What do you think?  Did the First Lady and her friends enjoy strawberries and champagne or beer and pretzels? You will have to read it to find out–or buy the book!

http://bookfare.blogspot.com/

Americans have always had a love affair with British Royalty, not that we ever wanted them, but we are fascinated by them–my grandmother was one of the worst.  We love their musty old castles and the pageantry, and  it was all rolled out for the Wedding of the Year as only the Brits can do it.  I wasn’t even going to watch but I got pulled right in.

While everyone looked for the Bride, I looked for the bride’s Grandmother-in-law.   She was hard not to see in her bright yellow.  No one else wore yellow, actually, no other woman even wore a bright color.  How do they do that?   And why did they pick that cheery color?  Was it to make sure the Bride did not upstage the Queen.  Well, they pulled it off, the Brits did.  They put on quite a show with the Bride glowing and  The Queen out-standing.  Did you know that the Queen and her husband share a great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria.

I have grown up to write about Sleeping Beauties–women who are busy being what they are supposed to be–and I have never seen a more perfect example, but I certainly can’t call her a Sleeping Beauty waiting to be awakened.  No, she defies the idea.  She’s a  Queen and gotten quite good at it.  Toward the end of the ceremony, when they played “God Save the Queen”, she didn’t fidget, as I might have.  No, she sat quietly, her head down,  allowing them to pay tribute to her as was her due.    When she came out on the balcony, she waved, in a somewhat bored fashion; after all, she’s done a lot of that.  After, whatever she considered an adequate time for the family to be seen by their subjects, she went in which signaled the end of that.

I must admit that I was fascinated with her.  What was she thinking?  Is she happy?  Does she worry about her family, their health and happiness or just that they don’t botch things up.  They’ve done a lot of that.  How does she feel when they aren’t being what they are supposed to be?  Does she love her subjects and her country,  or just need them because she’s a Queen?  I guess we’ll never know.

Did you know that one of her ‘Ladies in Waiting’ carries a sheep skin cover for the toilet seat when they travel?

Leave me a comment.  I would love to hear from you!

For the past five years, she has been dancing with the NETSational Senior Dance Team–hand-picked to perform a Hip Hop routine at the Nets Basketball games.  She has traveled with her dance team–all over the country– to promote a new film, Gotta Dance, which was featured at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Watch for BLOND-e with her Hip Hop Team and watch for her story on my Blog and later in The Late-Bloomer Chronicle.

I know, it’s an old, tired joke, but I like it!  Besides, there’s another way to get to Carnegie Hall–buy a ticket.  (Did you know that tickets cost $1 and $2 for the opening night on May 8, 1891?} And, it was an auspicious beginning with Peter Tchaikovsky on the program conducting his “Festival Coronation March“. ( Did you know that Tchaikovsky was so superstitious that he would hold his head on when he conducted afraid it might topple off.  Honest!!!)

Last week I used my fourth and final ticket in an International Orchestra Series I had purchased.  This one was the St. Petersburg  Philharmonic.  They featured a marvelous pianist named Nikolai Lugansky in the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.   It was an encore performance.  (Did you know that in 1909 this same concerto was performed on that very stage by Rachmaninoff, himself, and the Boston Symphony?)

A sense of wonder struck me as the musicians entered.  Here I was, a girl from Augusta, Arkansas, sitting in this famed Music Hall, watching a performance by accomplished musicians from t he beautiful cit y of St. Petersburg. Who would have ever thought it!!

I remember a few years back when I had been struck with the same wonder.  My cousin, Martha, and I had gone to the Metropolitan Museum for a  Van Gogh show and had walked down to the Plaza Hotel for lunch–on the way we had casually passed Al Pacino walking the other way.  (I had a hard time acting  nonchalant.)  At lunch,  I said, looking under the table and seeing a plug,  “Used to, when you had a call, they’d bring the phone right over to the table and plug it in,  Now, I believe they use cordless. . . . . . . . Did you ever think we’d be sitting at a table in the Plaza having lunch.”

“No, and I don’t have the slightest idea what to do with this,” she replied, holding up a fish knife.

The Plaza has changed a lot and so has Al Pacino, but the Met and Carnegie Hall remain constant.   St. Petersburg is the ‘Venice of the North’ and the  St. Petersburg Philharmonic is a proud Russian institution.

But you don’t see many fish knives around anymore.

Leave me a comment or just say ‘Hi’.  I’d love to hear from you!

But, getting to the point, last week, I told my friend about a Blog I had just read on Colette and one of her books and she, right away, ordered the book and even a CD of it in French. At the time. I was in one of my snits so I announced, “I don’t like French women writers!” She responded, “You haven’t read any!”   She had me!

George Sand

So, I googled French Women Writers.  Can you believe how many there are?  I was amazed too!  However, before I got there, I realized that I knew three, two intimately.  The first, George Sand, I had met because of the composer Frederic  Chopin–she was his lover and she liked to walk around in fancy men’s clothes.  I’ve never read her so I don’t think she counts.

The second, Christine de Pisan, I have already written about in my work, Daughters of Eve, a Herstory Book, but Christine was actually born in Italy to Italian parents, who moved to France when her father was appointed astrologer to King Charles the Wise.  I look at her as a moot point.

The third,  Simone de Beauvoir, was pure French, born in Paris and educated in French schools, including the Sorbonne.  I met her in  a graduate course in Existentialism, where  I was required to write a paper on her book/essay “The Ethics of Ambiguity“.  In it, she develops an Ethics for Existential thought which she shared with her lifetime lover and intellectual companion,  Jean Paul Sartre.  (Did you know that Sartre was not quite five feet tall?  Obviously, height has nothing to do with intellect.)

She is probably best known for her feminist writing; especially The Second Sex which is a foundation for modern feminism.  In its introduction she writes,  “woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave;  the two sexes have never shared the world in equality.”  That was a strong statement for 1949.

It struck me while writing this, that of the two French Women Writers I know–the pseudo-Christine and the bona-fide Simone–both were feminists.  Christine de Pisan/Pizan/Pissano) is considered the first feminist writer for her contribution to women of her day in The City of Ladies , and Simone de Beauvoir is considered the pre-cursor to major feminist writers of the last half of the 20th century.  I think I’ll put them both in The Late-Bloomer Chronicle, that is, if I can find enough late-bloomers to join them.

Leave me a comment–I’d love to hear from you!

Christine was married when she was 15 and widowed when she was 25.  She was left with five mouths to feed and much debt at a time when a woman of her class had two choices–to remarry or become a nun–obviously, Christine could not become a nun and shirk her responsibilities and she said that she’d had a happy marriage and did not care to enter the state again.  Fortunately for her, it was also a time in France  when Charles V the Wise was building a magnificent library and she had a talent copying manuscripts.  She would eventually be courted by the great courts of Europe for, not only her agile mind and eloquent verse, but, also a woman earning her livelihood by writing was an oddity, indeed.  Christine had the strength and determination to do what she had to do and to be what she could be.  Read more about her in my book, Daughters of Eve, a Herstory Book.