Looking, looking

I would have included 'dress-ups' in my 'Harmless Hobby' series, but I didn't like the look of those asps!

Yep, tell Theda Bara she can stop looking, she's in Fanny the Flying Housewife & other stories too!

Her poem's in the previous post.

Shameless Self-Promotion

WHO WAS

FANNY the FLYING

HOUSEWIFE ?

*

A sample can be found in an earlier post about Josephine Baker, & here are another couple to tempt you ... but that's all, now you'll just have to borrow a copy from a Brisbane Library or request your own for the paltry sum of $AUD20 by posting a suitably grovelling message!

'Kiss me, My Fool'

Theda Bara, silent film actress, 1885 — 1955

she spoke not one word

in a dozen years on the screen

this all-new 1914 model

for a Hollywood tired

of sweet innocence

the original vamp

woman as bloodsucker

eyes like smudgepots

let her studio bosses

promote a Cincinnati girl

as a Middle Eastern Beauty

and hint that her name was

an anagram of 'arab death'

instead of short for

Theodosia (God's gift)

this clever girl

knew just what to reveal

and what to veil

always let the text

do the talking

Persistence of vision

Olive Cotton, Photographer, 1911 — 2003

no snapshot for the life

of a woman who never stopped

framing images in her mind's eye

in twenty years away from the darkroom

a tent her first chosen home

with laughing children playing

in a dry creek bed

deep in the backlit bush

a woman with suitcases

filled with negatives

watching for the moment

when the sky was just right

who never thought to see the day

she'd step out of the shadow

set galleries aglow

indirect light still eloquent under her hands

and focus deep enough

to illuminate a soul