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  Though most famous (to me, anyway) as the Pepsi-and-milk-swigging half of Laverne & Shirley, Penny Marshall’s new memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, reveals her real life was as crazy as anything that went on in front of the cameras. The book reads like a Who’s Who of pop culture’s major players in the last . . . → Read More: My Interview With Penny Marshall: In a League of Her Own  If you’ve heard of Arlene Dahl, you know she was a beautiful 1950s movie star primarily famous for her red hair and her beauty mark. (Her first fan letter arrived with no name, just a drawing of a pair of lips and a beauty spot, and the address: Hollywood, California.) But she’s famous to . . . → Read More: Beauty Marks the Spot: This Cougar is Dahled Up!  Sure, Helen Mirren is an Oscar-winning, Shakespeare-trained, supremely talented and thoughtful woman whose legacy includes hundreds of stellar performances on TV, stage, and screen. She holds the title Dame for her services to the performing arts, but by performing the apparently miraculous achievement of looking hot in her bathing suit whilst in her sixties . . . → Read More: Helen Mirren and the Bikini Shot Heard ‘Round the World  If Carmen Miranda didn’t exist we’d have had to invent her. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a world without a woman in impossibly high heels and an impossibly high tower of fruit on her head chic-chic-a-booming to an infectious samba. (And neither can most drag queens.) Many people today recognize the image . . . → Read More: Have You Been Properly Carmen Mirandized? There’s More to this Bombshell Than Bananas  I can’t commit to doing what Jesus would do in any given situation. I’m not generous enough, wise enough, or turn water into wine-y enough. There are T-shirts that suggest one do whatever Joan Jett would do, but I’m not bad ass enough. Not good enough to be Jesus, not bad enough to be . . . → Read More: What Would Barbara Stanwyck Do?  I’ve been obsessed with Pre-Code movies for decades. Here’s why: Most people believe old movies are stodgy, quaint relics of a time when asexual women did what they were told and upright, wholesome men stalwartly upheld good Christian values. But most people are wrong. Very, very wrong. These people assume the post-World War . . . → Read More: Fabulously Perverted and Sexy Pre-Code 30s Movies! Part 1  One of the things I love about old movies, old songs, and detective novels from the likes of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, is the great vernacular. It further adds to the feel that the 30s and 40s is this cool, arcane world with its own reality, its own set of rules, and a language all its own.
Take Minnie the Moocher (please). In the first three lines of the song we learn Minnie is not only a moocher, but also a “lowdown hoochie-coocher” and “the roughest and toughest frail.” In other words, Minnie was infamous for taking all she could get away with taking, as well as rough, tough and pretty slutty. You see, a moocher* is someone who gloms on to whatever he or she can get, hoochie-coocher means sexually promiscuous, a frail is a woman, and lowdown means, well, not so nice. (She also liked to “kick the gong around”; in other words, Minnie hearts opium.You see, “dame” is only one of many terms folks in the Great Depression had for the chromosomally Y-challenged half of the population. Here are some other words meaning female:Ankle (as a verb this means to walk)
 Ace of Spades (widow) Anchor (wife) Babe or Baby Baggage (wife) Ball and Chain (wife…hmmm, sensing a pattern here) Better Half (wife…that’s better) Bats (prostitute) Biddy (oddly enough, a young woman) Bim or Bimbo Blimp (stout woman) Blister (Ugly or old woman) Broad Bundle of Rags (wife…sheesh) Canary (singer) Chick Chippy Cookie Pusher (wealthy young woman) Cuddle Cutie (prostitute) Dawn Patrol (restaurant lingo for a young woman who regularly patronizes the joint very early in the morning) Demi-Tasse or Demi-Rep (prostitute) Dish Doll or Dolly Fem Fever (girlfriend) Filly (young woman) Floozie (not a compliment) Frail Frau (wife) Frill Frump (sloppy or critical woman) Gash Gid (young woman) Gilly (prostitute) Girlie Golddigger (woman only after dough) Grouse (prostitute) Hash-Slinger (waitress) Herring (an incorruptible girl — Herring was the brand of safe that couldn’t be dynamited open ) High Jumper (young woman fond of liquor) Iron Pants (chaste woman) Jailbait (teenage girls)  Leave a comment  MOVIES, POP-ED  30s, 40s, detectives, female, film noir, girl, hardboiled, language, slang, woman, women  The 1940s and Depression era “girl reporter” embodies everything I could ever want to be. The very quintessence of dame-ness, she’s smart, savvy, confident, independent, and quick with the comeback. (She also looks pretty steppy in her fitted suit.) As adept at a snappy line as she is with a byline, . . . → Read More: Girl Crush on Girl Reporter (Wish MY Name Were “Torchy Blane”)  The seminal (har har) scene in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve whereby Barbara Stanwyck shows us how it's done. I could write a treatise on how much one can learn from this scene in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve: The Lady Eve Stateroom . . . → Read More: “Why Hopsy…” |
   
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