Pritchard’s The Fall of Phaeton (1736) when actress Kitty Clive broke off her singing to rescue a lady in the pit who had fainted: “In great Concern [Clive] ran off the stage for a Glass of Water and procured it to be delivered to the poor Lady who, by this means, recovered. I could not but be delighted to see Her (who enters so thoroughly into all her Part and is really the very Character she assumes) the first to take notice of an accident of this kind: nor could I help feeling better pleased when the Audience applauded her Action.”

…It is commonplace to argue that Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences attended plays “to see, and to be seen,” as Clive’s epilogue put it. Clearly verbal banter ricocheted from stage’s edge to the audience and back, and the actress’s words reflect a shared immersion in the theatricality of the event. Though women of the middling and upper classes ordinarily occupied the boxes and the middle gallery, both sexes sometimes sat on the eighteenth-century stage itself, especially during benefit performances, to constitute a second audience visible to the pit, gallery, and boxes. Female servants were among those who occupied the upper gallery.

The spectacular presence of ladies from the court in attendance purportedly testified to the nation’s claim to superior women: “the Whole is illuminated to the greatest Advantage,” unlike the theaters abroad where only the stage was lit, “and indeed the English have reason in this, for no Nation in the World can shew such an Assembly of shining Beauties as here.” This nationalist fervor would have resonated differently in Ireland: at a Dublin charity benefit of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent in January 1746, “a hundred ladies of the first distinction, dressed in all the elegance of fashion, who, unable to obtain places in the pit and boxes, had, in order to assist and support the manager, accepted of accommodations on the stage, the clamour was so great that Mr. Sheridan was obliged to withdraw without speaking.”

Even after the audience was banished from the stage, the brilliantly lit house of the Dublin theater, shaped in a semicircle, put the ladies and gentlemen of quality on display in the same manner as the actors. Like the fictional Sophronia introduced in Steele’s Theatre, sometimes the “fine ladies” attended together in a theater party conspicuously seated in the side boxes, though women of elevated social standing often appeared in vizard disguise until audience members wearing masks were banned in the early eighteenth century. The public liaisons reputed to occur in pit and gallery may have led theatergoing women to avoid those seating areas because of the potential sexual danger.

Susan Cannon Harris imaginatively characterizes the political and social stakes for women in the mid-century Dublin theater as potentially subversive when the women spectators sat onstage as the fair penitent actress-heroine performed Rowe’s play. Female spectators and actresses in close proximity were, she argues, united in recognizing their vulnerability to sexual coercion and violence in spite of their social differences, to “carve out a cause, and a subjectivity, of their own.” That kind of consolidation of women’s interests in the public sphere, Harris contends, threatened to supersede other national, regional, or class loyalties. This close identification between the ladies and the actresses and their formation of a shared subjectivity, I suggest, was not limited to the Irish theaters at mid-century but was ongoing even from women’s first appearance on stage.

…The problem was especially vexing during benefit performance when, for example, Lavinia Fenton, acting as Cherry in The Beaux Stratagem for her benefit (29 April 1726), reported that she “offended the best Part of her Friends, by laying Pit and Boxes together” to increase the number of seats available and thus the evening’s receipts. The offense was sufficiently heinous that many tickets for the performance had to be refunded. The memoirs of actors, theater managers, and theater historians abound with similar anecdotes describing startling interruptions and boisterous exchanges among authors, managers, actors, prompters, and spectators that gave texture to the eighteenth-century theatrical arena.

The vocal, often rowdy, audience who participated jointly with the players in an evening’s entertainment in Covent Garden or Drury Lane is, then, more typical of the period than the image of a theater filled with bemused spectators regarding a proscenium stage would suggest, and women on both sides of the stage engaged with the actors in multiple ways. Because of the full assembly’s participation in theatrical repartee, the confusion of the stage’s boundary, and the bonds of patronage between actor and audience, it is misleading to regard the eighteenth-century theater primarily as a picture stage upon which a distant audience gazed with relative detachment, especially with regard to women actors and spectators.”

- Felicity Nussbaum, “Actresses and Patrons: The Theatrical Contract.” in Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater

#history #restoration #georgian #english #theater #felicity nussbaum #rival queens

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nellygwyn · 3 years

Note

Hi Olivia! I'm currently doing outlining for a story set during the late Georgian period (but before the Regency, c. 1800-1809) that focuses on theatre but I'm having trouble tracking down resources. Do you have any recommendations from which I can draw?

Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre by Felicity Nussbaum is a good book (actually, anything by Nussbaum, really). So is Claire Tomalin's biography of Dorothea Jordan, a very famous comic actress in the period you are writing about. If you can find a copy of one of the many volumes of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, that would be helpful for you too. Probably worth reading novels from the period too, ones where characters go to the theatre (in Fanny Burney's Evelina, for example, Evelina goes to the theatre A LOT - that can shed light on how the audience behaved)

I also recommend getting your hands on Greg Jenner's new book 'Dead Famous.' It's a broad history of celebrity but he does write a lot about 18th century actors and theatre.

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jamesgraybooksellerworld · 4 years

Text

352J [OLIVIER, Jacques, or Alexis TROUSSET].

A Discourse of Women, shewing their Imperfections alphabetically. Newly translated out of the French into English.

London: printed in the year 1679. $3,800

12mo (135 × 70 mm), pp. [4], 185, [1], without initial blank leaf. Woodcut headpiece (with snakes) to dedication. Quite dust-stained/browned, closely-cut at foredge, usually resulting merely in a short margin, but just touching text of a handful of leaves towards the opening. Eighteenth-century panelled sprinkled calf with stencilled diapered lozenge to sides, borders in gilt and blind, black floral cornerpieces, spine with large red morocco label and three panels with cinquefoil tools in gilt. Rubbed, joints starting, spine chipped at head and foot. Contemporary purple shelf mark: ‘Lib J.9-no.8-’ An otherwise unrecorded issue of a notorious misogynist satire, Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (1617), first published in English in 1662. According to Athenae Oxonienses, the translator was Richard Banke of Lincoln College. It was reprinted in 1672 and 1673 and this is a reissue of unsold sheets of the 1673 edition with a new title, dated but without imprint. All editions are rare. This issue not in Wing (cf. O284A-C for the other edition/ issues). See Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of all we hate: English Satires on Women, 1660-1750, p. 178n. ESTC Citation No. R22566 Olivier, Jacques. London : printed for Henry Brome, at the Gun in Ivy-lane, M.DCLXII. [1662] Physical descr. [4], 204 p. ; 8⁰. General note Translation of: Olivier, Jacques. Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes. Leaf pi2r numbered 205. [A]² B-N⁸ O⁶. Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), O284A

Copies – Brit.Isles : British Library, Cambridge University London School of Economics. Copies – N.America\ Folger Shakespeare Huntington Library William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ESTC Citation No. R229574 Olivier, Jacques. A discourse of women, shewing their imperfections alphabetically. Newly translated out of the French into English. London : printed for R.T. and are to be sold in Little Britain, [1673.] Physical descr. [6], 185, [1] p. ; 12⁰. Copies – Brit.Isles : British Library Oxford University Bodleian Library

Copies – N.America\ Duke University Newberry Yale University

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Bold Poets and rash Painters may aspire With pen and pencill to describe my Faire, Alas; their arts in the performance fayle, And reach not that divine Original, Some Shadd’wy glimpse they may present to view, And this is all poore humane art Can doe▪

346J J.B. Gent.

The young lovers guide,

or, The unsuccessful amours of Philabius, a country lover; set forth in several kind epistles, writ by him to his beautious-unkind mistress. Teaching lover s how to comport themselves with resignation in their love-disasters. With The answer of Helena to Paris, by a country shepherdess. As also, The sixth Æneid and fourth eclogue of Virgil, both newly translated by J.B. Gent.

London : Printed and are to be Sold by the Booksellers of London, 1699. $3,500

Octavo, A4, B-G8,H6 I2( lacking 3&’4) (A1, frontispiece Present; I3&’4, advertisements lacking ) inches [8], 116, [4] p. : The frontispiece is signed: M· Vander Gucht. scul:. 1660-1725,

This copy is bound in original paneled sheep with spine cracking but cords holding Strong.

A very rare slyly misogynistic “guide’ for what turns out be emotional turmoil and Love-Disasters !

Writ by Philabius to Venus, his Planetary Ascendant.

Dear Mother Venus!

I must style you so.

From you descended, tho’ unhappy Beau.

You are my Astral Mother; at my birth

Your pow’rful Influence bore the sway on Earth

From my Ascendent: being sprung from you,

I hop’d Success where-ever I should woo.

Your Pow’r in Heav’n and Earth prevails, shall I,

A Son of yours, by you forsaken die?

Twenty long Months now I have lov’d a Fair,

And all my Courtship’s ending in Despair.

All Earthly Beauties, scatter’d here and there,

From you, their Source, derive the Charms they bear.

Wing (2nd ed.), B131; Arber’s Term cat.; III 142

Copies – Brit.Isles : British Library

Cambridge University St. John’s College

Oxford University, Bodleian Library

Copies – N.America : Folger Shakespeare

Harvard Houghton Library

Henry E. Huntington

Newberry

UCLA, Clark Memorial Library

University of Illinois

Engraved frontispiece of the Mistress holding a fan, title within double rule border, 4-pages of publisher`s advertisements at the end Contemporary calf (worn). . FIRST EDITION. . The author remains unknown.

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A collection of Poems and Letters by Christian mystic and prolific writer, Jeanne-Marie Guyon published in Dublin.

348J François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon 1651-1715 & Josiah Martin 1683-1747 & Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon 1648-1717

A dissertation on pure love, by the Arch-Bishop of Cambray. With an account of the life and writings of the Lady, for whose sake The Archbishop was banish’d from Court: And the grievous Persecution she suffer’d in France for her Religion. Also Two Letters in French and English, written by one of the Lady’s Maids, during her Confinement in the Castle of Vincennes, where she was Prisoner Eight Years. One of the Letters was writ with a Bit of Stick instead of a Pen, and Soot instead of Ink, to her Brother; the other to a Clergyman. Together with an apologetic preface. Containing divers letters of the Archbishop of Cambray, to the Duke of Burgundy, the present French King’s Father, and other Persons of Distinction. And divers letters of the lady to Persons of Quality, relating to her Religious Principles

Dublin : printed by Isaac Jackson, in Meath-Street, [1739]. $ 4,000

Octavo 7 3/4 x 5 inches First and only English edition. Bound in Original sheep, with a quite primitive repair to the front board.

Fenélon’s text appears to consist largely of extracts from ’Les oeuvres spirituelles’. The preface, account of Jeanne Marie Guyon etc. is compiled by Josiah Martin. The text of the letters, and poems, is in French and English. This is an Astonishing collection of letters and poems.

“JOSIAH MARTIN, (1683–1747), quaker, was born near London in 1683. He became a good classical scholar, and is spoken of by Gough, the translator of Madame Guyon’s Life, 1772, as a man whose memory is esteemed for ‘learning, humility, and fervent piety.’ He died unmarried, 18 Dec. 1747, in the parish of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and was buried in the Friends’ burial-ground, Bunhill Fields. He left the proceeds of his library of four thousand volumes to be divided among nephews and nieces. Joseph Besse [q. v.] was his executor.

Martin’s name is best known in connection with ‘A Letter from one of the People called Quakers to Francis de Voltaire, occasioned by his Remarks on that People in his Letters concerning the English Nation,’ London, 1741. It was twice reprinted, London and Dublin, and translated into French. It is a temperate and scholarly treatise, and was in much favour at the time.

Of his other works the chief are: 1. ‘A Vindication of Women’s Preaching, as well from Holy Scripture and Antient Writings as from the Paraphrase and Notes of the Judicious John Locke, wherein the Observations of B[enjamin] C[oole] on the said Paraphrase . . . and the Arguments in his Book entitled “Reflections,” &c, are fullv considered,’ London, 1717. 2. ‘The Great Case of Tithes truly stated … by Anthony Pearson [q. v.] . . . to which is added a Defence of some other Principles held by the People call’d Quakers . . .,’ London, 1730. 3. ‘A Letter concerning the Origin, Reason, and Foundation of the Law of Tithes in England,’ 1732. He also edited, with an ‘Apologetic Preface,’ comprising more than half the book, and containing many additional letters from Fénelon and Madame Guyon, ‘The Archbishop of Cambray’s Dissertation on Pure Love, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Lady for whose sake he was banish’d from Court,’ London, 1735.

[Joseph Smith’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books; works quoted above; Life of Madame Guyon, Bristol, 1772, pt. i. errata; registers at Devonshire House; will P.C.C. 58 Strahan, at Somerset House.]

C. F. S.

Fénelon was nominated in February, 1696, Fénelon was consecrated in August of the same year by Bossuet in the chapel of Saint-Cyr. The future of the young prelate looked brilliant, when he fell into deep disgrace.

The cause of Fénelon’s trouble was his connection with Madame Guyon, whom he had met in the society of his friends, the Beauvilliers and the Chevreuses. She was a native of Orléans, which she left when about twenty-eight years old, a widowed mother of three children, to carry on a sort of apostolate of mysticism, under the direction of Père Lacombe, a Barnabite. After many journeys to Geneva, and through Provence and Italy, she set forth her ideas in two works, “Le moyen court et facile de faire oraison” and “Les torrents spirituels”. In exaggerated language characteristic of her visionary mind, she presented a system too evidently founded on the Quietism of Molinos, that had just been condemned by Innocent XI in 1687. There were, however, great divergencies between the two systems. Whereas Molinos made man’s earthly perfection consist in a state of uninterrupted contemplation and love, which would dispense the soul from all active virtue and reduce it to absolute inaction, Madame Guyon rejected with horror the dangerous conclusions of Molinos as to the cessation of the necessity of offering positive resistance to temptation. Indeed, in all her relations with Père Lacombe, as well as with Fénelon, her virtuous life was never called in doubt. Soon after her arrival in Paris she became acquainted with many pious persons of the court and in the city, among them Madame de Maintenon and the Ducs de Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, who introduced her to Fénelon. In turn, he was attracted by her piety, her lofty spirituality, the charm of her personality, and of her books. It was not long, however, before the Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was, began to unsettle the mind of Madame de Maintenon by questioning the orthodoxy of Madame Guyon’s theories. The latter, thereupon, begged to have her works submitted to an ecclesiastical commission composed of Bossuet, de Noailles, who was then Bishop of Châlons, later Archbishop of Paris, and M. Tronson; superior of-Saint-Sulpice. After an examination which lasted six months, the commission delivered its verdict in thirty-four articles known as the “Articles d’ Issy”, from the place near Paris where the commission sat. These articles, which were signed by Fénelon and the Bishop of Chartres, also by the members of the commission, condemned very briefly Madame Guyon’s ideas, and gave a short exposition of the Catholic teaching on prayer. Madame Guyon submitted to the condemnation, but her teaching spread in England, and Protestants, who have had her books reprinted have always expressed sympathy with her views. Cowper translated some of her hymns into English verse; and her autobiography was translated into English by Thomas Digby (London, 1805) and Thomas Upam (New York, 1848). Her books have been long forgotten in France.

Jeanne Marie Guyon

b. 1648, Montargis, France; d. 1717, Blois, France

A Christian mystic and prolific writer, Jeanne-Marie Guyon advocated a form of spirituality that led to conflict with authorities and incarceration. She was raised in a convent, then married off to a wealthy older man at the age of sixteen. When her husband died in 1676, she embarked on an evangelical mission to convert Protestants to her brand of spirituality, a mild form of quietism, which propounded the notion that through complete passivity (quiet) of the soul, one could become an agent of the divine. Guyon traveled to Geneva, Turin, and Grenoble with her mentor, Friar François Lacombe, at the same time producing several manuscripts: Les torrents spirituels (Spiritual Torrents); an 8,000-page commentary on the Bible; and her most important work, the Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (The Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, 1685). Her activities aroused suspicion; she was arrested in 1688 and committed to the convent of the Visitation in Paris, where she began writing an autobiography. Released within a few months, she continued proselytizing, meanwhile attracting several male disciples. In 1695, the Catholic church declared quietism heretical, and Guyon was locked up in the Bastille until 1703. Upon her release, she retired to her son’s estate in Blois. Her writings were published in forty-five volumes from 1712 to 1720.

Her writings began to be published in Holland in 1704, and brought her new admirers. Englishmen and Germans–among them Wettstein and Lord Forbes–visited her at Blois. Through them Madame Guyon’s doctrines became known among Protestants and in that soil took vigorous root. But she did not live to see this unlooked-for diffusion of her writings. She passed away at Blois, at the age of sixty-eight, protesting in her will that she died submissive to the Catholic Church, from which she had never had any intention of separating herself. Her doctrines, like her life, have nevertheless given rise to the widest divergences of opinion. Her published works (the “Moyen court” and the “Règles des assocées à l’Enfance de Jésus”) having been placed on the Index in 1688, and Fénelon’s “Maximes des saints” branded with the condemnation of both the pope and the bishops of France, the Church has thus plainly reprobated Madame Guyon’s doctrines, a reprobation which the extravagance of her language would in itself sufficiently justify. Her strange conduct brought upon her severe censures, in which she could see only manifestations of spite. Evidently, she too often fell short of due reserve and prudence; but after all that can be said in this sense, it must be acknowledged that her morality appears to have given no grounds for serious reproach. Bossuet, who was never indulgent in her regard, could say before the full assembly of the French clergy: “As to the abominations which have been held to be the result of her principles, there was never any question of the horror she testified for them.” It is remarkable, too, that her disciples at the Court of Louis XIV were always persons of great piety and of exemplary life.

On the other hand, Madame Guyon’s warmest partisans after her death were to be found among the Protestants. It was a Dutch Protestant, the pastor Poiret, who began the publication of her works; a Vaudois pietist pastor, Duthoit-Mambrini, continued it. Her “Life” was translated into English and German, and her ideas, long since forgotten in France, have for generations been in favour in Germany, Switzerland, England, and among Methodists in America. ”

P.144 misnumbered 134. Price from imprint: price a British Half-Crown. Dissertain 16p and Directions for a holy life 5p. DNB includes this in Martin’s works

Copies – Brit.Isles. : British Library, Dublin City Library, National Library of Ireland Trinity College Library

Copies – N.America. : Bates College, Harvard University, Haverford Col , Library Company of Philadelphia, Newberry, Pittsburgh Theological Princeton University, University of Illinois University of Toronto, Library

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331J Theophilis Polwheile

Aὐθέντης, Authentēs. Or A treatise of self-deniall. Wherein the necessity and excellency of it is demonstrated; with several directions for the practice of it. By Theophilus Polwheile, M.A. sometimes of Emmanuel Colledge in Cambridge, now teacher of the Church at Teverton in Devon.

London: printed for Thomas Johnson, and are to be sold at the Golden-Key in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1659 $1,200

Octavo Full 18/19th century calf . Signed by B Fuller. Like the Anatomy of Melancholy Polwheile takes an enclyopedic view of Self denial in all sorts of literature. was a minister based mainly in Tiverton; the year after this was published, in the Restoration of 1660, he was ejected from his ministerial position for his religious views and for his sympathies with the Independents, who advocated for local control and for a certain freedom of religion for those who were not Catholic; because of this, he was often in trouble until the Declaration of Indulgence by James II in 1687, establishing freedom of religion in England (James II being Catholic)

“Some think Orthodox and right opinions to be a plea for a loose life, whereas there is no Ill course of life, But springs from some false opinions.” Also Some very interesting subjects “Madness, the reason why so many men of great parts and learning are smitten with it”

“There are Time-servers and Man-pleasers”. There is no surprise that this is rare, I bet lots of copies were thrown out? Two US copies in the US.

Wing (2nd ed.), P2782; Thomason; E.1733[1].

Copies – N.America :General Theological Seminary & Union Theological Seminary…

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362J James FISHER and [Martha HATFIELD].

The wise virgin: or, A wonderfull narration of the various dispensations of God towards a childe of eleven years of age; wherein as his severity hath appeared in afflicting, so also his goodness both in enabling her (when stricken dumb, deaf, and blind, through the prevalency of her disease) at several times to utter many glorious truths concerning Christ, faith, and other subjects; and also in recovering her without the use of any external means, lest the glory should be given to any other. To the wonderment of many that came far and neer to see and hear her. With some observations in the fourth year since her recovery. She is the daughter of Mr. Anthony Hatfield gentleman, in Laughton in York-shire; her name is Martha Hatfield. The third edition enlarged, with some passages of her gracious conversation now in the time of health. By James Fisher, servant of Christ, and minister of the Gospel in Sheffield.

LONDON: Printed for John Rothwell, at the Fountain, in Cheap-side. 1656 $3,300 Octavo, 143 x 97 x 23 mm (binding), 139 x 94 x 18 mm (text block). A-M8, N3. Lacks A1, blank or portrait? [26], 170 pp. Bound in contemporary calf, upper board reattached, somewhat later marbled and blank ends. Leather rubbed with minor loss to extremities. Interior: Title stained, leaves soiled, gathering N browned, long vertical tear to E2 without loss, tail fore-corner of F8 torn away, with loss of a letter, side notes of B2v trimmed. This is a remarkable survival of the third edition of the popular interregnum account of Sheffield Presbyterian minister James Fisher’s 11-year-old niece Martha Hatfield’s prophetic dialogues following her recovery from a devastating catalepsy that had left her “dumb, deaf, and blind.” Mar tha’s disease, which defies modern retro-diagnostics, was at the time characterized as “spleenwinde,” a term even the Oxford English Dictionary has overlooked. Her sufferings were as variable as they were extraordinary the young girl at one point endured a 17-day fugue state during which her eyes remained open and fixed and she gnashed her teeth to the breaking point. In counterpoise to the horrors of her infirmity, her utterances in periods of remission and upon recovery were of great purity and sweetness; it is this stark contrast that was, and is, the persistent allure of this little book. The Wise Virgin appeared five times between 1653 and 1665; some editions have a portrait frontispiece, and it is entirely possible that the present third edition should have one at A1v, though the copy scanned by Early English Books Online does not. Copies located at Yale, and at Oxford (from which the EEBO copy was made). Wing F1006.

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257J Jacques Ferrand

Εροτομανια Or A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love, or EROTIQUE MELANCHOLY.

Oxford: by L. Lichfield to be sold by Edward Forrest, 1640 $6,900.

Octavo a-b8, c4, A-Y8, Z6 (First English edition.

Bound in nineteenth century English gilt tooled sheep. Ferrand approaches the medical afflictions produced by intense love. In addition to confronting the medical symptoms, Ferrand also describes the psychiatric symptoms.

Includes chapters, Whether Love-Melancholy be an Hereditary disease, or no. Whether or no by Physiognomy and Chiromancy a man may know one to be inclined to Love, and Chirurgicall Remedies, for the Prevention of Love, and erotique Melancholy. Of the psychiatric nature the doctor includes the chapters, Whether or no by Oniromancy, or the Interpretation of Dreames, one may know those that are in love, Whether or no, a Physitian may by his Art find out Love, without confession of the Patient, and Of Melancholy, and its several kinds. Other chapters discuss astrology, external and internal symptoms, medicinal, methodical, empirical, and pharmaceutical remedies of love

Melancholy. STC 10829; Hunter & Macalpine, p. 118; NUC NF 0098305, ICU, CtY, PPL, CLSU, DFo, ICN, OU, DLC, CSmH, MH.

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A Discourse of Women, 2) The young lovers guide, 3) A dissertation on pure love, 4) A treatise of self-deniall, 5) The wise virgin, 6) A Treatise Discoursing the Cure of Erotique Melancholy. 352J . A Discourse of Women, shewing their Imperfections alphabetically. Newly translated out of the French into English.

#Erotomania #Prophetic visions #Spells #the wise virgin #Visions

0 notes

thoughtfulcupcakesublime · 4 years

Link

Artwork from local teenagers is being shared with the public.

Visitors of the Caton Merchant Family Gallery, 9419 Battle Street in Manassas, will find pieces created by more than 30 high school students until January 14.

They are included in the Off the Wall exhibit that’s hosted by the Center for the Arts, according to a release from Prince William County Public Schools (PWCS).

“The Off the Wall art contest is a wonderful opportunity that enables students to think outside the box,” Jasmine Hawkins, administrative coordinator of the Arts Program in the PWCS Office of Student Learning, said in a release. “Students who participate receive a real-world gallery experience; their artwork is displayed at the Center for the Arts, and they are invited to participate in an artist reception. This exciting contest allows our students to experience the life of an artist for themselves.”

Selected students will receive awards at an open house that’s taking place from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday.

After the exhibit, the pieces can be viewed at Lockheed Martin, 9500 Godwin Drive #106 in Manassas.

The following students were chosen for the exhibit:

Jemma Alumbaugh — Hylton High School in Woodbridge

Joselyn Andrade — Woodbridge High School

Taylor Arnold — Hylton High School

Nicholas Austin-Wakefield — Battlefield High School in Haymarket

Diego Barrera Rivera — Osbourn Park High School in Manassas

Julianna Bolivar — Forest Park High School in Woodbridge

Anh Dao — Woodbridge High School

Hope Dearborn — Patriot High School in Nokesville

Corynn Ellsworth — Osbourn Park High School

Felicity Gonzalez Rivera — Colgan High School

Manuel Guerrero Zdeinert — Osbourn Park High School

Michelle Huynh — Patriot High School

David Jones — Colgan High School

Chloey Kessler — Brentsville District High School in Nokesville

David Kim — Forest Park High School

Thia Lam — Hylton High School

Isabel Lee — Battlefield High School

Lauren Machen — Brentsville District High School

Alaina Marie Gaul — Patriot High School

Aidan McGuire — Colgan High School

Kyra Morris — Woodbridge High School

Katelyn Nussbaum — Patriot High School

Victoria Pittella — Colgan High School

Rocio Serrano Velasco — Osbourn Park High School

Fatima Shaikh — Patriot High School

Yohanna Taddesse — Woodbridge High School

Rachael Tang — Osbourn Park High School

Olivia Thacker — Osbourn Park High School

McKenna Titcomb — Colgan High School

Ashley Tran — Patriot High School

Valeria Vera Alva — Colgan High School in Manassas

Keilani Wetternach — Osbourn Park High School

The post Manassas exhibit features pieces by area students appeared first on What's Up Prince William.

via What's Up Prince William

#IFTTT #What's Up Prince William #PWC News

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tthfn-blog · 6 years

Text

5. Amor

Como el título muestra en este ensayo el tema va a ser el amor. ¿Qué es el amor?, ¿Tiene definición? Según la Real Academia Española es amor es: „Sentimiento hacia otra persona que naturalmente nos atrae y que, procurando reciprocidad en el deseo de unión, nos completa, alegra y da energía para convivir, comunicarnos y crear.” Para hoy teníamos que leer un fragmento de Martha Nussbaum que se llama Paisajes del pensamiento.

El texto literario se llama Amor ciego de Rosa Montero. La mujer es exitosa y abogada, pero dice que es fea y no hay espejos en su casa, porque piensa que no es necesario. Lleva siete años casada con un ciego y la relación entre ella y su marido es muy fría. Al inicio podríamos pensar que por eso es el título de la obra, pero no es así. Más tarde la protagonista encontrará con el nuevo compañero que se llama Tomás y el encuentro era inesperado. A la mujer le gusta a Tomás y espera que sea un amor correspondido. Pienso que es un „amor ciego” porque el hombre amó la mujer por su valor interior y no le interesaba más. Entonces es muy interesante porque el matrimonio significa que dos personas aman uno al otro, pero en este caso es diferente, porque la mujer le quiere una otra persona y el hombre no quiere la mujer. Entonces pienso que „amor ciego” significa un „amor falso”. La relación con el texto teórico es que la protegonista pensaba que el amor solo existe cuando eres bella y bonita, pero no es así y el teórico también dijo esto.

El otro texto se llama Mi hombre también de Rosa Montero. En este texto podemos ver esposos quienes no son felices, como antes. Su romance empezó cuando eran jóvenes y enamorados. Ahora viven juntos porque fue un hábíto el matrimonio para ellos. El amor se cambia a afecto y hábito. La mujer que es la protagonista habla sobre sus días y dice que su esposo no hace nada en la casa. También menciona que se ha engañado a su esposo, pero por la noche cuando se despierto sin saber dónde está, siente su marido, siente que está al lado de ella. Esto se da una seguridad y „solo entonces” puede decir que es su hombre. Pienso que la relación con el texto teórico es que el amor se desvanece. También podríampos relacionar con el miedo, pero pienso que no es tan importante en nuestro tema.

A base de las obras puedo decir que la palabra „amor” es una cosa muy complicado. Según mi opinión el amor que vemos en los escritos no es el amor que la gente suele asociar, cuando oye este vocablo. Las obras literarias no nos muestran un amor real, más bien deseos, afectos y costumbres, hábitos. Pero la pregunta que me surgió al fin del último texto es: ¿Existe un amor verdadero que subsiste hasta la infinitud?

0 notes

dwellordream · 2 years

Text

“...Frances Abington rose rapidly to the status of stage goddess and fashion icon. As a magnificent “Priestess of Fashion,” Abington functioned as a spiritual guide to a secular realm; her divine aura emanated from a combination of dazzling comic talent with haute couture. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her as Thalia, “the first priestess of the Comic Muse in this country,” echoing a description that Hugh Kelly had employed in the preface to School for Wives (1777). Even in Paris, we are told, Mrs. Abington merited “the most flattering reception from the higher ranks of the Parisian Noblesse.” A commanding presence united with fashionable femininity, Abington transformed high style into the unlikely vehicle through which a woman’s strength and independence could be articulated.

At the same time Abington lured her audiences into imbibing the curative power of consumption; she turned fashion into a religion of sorts, and the magic of capital into an aesthetic. At the height of Abington’s career in the 1770s, actresses achieving social mobility had developed a rather long history; by that time she was no longer an anomaly as an accomplished public woman. Paul Langford has pointed to the “full-blown revolution for women in the 1770s,” paralleling the revolutionary spirit abroad, that turned in part on the expansion of women’s presence in relation in print culture and the marketplace. Peter Clark describes women’s activities in the period as “fashionable sociability,” a term that Gillian Russell usefully expanded into the concept of “domiciliary sociability” to define women’s pervasive presence at operas, masquerades, lectures, concert halls, and exhibitions in the later eighteenth century.

The theatrical world nourished the large commercial enterprises that spilled out from private performances into the concert halls and entertainment centers of London and its environs. In order to impress friends with their intimacy with celebrities, hosts and hostesses invited star players willing to entertain guests at private events with recitation and song, and to grace social events with their charismatic presence. Star actresses—including Abington, Pritchard, Pope/Young, and Yates—attended the more austere Bluestocking assemblies where women’s conversations reflected “polite, enlightened behavior as opposed to aristocratic decorum through their sociability”; they openly infiltrated gatherings at diverse venues such as Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and at Cornelys and Pantheon. Sarah Siddons, for example, was known to have undertaken public readings in the Argyll Rooms.

Celebrated actresses, mingling in fashionable society, forecast the new freedoms for women later realized by Wollstonecraft and others in the 1790s who, though openly hostile to the frivolous consumption to which Abington gave license, shared the desire for economic independence and political influence. Frances Abington’s stature entitled her to choose her own costuming; her fashion expertise allowed her to upstage Garrick, who had difficulty competing for attention with “an actress of powerful talent, backed by half the women of fashion in the metropolis. The dates of her active theatrical life (1754–98) correspond to an explosion in fashion accompanied by an increased audience demand for historically and geographically accurate stage costuming. Reputed to have been a servant to a French milliner in Cockspur Street, she learned dressmaking and costume design in her youth, and these connections with millinery followed her in at least two ways.

First, rumors of Abington having been a prostitute in her early years may have been a consequence of the customary linkage of “common Women of the Town” with millinery. Apprentice milliners, in spite of being hard-working young women, were known to be the prey of unsavory men and regarded as morally suspect. The London Tradesman, for example, warned parents to avoid apprenticing their daughters to the trade because “The vast Resort of young Beaus and Rakes to Millinery Shops, exposes young Creatures to many Temptations, and insensibly debauches their Morals before they are capable of Vice” (208). The author of the tract reported that “nine out of ten of the young creatures that are obliged to serve in these Shops, are ruined and undone . . . debauched in their Houses” (209).

Second, Abington’s ability to influence style very likely evolved from her insider knowledge of the dressmaking trade. According to the treatise that described a plan to transform indigent and wayward girls into industrious seamstresses, a milliner’s eye-popping list of products included “Smocks, Aprons, Tippits, Handerchiefs, Neckaties, Ruffles, Mobs, Caps, Dressed-Heads . . . Cloaks, Manteels, Mantelets, Cheens and Capucheens . . . Hats, Hoods and Caps . . . Gloves, Muffs, and Ribons” and more, all articles of clothing that Abington may well have known how to construct (208). The most celebrated women players often commissioned the design of their own costumes and supervised the sewing (with the notable exceptions of handkerchiefs and slippers), and the purchase of elaborate costuming was a necessary expenditure for actresses who sought to maintain star status.

At the height of her fame, Abington was annually granted the astronomical sum of £500 as her onstage costume allowance, but actresses were known to spend considerably more than allotted. Actresses worked extremely closely with seamstresses but, less predictably, milliners served as their fashion advisors, designers, innovators, and even spies. Actress George Anne Bellamy mentions sponsoring a prospective young milliner going to France, “under the protection of the Mademoiselles Gressiers, in order to learn the art of making mantuas, robes, trimmings, and all the necessary appendages to dress.”

According to the London Tradesman, a milliner “imports new Whims from Paris every Post, and puts the Ladies Heads in as many different Shapes in one Month as there are different Appearances of the Moon in that Space. The most noted of them keep an Agent at Paris, who have nothing else to do but to watch the Motions of the Fashions, and procure Intelligence of their Changes, which she signifies her Principals, with as much Zeal and secrecy as an Ambassador or Penipo would the important Discovery of some political Intrigue” (207–8).

In spite of her humble origins, Abington possessed the requisite economic clout and insider’s expertise to cultivate a signature style while employing others to carry out the labor she could knowledgeably supervise. On her appearance at Covent Garden in 1782, Abington claimed to be a “noviciate” (in spite of being advanced in her career) to both fashion and a religious order when, dressed in a simple dark “Carmelite satin” with short white sleeves, her stage address reached from “the goddesses in the boxes to the gods in the upper regions” (Life of Mrs. Abington, 92). The newspapers lingered lovingly over the details of the Parisian fashion that combined elegance with religious overtones:

“Mrs. Abington’s dress was a chef d’ouevre, in point of taste and simple elegance: the body of her gown was of Carmelite satin, with white sleeves of silver-spotted muslin, tied near the middle of the arm, with a Carmelite ribbon, the bows of which were turned behind—The skirt of her dress was a white silver tissue, decorated with an ostrich and silver trimming, studded with jewels. Her apron was of silver-spotted muslin, with two flounces near the bottom, edged with a trimming of carmelite and white, below which appeared a rich embroidered petticoat fringe. Her head-dress contained no profusion of jewels, but was remarkably neat; the cap consisted of a few feathers, admirably disposed, and an artificial sprig, of carmelite colour, with white ribbons.”

“Carmelite” is, of course, not only a warm golden brown color but also the name of an order of cloistered nuns, thus calling to the audience’s mind her status as a heaven-sent intercessor who called them to consume. Women’s stage clothing in the Restoration period had been restricted to the theater, for one was not permitted to take away “feathers nor clothes nor ribbons nor any thing relating to the stage.” A defiant late seventeenth-century actress was warned, “Whereas by Experience Wee find our Cloathes Tarnished & Imperilled by frequent Weareing them out of the Playhouse It is thought fitt noe Weoman presume to goe out of the House with the Play House Cloathes or Properties upon Penalty of their Weekes pay.”

But the boundaries of stage and theater became surprisingly more porous in the eighteenth century, and luxurious theatrical display thoroughly pervaded the London’s social world that imitated it. One European observer who returned to England in the 1770s, for example, criticized the spectacular clothing worn as everyday dress as more suitable to masquerade costuming: “There is at present much more expence and taste in the trimmings of the Ladys Gowns than in the stuffs; they are full and in almost a theatrical style, but I think very handsome.” Theatrical costumes were extremely expensive, amounting to an increasingly large percentage of the company’s budget, and tempted lesser players to help themselves to stage clothing.

Actress George Anne Bellamy describes in her memoirs the strange admixture of elegant, stained, and tattered clothing cobbled together for fellow actors in the tragic productions she witnessed: “Whilst the empresses and queens appeared in black velvet, and, upon extraordinary occasions, with the additional finery of an embroidered or tissue petticoat; and the younger part of the females, in cast[off] gowns of persons of quality, or altered habits rather soiled; the male part of the dramatis personae st[r]utted in tarnished laced coats and waistcoats, full bottom or tye wigs, and black worsted stockings.” Unlike the earlier decades when actresses often recycled cast-offs or dresses from ladies of quality through countless performances, Abington’s high couture declared her newfound value.

As a living mannequin dressed in high fashion, Abington advertised through her self-commodified person, and through democratizing exchanges with the audience, that being à la mode was newly accessible to them. Though she was not the sole inventor of theatrical fashion-modeling, Abington turned à-la-mode clothing into her own idiosyncratic personal trademark and a sign of her value, thus paradoxically creating a material femininity through surface opulence but also producing an impression of a robust interiority. For better and for worse celebrity’s effects, as Chris Rojek has neatly summarized them, operate “to articulate, and legitimate, various forms of subjectivity that enhance the value of individuality and personality.”

Fashion afforded Abington a unique cultural authority that male actors, even as fops, would have found impossible to emulate. “Ladies of the first distinction,” Charles Dibdin tells us, consulted “from a decided conviction of her judgment in blending what was beautiful with what was becoming.” Abington thus broke from the traditional generic costuming in the theater, which had included “black velvet and white satin dresses, point lace, and stomacher for the tragic line; pink, blue, and white satin dresses with feathers, fans, and veils for comedy; and scarlet or buff frocks with blue or green ribbons, crucifix pendant, and French head dress for melodrama.”

Instead, Abington designed sumptuously beautiful clothing that was unique to particular performances and identified specifically with her, most especially the Francophile Lady Bab’s magnificent costume in Maid of the Oaks in which she was immortalized in Thomas Hickey’s painting. During her five-year sojourn in Dublin, Abington was fetishized as a highly prized commodity from her first performances as ingénue and fine lady in Ireland: “The whole circle were in surprise and rapture, each asking the other how such a treasure could have possibly been in Dublin, and almost in a state of obscurity; such a jewel was invaluable, and their own tastes and judgments they feared would justly be called in question, if this daughter of Thalia was not immediately taken by the hand, and distinguished as her certain and striking merit demanded.”

Abington commodified her apparent interiority to personify accumulation and profit as she circulated in an aestheticized form that signified her value. During the fashionable 1770s, familiar objects of everyday life gained magical properties on stage, thus possessing the double quality of being simultaneously ordinary and remarkable. Lynn M. Voskuil helpfully explicates this paradoxical doubleness of properties first articulated in Marx’s Capital: “The talismanic properties of commodities, then, were precisely a function of their familiarity, their status as everyday, usable items. In the marketplace, triviality became fantastic when, in circulation, it was dislodged from its social and material context, lending commodities a hypostatic autonomy that appeared to be as objective as the wood that made up the table or the linen that went into the coat. In this way, the realistic and the fetishistic were closely related, their links embodied by objects that were at once familiar and strange.”

Transformed into commodities like the charismatic Abington, these consumable objects took on mystical powers and potential agency, becoming attached to character and enmeshed with the identities of the human beings who wore them. Theatrical fashion and accessories served as conduits for surprisingly intimate relations between actresses and women of elevated standing. When the New Theatre in Glasgow was set on fire by disgruntled Methodists, George Anne Bellamy’s extensive wardrobe was incinerated: “I there beheld the ashes of all my finery, which had cost many, many hundreds of pounds . . . there being among them a complete set of garnets and pearls, from cap to stomacher” (Apology, 4:69, 70). The ladies of the city and its environs, vividly demonstrating the interactivity between elite dress and theatrical fashion, promptly came to the rescue to loan the actress more than forty gowns, “some of these almost new, as well as very rich” (4:71).”

- Felicity Nussbaum, “The Actress and Material Femininity: Frances Abington.” in Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater

#georgian #1770s #history #english #theater #fashion #felicity nussbaum #rival queens

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“The London theater stood at the center of urban life in Restoration and eighteenth-century England. Women were vital participants in its success as actresses, playwrights, patrons, orange girls and pawnbrokers, costume makers and vendors. Star players such as Elizabeth Barry, the subject of Otway’s poetic lines, linked public fame to audience affection through the magnetic theatrical appeal of their palpable feminine presence. Barry and other actresses openly violated the conventional injunction aimed at ambitious women during this historical period: “Your sex’s glory,” enjoined Edward Young in Love of Fame (1725–28), “’tis, to shine unknown; / Of all applause be fondest of your own.” Ranging in reputation from prostitutes to socially respectable ladies, early actresses afford a dynamic cultural site for examining unequivocally public women in a period that ostensibly fostered domesticity as an ideal.

Social and economic forces encouraged lively social exchange and a thriving print culture that was crucial to the construction of celebrity. Actors’ worth in the theatrical marketplace fluctuated depending upon public demand throughout a period that witnessed the change from a powerful aristocracy’s dominance to an increasingly urban landscape of merchants and traders. Women’s emergence as celebrities culminated at century’s end in the staggering popularity of Sarah Siddons, whose ardent fans breakfasted near the playhouse to claim much-coveted tickets. Yet the concepts of “woman” and “actor” were often at odds in this formative time that balanced a long-standing patronage system together with an emergent market economy.

At first women who engaged in theatrical activities seem to have been regarded as curiosities in the same aberrant category as the exotics who peopled fairs and other popular entertainments—the hog-faced woman, hairy wench, or baboons—exhibited in public for commercial return in the seventeenth century. By what definition were these first actresses who displayed an unprecedented public femininity to be regarded as women? How could one reconcile “the rarity and beauty of their talents” with “the discredit of employing them”? How were the passionate feelings aroused in both sexes in the audience to be channeled into higher profits? The economic realities of the theater, I argue here, disrupted any simple staging of femininity. Throughout the earlier seventeenth century and even during the Interregnum, women participated sporadically in court entertainments, public theatricality, popular festival rituals, and guild performances, but no women appeared in London’s legitimate theaters until the Restoration in 1660.

Male actors had earlier interpreted the roles of Cleopatra and Desdemona, Kate and Ophelia, in the often eroticized parts Shakespeare created with the expectation that boys would play them. Partly as a response to the shortage of experienced boy actors caused by the closing of the theaters in 1642 for nearly two decades, the restriction against women’s performing was lifted upon the restoration of Charles II, although Edward Kynaston of Duke’s Company (whom Samuel Pepys called “the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life”), as well as James Nokes and Charles Hart of King’s Company continued to perform occasionally as women. …More than a century later Sarah Siddons’ early biographer, Thomas Campbell, attributed actresses’ assumption of women’s roles to Puritan fears that men’s dressing in female attire contradicted Levitical law in the Book of Deuteronomy, a concern he dismisses, for the fact that actresses would have had to utter licentious language was more likely to have been a legitimate concern.

The itinerant nature of the early English touring companies contributed to making women’s participation unacceptable because of their being suspected to be prostitutes, and the establishment of patent theaters provided a stable, potentially more reputable, location. The hoped-for effect of actresses coming to the stage to usurp the gender-bending place of Renaissance boys and supplant men in “skirts roles” did not rid the stage of effeminacy; but as dramatic roles for real women were for the first time invented and then expanded, the Restoration theater, and the new plays that were written for it, became more fully rooted in the female body. It seems likely that the most compelling reason that women had been prevented from appearing on stage was that actors feared the economic competition which actresses would bring to the commercial theater.

Memoirists, managers, fellow actors, and audience members consistently understated the cultural—and economic—power that actresses might wield. In addition, female dramatists after the turn of the century (most significantly Susanna Centlivre, Susannah Cibber, and later Hannah Cowley, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Griffith, and Elizabeth Inchbald) were attracted to the burgeoning business of writing for the newly feminized stage. In short, women’s indispensability to the success of the commercial theater was firmly, if sometimes grudgingly, established over the course of eighteenth century. Though professional female players did not mount the legitimate stage until the Restoration in England, some craft guilds in earlier periods may have allowed young women, in addition to the occasional itinerant female stroller, to act in the French and English plays they produced.

Medieval convents would have staged same-sex performances in which the nuns participated (Shapiro, 178), and women occasionally appeared in Tudor pageants and popular entertainments. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries French, Italian, and Spanish women had been permitted to perform as professionals, though permission was at times rescinded. These early actresses were also forbidden to cross-dress in order to keep sexual difference clearly defined. Performing commedia dell’arte in 1564, the Italian actress Lucrezia Senese was probably the first European professional woman player, followed later by the Roman Flaminia and Isabella Andreini of Padua, although the Papal States decree required that castrati should substitute for women until the late eighteenth century. Italian companies traveling in France began to encourage the cultivation of homegrown actresses first in Bordeaux and then in Paris.

Actresses also appeared in Spain, performing with an Italian troupe in 1587, though they were again outlawed in Spain from 1596 to 1600, at which time only married women could act in public. Abbé Hedelin cautioned that no single woman should act unless her mother or father was a member of the company, and that widows must marry with a year and half if they were to perform. While such rules are commonly assumed to have been designed to protect actresses’ chastity, restricting their marital status would also have controlled their access to their earnings. In the Restoration and eighteenth century, married couples who were both actors were often listed as earning a single shared wage, even when the wife commanded the superior salary.

Happenstance or luck is often an important part of the prevailing narrative as to why women were recruited into the theater, but it also seems possible that placing themselves within listening range of well-known playwrights, managers, or other actors may well have been, rather than an accident, a clever young woman’s taking an opportunity to audition for a potentially lucrative position in order to support herself and incidentally to regain the status that her family had lost. A considerable number of actresses were “discovered” in relatively public places. Charles Taylor insisted that George Farquhar was totally responsible for Oldfield’s becoming an actress rather than attributing it to her initiative after her eloquent dramatic reading at Mitre Tavern in St. James’s Market led the playwright to become her patron.

Peg Woffington, the daughter of a journeyman bricklayer and washerwoman in Dublin, was apprenticed at age twelve to Mademoiselle Violante after the Italian gymnast and equilibrist noticed her natural talent. Kitty Clive’s fortuitously singing within hearing of the Beef-steak Club at Bell Tavern may have led to her promotion to the stage by Club members Mr. Beard and Mr. Dunstall—though William Chetwood insists instead that he and Theophilus Cibber recommended her to Colley Cibber upon hearing her lilting voice.10 Perhaps Woffington, Oldfield, and Clive firmly planted themselves within close proximity to influential men to expedite their ascent to the stage. It is not known whether women were apprenticed to master actors after they began appearing on the stage in 1660, and it is beyond the scope of this study to provide a full history of thespian education.

Renaissance practices would not have included women, of course, and not a great deal is known about actors’ training before or after 1660. It is clear, however, that early modern apprentices in the craft of acting were usually tutored by individual masters to whom they were bound, rather than being instructed within the larger theater troupe, and many boys continued with their training for the requisite seven years. The boys acted in adult roles when they reached majority, though adult men also took on skirts roles after 1642. Indentured workers, some of whom may have been young adults, may have played female roles under duress because a stigma of effeminacy was attached to them. The “play-boys” taking the roles of women characters in the Renaissance were often apprentices to grocer or weaver guilds and most likely occupied a lower social standing than the adult male actors who lived in the homes of their masters (Shapiro, 183).

As manufacturing, service, and construction industries declined, there was less need to train new workers, who turned instead to the newly developing trades. Tutors assumed a proprietary role over trained apprentices and could lease or even sell them to theater companies. Corrupt and abusive practices evolved from the expectation that masters sometimes adopted the role of moral guide and disciplinarian. Female performers introduced into this situation suffered special difficulties and could easily have been sexually compromised. As Michael Shapiro rightly pointed out, “It is hard to imagine many literate girls or young women whose families would have allowed them to become apprentices (which would have meant leaving home and moving into the master’s house) at an age probably even earlier . . . than for . . . domestic service” (188), but unexpected financial strains might have induced families to indenture their daughters if, for example, they could be apprenticed into the relative safety of a widow’s home.

Women were sometimes taken into a noble family and treated as one of their own, as in the case of Elizabeth Barry who became part of Sir William and Lady Davenant’s household, or Anne Bracegirdle who lived with the acting family of the Bettertons. John Harold Wilson maintains that the theater companies would have relied for potential actresses on “genteel poor” women who merely assumed an air of refinement, but this argument rests on the questionable assumption that performing the roles of Restoration heroines required less labor, skill, and talent than acting demanded of men. Another avenue to the theater would have been as tradeswomen such as seamstresses, dressers, milliners, and spinsters who were subsidiary to the theater but absolutely essential to it.

Male apprentices were bound not to marry during their indenture, but female apprentices, constrained until age twenty-one, may well have sought to wed in order to be freed from any obligation to their masters. The historical relationship between apprentices to the theater and actresses is not simple, though they were in fact very closely intertwined. For example, the prologue to George Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (1699) implies a petty criminal relationship of boy actors to their masters, one that is also explored later in George Lillo’s bourgeois tragedy, The London Merchant (1731): And now the modish Prentice he implores, Who with his Master’s Cash stol’n out of Doors, Imploys it on a brace of—Honourable Whores.

Because actor boys often played whores and may have been objects of sexual desire for the adult male actors, the assumption that actresses could also be treated as erotic playthings may suggest a continuation rather than a break with the practices of predatory actors before the Interregnum. For example, in 1688 apprentice boys attacked bawdy houses and rioted against prostitutes, but the boys, provoked by their fear of sexual and economic competition from whores, may have wanted to protest more generally the low wages and poor conditions of laborers. The violence against female prostitutes may have erupted because they, like actresses, posed a special challenge to masculine prerogative of various sorts. The fledgling actors, Katherine Romack persuasively argues, may also have been attempting to preserve the homosocial situation that pertained before women professionals came to the stage.

We might conclude from the evidence available that actresses, like the whores with whom they were so closely aligned, were poised to become both sexual and economic rivals to boy actors and apprentices. The line between female apprentices and sex workers was thus very finely drawn from the Restoration on. Prostitution was sometimes used as a paradigmatic catch-all term for female labor of any sort, as revealed in the mid-century burlesque pamphlet that purports to be actress Ann Catley’s biography: “The word Prostitute does not always Mean a W-- but is used also, to signify any Person that does any Thing for Hire.” Similarly, a treatise entitled Chiron: or, the mental optician, jests at the too refined sensibilities of the female apprentice who refused to carry linens to a young gentlemen’s chambers for fear of being sexually compromised, because she recognized that her job was at stake, and that “her cruel mistress . . . would sell her at the market price.”

How then did women become trained actresses when there were so few formal opportunities to be tutored in their craft? Our knowledge of the training available to fledging actresses is relatively slim. The London nursery that Lady Davenant formed in 1671 had disappeared by the 1680s, but there is some evidence that nurseries for young actors persisted until the late nineteenth century. The two legitimate London companies in the Restoration shared a joint nursery, and another performance school was set up in Norwich. Training for Restoration actors also took place at the George Jolly Hatton Garden Nursery established by Thomas Killigrew. On 30 March 1664 Davenant and Killigrew were authorized to set up a playhouse “for ye instructing of Boyes & Girles in ye Art of Acting . . . .in the nature of a nursery.”

Elizabeth Howe suggests that the coterie nature of the Restoration theater encouraged hothouse breeding for the few actresses determined to merit presentation at court: “The actresses apparently represent an exception to the general decline in professional opportunities for women after 1660.” But it seems most likely that aspiring women players participated in a more informal kind of apprentice system than that which obtained among the actors. Some actresses learned gestures, movement, and enunciation from the playwrights who wrote for them, or from the male actors who were their lovers or husbands, as in the case of Mary Saunderson and her husband Thomas Betterton. A woman housekeeper taught acting to girls while Betterton instructed the boys in his company (Freeburn, 152). The Bettertons schooled Anne Bracegirdle and Mary Porter, and Lady Davenant is believed to have tutored Elizabeth Barry for her role in The Man of Mode.

Lord Rochester was long rumored to have also instructed Barry, albeit with differing motivations; and though the assertion lacks credibility because he was not residing in London on the appropriate dates, it does suggest that lovers may have served as tutors as well. Oldfield’s biography maintains that her lover Maynwaring’s training contributed heavily to her success as a player (Egerton, 4). From the beginning, actresses would have been recruited primarily from among those who could read, or at least memorize easily by rote, requiring their possessing a certain basic quickness and education. A narrow time gap existed between performance and rehearsal with little time allotted for practice, and individual actresses also prepared lines on their own with occasional coaching from a fellow actor who might have greater experience.

In some companies a trial period of acting for three months without salary resembled a sort of apprenticeship that would have allowed inexperienced players to attend rehearsals and to attempt to learn parts from veteran members of the company. At the turn into the eighteenth century, however, training would still have been haphazard. As a second generation of actresses developed, they garnered skills and techniques from the seasoned senior players. Occasionally mothers or sisters of actresses imparted their understanding of specific dramatic parts. Kitty Clive protested that she coached a fellow actress at her own expense, and that she deserved greater remuneration for those services, especially when she compared her regular salary to the income of Susannah Cibber, who made about twice as much.

Clive demanded that Garrick raise her salary to compensate for the expenses she had incurred while coaching the younger woman: “The year Mrs. Vincent Came on the Stage, it cost me above five Pound to go to and from London to rehears with her and teach her the Part of Polly, I coud not be calld on to do it, as it was long before the house oppend, it was to oblige Mr Garrick.” Mary Betterton was also a generous mentor: “When she quitted the Stage, several good Actresses were the better for her Instruction” (Memoirs, 1731). When schools of acting differed, such inbred tutoring could backfire. Garrick complains that Jane Cibber’s training in tragedy by Colley Cibber was inadequate, and that “the Young Lady may have Genius for all I know, but if she has, it is so eclips’d by the Manner of speaking ye Laureat has taught her, that I am afraid it will not do—We differ greatly in our Notion of Acting (in Tragedy I mean) & If he is right I am & ever shall be in ye wrong road.”

Charles Macklin’s memoirs speak of Mrs. Dancer (who later became Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Crawford) whose skills were magnificently improved after “the silver-toned [Mr.] Barry” coached her. As is well-known, Sarah Siddons learned her craft on the provincial circuit, and Dublin also frequently served as a training ground for women players. Acting on the legitimate stage continued to be a sought-after means of earning a living, and star actresses regularly fielded appeals from young hopefuls. George Anne Bellamy remarks that while she played at the Edinburgh theater, “an incredible number” of letters came to her “from itinerant players applying to be engaged. . . . They generally wrote in such a style, as to shew they all thought themselves Garricks and Cibbers.”

Young apprentice workers in many trades were seduced by the attractions of celebrity and the hope that instant success would relieve the drudgery of their manual labor. Their plebeian idealization of acting as a plausible alternative serves as a material example of the appeal that stage models of identity could hold for the working-class imagination. Both men and women alike romanticized performative labor because it seemed to offer an alternative to lifelong drudgery with potential to yield an economic windfall and unprecedented class mobility. The threat was sufficient for Samuel Richardson to write The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), which defends the statutory regulations against apprentices frequenting the theater, and the tract severely warns the young men about the stage’s corrupting effect. Plays and other popular entertainments, Richardson cautions, pandered to low standards of taste and tempted lower tradespersons to avoid disciplined work and to affect high style.

Though apprentices apparently accrued some discretionary income through legitimate means, their conspicuous consumption attracted the kind of envy and animosity usually aimed at upwardly mobile nabobs returning from travels abroad. The criticisms were especially directed at the finely dressed apprentices who thwarted sumptuary laws and dared to display confusing markers of social class. The Lord Mayor and Common Council had required apprentices to dress in the apparel their masters gave them as indicative of their station. They were to wear only woolen caps, the plainest of doublets sans ruffles, fancy pumps, or jewelry, and to carry no sword: “And ’tis now to be wish’d that some such good Law were thought of, to restrain the far more destructive Practices of our modern Apprentices, viz. those of Whore and Horse-keeping, frequenting Tavern Clubs and Playhouses, and their great excesses in Cloaths, Linen, Perriwigs, Gold and Silver Watches, &c.”

For the worst offender against sumptuary regulations, the term of indenture could be extended beyond the agreed-upon time. As these young workers accrued capital, they threatened to abandon industrious application to their trades, the very means that had earned them the shillings necessary to purchase a theater ticket. Though these public directives were largely directed at male apprentices, women workers were equally attracted to the stage. In 1729 the justices of the peace carped that Thomas Odell’s theater in Ayliffe Street, like other London theaters, drew “Tradesmans Servants and others from their lawful Callings, and corrupt[ed] their Manners.” This was exacerbated because the six o’clock curtain time conflicted with business hours that typically extended until eight or nine at night for apprentice workers (Vade Mecum, vi).

Plays were specifically designed to be performed for apprentices on work-free holidays, the best-known being of course Lillo’s didactic tragedy, The London Merchant, produced for the first time three years before Richardson’s manual. Warned against neglecting business, and against the addictive quality of theater, the frivolous nature of the entertainment, and the temptation to whore with lewd women in the theatrical environs, apprentices were enjoined to be modest and frugal, religious and affable, and obsequious to their masters. In a related example, the Weekly Miscellany (8 March 1735) made reference to the rowdiness of apprentices at the opening of a new playhouse. The poorer apprentices sat in the upper gallery with the footmen, though those with a few more shillings to spend occupied the boxes and sideboxes.

Crowding into the mid-eighteenth-century theater, the notoriously ill-behaved apprentices sitting on the stage “three or four rows deep” interfered with productions. Tate Wilkinson describes the unruly scene: “A performer on a popular night could not step his foot with safety, lest he either should thereby hurt or offend, or be thrown down amongst scores of idle tipsy apprentices.” The theater, then, sorely tempted apprentices into engaging in immoral behavior and disrupting the social order from the bottom up. Arthur Murphy’s The Apprentice, the afterpiece to Southerne’s Oroonoko performed on 2 January 1756, gives a specific instance of the special perils awaiting stage-struck plebeian women. It features Dick and Charlotte, apprentices who haunt the theater in hopes of learning the craft of acting.

…Finding training to ascend to the stage was a risky and costly business for impressionable female apprentices who sought to become celebrated players through the fantastic imaginings made available every night of the season for the price of a theater ticket. Seeming to be unmoored from the fathers and husbands who defined their status, the social rank of women players was, as I have been arguing, more complicated than it was for most men. Their uncertain class position brought into play the sign of the “actress-as-whore,” if not the actuality of trading money for sex, though it is too simple to declare that “society assumed that a woman who displayed herself on the public stage was probably a whore.”

The often indeterminate social class of the newly professionalized actresses, made opaque through the diverse roles they played and the clothes they wore, could also empower them. Laura Rosenthal has argued that the actress, as “an untitled and unmonied professional . . . theatricalized an emergent instability of class identity” and destabilized real gender relations because male audience members “forgot” that an actress playing an aristocratic lady was simply inhabiting a role and was not properly marriageable in her own person. That actresses often wore the cast-off clothing of noblewomen may well have heightened their ability to attract libertine aristocrats, and actresses in turn sometimes bequeathed clothing, costumes, and jewels to their servants.

Tate Wilkinson is among those who complained that the fancy dress of women servants on stage, including their elaborate headdresses and satin shoes, encouraged sartorial upstarts in the audience to affect elevated social standing: “I have seen Mrs. Woffington dressed in high taste for Mrs. Phillis, for then all ladies’ companions or gentlewomen’s gentlewomen, actually appeared in that style of dress; nay, even the comical Clive dressed her Chambermaids, Lappet, Lettice, & c. in the same manner, authorised from what custom had warranted when they were in their younger days” (Memoirs, 4: 89). ….The Servants Calling (1725) urged employers to refrain from the common practice of giving fine clothes to their servants whose heads are “fill’d with Notions of their Advancement,” cautioning them to avoid dressing above their degree, and to “act the Part that belongs to them.”

Actresses violated these injunctions both as benefactors and as willing recipients of gifts of clothing from their patrons and admirers. In life and on the stage, then, the star actress taught lesser beings—the common servant girl and the aspiring apprentice—the art of social emulation. Moving through the social classes in drama and in life while mastering the etiquette of nobility, actresses revealed the performative nature of social status to audiences consisting of tradespersons, citizens’ wives, ladies of quality, and even queens The memoirs of actresses attempted to reconcile the fact that even though these women were not queens, they could convincingly impersonate the elite ranks and inspire the kind of adulation usually reserved for them; they represented the imagined possibilities that social change could bring.”

- Felicity Nussbaum, “The Economies of Celebrity.” in Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater

#history #english #restoration #georgian #theater #felicity nussbaum #rival queens #class

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