Month: March 2010

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Dodo

When I was in library school (today the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, a.k.a. the iSchool), I met an extraordinary woman named Dorothy Reddington, whose close friends called her Dodo. Now I had always thought that “Dodo” was a negative term, i.e., “as dumb as a dodo,” but she assured me it was an affectionate abbreviation for Dorothy. In fact, she was so comfortable with the nickname that she had her own postcards printed. She sent this one from England, with the note, “I have 400 of them (4 varieties) so I’ll be using them for some time to come.” Dorothy is no longer with us, tragically to those who knew her, but her postcard surfaced the other day, and I share it with you now. Her spirit lives.

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Quickness

Sumo, David Benjamin’s revised and updated version of his Joy of Sumo, is as irreverent and delicious a read as was the original. I share an early passage from a chapter in which he is discussing the four basic sumo body types — Jocks, Hippos, Butterballs, and Cabdrivers:

“Nobody would ever beat Hippos if they could get out of their own way. The TV commentators regularly gush about Hippos being ‘quick’ for their size — a questionable assertion when you realize that no one has really put together a sample group of 500-pound people to find out how quick they are… With Hippos, quickness is the issue, because it’s what they ain’t got. Yamamotoyama, for instance, in terms of sheer mass, is four people, and he’s only got two legs. Try getting four people to move together in a hurry and you have a sense of your average Hippo’s mobility. There are escalators that are shiftier.”

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Alas

The ill-fated Russian royal family, Emperor Nicholas II with Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and their children, Livadia, 1914, on the eve of the Russian Revolution that would take their lives. Photo from the studio of Levitsky and Co., with thanks to Dr. Melissa Conway.

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Career Path

“So if you were an astronomy student, I don’t really understand… How did you become a sniper?”

“I started shooting people.”

— From City of Thieves (2008) by David Benioff, a book that combines the siege of Leningrad, chess, ice skating, the preparations for a wedding reception, and poetry, all quite logically. And it provided the inspiration for the naming of The Courtyard Hounds.

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“I Dreamed I Played Chess…”

The Maidenform Bra “I Dreamed” campaign was launched in 1949 and ran for 20 years, making it one of the longest running campaigns in the history of advertising. The print ads featured models in situations that ranged from everyday to bizarre, happily wearing a Maidenform bra. This was the “chess” entry:

“I’m the darling of the chess-set. Pawns, knights, even kings watch my every move. For whether I’m the White Queen or the Black, I rule the board in my Maidenform Bra.”

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Inside Books

One of the things I love about used books, old books, is the treasures you find in their pages, not just the wealth of the book itself, but the scraps of paper used as bookmarks, or items the previous owner felt belonged with the book. Below, recently found tucked into a book about Albert Schweitzer, this snapshot from May of 1957…

… and on the back, in very neat handwriting, blue pen, “With Arlene Francis on the ‘Home Show’ (a few years ago) is Erica Anderson who had just come back from a trip to Lambarene.”

It does not hurt that once, on a tour of Radio City, I saw Arlene Francis live, doing her show, from a glassed-in balcony over the studio.