I hear the sound of distant drums

Timeslip moment again...

Can it really be twenty years since we danced our tits off to this track?

A Top 5 hit in the UK charts this week in 1993, it's The Goodmen (who?) and Give it Up:

The Goodmen - Give it Up

Rave on, peeps!

The amazing bouncing Ferret

Described succinctly by one reviewer as "poet, philosopher, peignoir model, puppeteer and trainee crowd surfer", Miss Eve Ferret is a firm favourite here at Dolores Delargo Towers. And her new show A Ferret Up The Arts (that Paul and I went to see last night) is fucking hilarious, to boot!

From her riotous opening number complete with marching drum, through her trademark meandering repartee of anecdotes and jokes (often at the expense of her long-suffering guitar accompanist Roddy Matthews), through her paean to the aforementioned peignoir (a long frilled nylon nightie - "closed, it's Rita Hayworth, open, it's Elsie Tanner!") to her seemingly endless supply of props (at one point, singing in French, she peppered us with mangetout, the next, fake money) not to mention her crowd-surfing Ferret doll, she was unstoppable.

The divine Miss F is not just a clever knock-about performer however, she can actually sing - and beautifully - when she wants to. She has been compared to both Barbara Dickson and Diana Krall in the past, and when she gets her teeth into a number her voice has the power to send chills down the spine.

She certainly had the audience in rapt awe at her version of Scars (a song written by Fran Landesman, whose Ballad of the Sad Young Men is a gay classic). Over the course of the evening she tried her hand at just about everything from Rappers' Delight to the blues, singing a blend of covers and her own material - Handbag Girl was a particular joy - and at every musical turn we were thrilled.



Of course the biggest thrill of all was Miss Ferret's promised "messing about with my chums" bit, as she introduced the first of her special guests, the extraordinarily talented Mzz Kimberley - an American drag queen with a magnificently powerful soul diva voice, who did a stunning version of Bridge Over Troubled Water as a gospel number, and transformed Peggy Lee's classic I'm A Woman into I'm A Tranny in a duet with Eve. Stunning.

But, of course, it was the appearance of that remarkable double-act, the lovely Fidelis Morgan and "national treasure" Celia Imrie - who entertained us so magnificently at Polari in April this year - which really set the place alight! They opened with a suitably autumnal song'n'dance number, during which the pair were pelted with fallen leaves - and soft toys and anything else that came to hand - by Miss Ferret, and then returned to delight us with a three-way version of Noel Coward's Mad About The Boy, with Fidelis playing the posh masculine type, Eve the Cockney housekeeper, and Celia the infatuated schoolgirl. It was a work of genius, and we adored it!

Eve Ferrett is an incomparable entertainer. There really is no-one else like her. This show was so hysterically funny at times, both Paul and I had tears streaming down our faces and were doubled up with laughter! I am so very pleased we went - it cheered me up immensely.

So overjoyed were we that we are booking for the second of her two shows. Next Monday (11th November), Eve's special guests are none other than Miss Adele Anderson (of Fascinating Aida fame) and the 80s pop legend Hazel O'Connor!

I can't wait.

A Ferret Up The Arts is at the Arts Theatre, Covent Garden.

Lovely Rita

"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.

Miss Moreno certainly is "plucky", as anecdote after anecdote about her long and often difficult life emerged. At 81, the lady is still gorgeous, svelte and sharp as a razor - she definitely looks nowhere near her actual age. Earlier this year she published her long-awaited memoir, and no holds were barred when it came to recalling how she was treated as a young Latino girl with great looks and a lot of talent entering a studio system that was still enmeshed in racial stereotyping.

"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!

"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."

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".

Of other "gentlemen" in her life, from Marlon Brando, with whom she had a six-year affair, to director Peter Glenville, whose film Summer and Smoke was the feature to follow the Q&A interview, and the film's star Lawrence Harvey (whose understanding of Tennessee Williams and the American Deep South were somewhat sketchy), her recollections were similar - none of these people knew how to handle her.

More hilarious and down-to-earth were her anecdotes about the surprisingly potty-mouthed Ann Miller, with whom she had been invited to another Hollywood party as arm candy, and what they discovered as they mischievously traipsed from bathroom to bathroom in the mansion to take a look through all of the host's medicine cabinets.

She spoke about her most famous roles with fondness - "Zelda Zanders" in Singin' in the Rain, "Tuptim" in The King and I and (of course) "Anita" in West Side Story, the part that gave her the most joy and landed her the Oscar (the first ever won by a Puerto Rican woman; she went on to be of the few people ever to win a Grammy, a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy).

After the formal interview the questions were opened to the audience, which was fun - especially when someone asked if she was now retired. "Don't be ridiculous!", she retorted. Audience interaction is evidently her forte, as when she quietly pointed out someone in the audience who had slept right through the whole hour-and-a-half, and the way she thanked people for prompting her when she occasionally got stuck recalling a name or a movie title. She impressed us all.

One reviewer described reading Rita's memoir as like "sitting on the couch and having a face to face conversation". In the green room afterwards, we discovered how true that comment was. Miss Moreno took each question Alex asked her and effortlessly used it a springboard for another of her easy-going and totally charming stories; it just felt like we were invited in to chat with her and the assembled company around the adjacent sofas.

She told us how her award-winning role as "Googie Gomez" in The Ritz was in fact a character she invented as a "party amusement" for friends - the "comedy talentless Latino". It impressed playwright Terrence McNally so much, he wrote the part around her. Her recollections of other roles, other co-stars, other times and lives could have kept us entertained all night, had she not been kept to her schedule by her loyal retinue and ushered out.

Rita Moreno is truly a wonderful lady, a grande dame of stage and screen, with a wealth of stories to tell. I am still reeling from the experience of breathing the same air as, let alone meeting, the woman who was part of this...

West Side Story - America

...and, not forgetting it is still Tacky Music Monday, this!

Rita Moreno and The Muppets - Fever

Rita Moreno on Wikipedia.

I never lost control

Many happy returns to that marvel of smoky vocals and classy soul the diminutive Lulu - (gulp) 65 years old today!

Suffice to say, I have blogged about the lady many times before so, without further ado, let us wallow in the gorgeousness of her fantabulosa collaboration with David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World...

Lulu - The Man Who Sold The World

We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend
Which came as some surprise; I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago

Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With The Man Who Sold The World

I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here
We must have died alone, a long long time ago

Who knows? not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the Man who Sold the World

Lulu Kennedy-Cairns, OBE (born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, 3rd November 1948)

Totty of the Day

Not bad for a centenarian...

"Sell yourself first, if you want to sell anything."

"I had the luck of having an obedient body."

Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster (2nd November 1913 – 20th October 1994)

An orange mini-dress?

Saturday.

Shopping.

Soft Tempo Lounge...

Soft Tempo Lounge - The Days With Suzy

[Music: The Days With Jane by The Helmut Brandenburg Orchestra]

You can go sweet talk to the wind

It's almost over (bar the shouting)...

Another weekend beckons, and it's time to glitter and sparkle!

Who better to provide the inspiration for our party outfits but those mistresses of sequins and big wigs, the fantabulosa Three Degrees? Here's their classic (and one of our faves here at Dolores Delargo Towers), from this week in 1978 - thirty-five years ago - it's Giving Up Giving In:

Three Degrees - Giving Up Giving In

Thank Disco It's Friday! Have a good one...

Three Degrees official website