Whew! Nearly there...
Despite the fact the weather is not looking particularly promising for the weekend, it is still a weekend - and time to party!
We happened to miss the birthday yesterday of our "Patron Saint of Hogging-the Spotlight-in-Sparkly-Gowns", Miss Diana Ross, so who better to lead the celebrations - in the company of a troupe of very odd [some slightly phallic, I thought] creatures, indeed? Thank Disco It's Friday!
Have a great one, folks!
“I knew that Imelda was given to memorable pronouncements and aphorisms and outrageous behaviour, some of it amusing and some of it horrific, but the fact that she immersed herself in the disco club world was a big selling point.Lyrics in the show [Here Lies Love] were often lifted directly from speeches, interviews, recordings from the time and even Marcos’s high school yearbook. One song is taken verbatim from a speech that Benigno Aquino gave about President Marcos building arts centres and not doing enough for the shanty towns in Manila, while another is based on quotes from an oral history of the People Power revolution that Byrne stumbled across.
“When I heard she had a giant mirror ball in her New York townhouse and turned the roof of the palace in Manila into a dancing club, I thought ‘she really surrounded herself with this music and created her own soundtrack to her life.’ Disco was a genre that I was uncomfortable with but keen to explore, so with those factors in mind I thought, ‘let’s see if there’s a story to be told here’.”
"I've always had this image of this strong, sprightly person who is undaunted by anything; on the contrary, I was one of the shyest, most unsure people you ever met in your life. But I have one very specific quality: I'm plucky. I really am. I would say that's a perfect description of my personality. I am able to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward. I'm very stubborn. I never knew that about myself. But I realize how stubborn I am when I look at all the terrible things that happened to me and how I just get up and keep going."And thus, one of the all-time legends - and this case a superlative that is appropriate - of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Señorita Rita Moreno (pronounced "More-enn-o", she emphasised) summed herself up at the "In Conversation" event I was fortunate to attend last night at the BFI. Darling "journo-slut" Alex Hopkins had sweet-talked his way to be the only representative of the press to gain entry to the green room at the event, and I was thrilled when he asked me to accompany him.
"I became the house ethnic. And that meant I had to play anything that was not American. So I became this Gypsy girl, or I was a Polynesian girl, or I was an Egyptian girl. And finally I decided that by playing all these roles, I should have some kind of accent, but of course I had no idea what these people sounded like so I made up my own, and I now call it the universal ethnic accent. The funny part of it is that all my ethnic characters that I played all sounded exactly the same!Racism was not the only discriminatory attitude she encountered, either. She recounted the awful experience of having to flee a cocktail party where she was treated, by the host and male guests alike, as a "piece of meat" to be groped and subjected to whispered obscenities. She managed to escape by getting a lift home by a truck full of Mexican garden labourers - "the only gentlemen I met that night".
"It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful - I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning."
