Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Mae West: Today in Austin

MAE WEST made the front page in Australia on Tuesday, 30 May 1950. This tantalizing tidbit was featured in The Argus and elsewhere.
• • Las Vegas, Monday: Mae West will open soon a gambling restaurant — casino in Las Vegas. Her lawyer Charles Catt, announced today that Mae West would be a featured attraction in the casino's floor shows.
• • The "Mae West Revue" was not assembled until a few years later, however, it's clear Mae was mulling over her prospects.  Aware that there were opportunities for live entertainment in Nevada's big rooms, the performer was putting out feelers in 1950.
• • On Wednesday, 30 May 2012 in Texas • •
• • "Myra Breckinridge" starring Mae West will be screened at The Alamo Drafthouse Ritz today.  The event is hosted by their local drag diva Rebecca Havemeyer, whose birthday it is.  Havemeyer disclosed that tonight is the last of Celluloid Handbag (locals must know what that is) and also reported, "Two years ago we screened this movie and the walls nearly went up in flames of joy and amazement.  You will regret missin' this one. Trust."
• • WHERE: Alamo Drafthouse Ritz: 320 E 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701
• • WHEN: at 7:00 pm this evening on May 30th.    
• • Dave Apollon [23 February 1897 — 30 May 2003] • •
• • Born in Kiev, Russia on 23 February 1897, Dave's foreign accent and sentence structure were so striking that Mae West knew how to increase his comic capital when they worked together during 1922 in the ill-fated “Ginger Box Revue” (slated to open at the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square).
• • In “Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It,” Mae described her first encounter with Dave during the "Ginger Box" debacle.
• • Mae West wrote, “At a rehearsal of this show I first met Dave Apollon. He had just arrived in this country, after some hardships, and was in the show. He was a fine mandolin player and Russian dancer. I first saw him dressed in a very tight-fitting green tweed suit that looked as if it had been made for a smaller brother, high button shoes, and a high Hoover collar. He was short but slender, with a round elf’s face, and a turned-up nose over a mocking mouth. He had a sour-cream heavy Russian accent, and a very amusing way of expressing himself in a fractured English almost like double-talk. Dave was very funny, I thought, but in the show he just played the mandolin and did a short dance. I couldn't help being amused by him and I would have him come to me so that I could ask him questions just to hear him mangle the language. I would try not to laugh out loud, just inwardly, and somehow everything became funnier that way. When Dave Apollon would start talking it would break me up inside. He’d ask, ‘Whut suz funnik I'm saying please to tell me?’”
• • Dave Apollon died in Las Vegas during the month of May — — on 30 May 1972.  He was 75.
• • On Wednesday, 30 May 2007 • •
• • Christie's held this auction of a Mae West movie collectible in New York City, Rockefeller Plaza on Wednesday, 30 May 2007.
• • A costume design for Mae West, circa 1970s, by Edith Head possibly for "Sextette" [1978]. The sketch of this elegant pink gown is pictured in the auction booklet. A collector paid $900 to possess it.
• • In Her Own Words • •
• • Mae West said: "A man has more character in his face at 40 than at 20 — — he has suffered longer."  
• • Quote, Unquote • •
• • An article by a movie maven discussed Mae West.
• • Molly Haskell wrote: Mae West, the blond, diamond-studded, wisecracking, sashaying vamp from Brooklyn who lit up the stage in the 1920's and the screen in the 30's with a special brand of gender-bending sexuality, still defies categories and refuses to be conscripted into any one ideological army. The salty double-entendres, delivered with the drawling voice and rolling hips, have been recycled by a thousand female impersonators, but she was already there. As early as 1934 she was being called (by a writer in Vanity Fair) "the greatest female impersonator of all time."  . . .
• • Source: Article: "Mae West's Bawdy Spirit Spans the Gay 90's" written by Molly Haskell for The N.Y. Times; published on 15 August 1993 
By the Numbers • •
• • The Mae West Blog was started seven years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 2316th blog post. Unlike many blogs, which draw upon reprinted content from a newspaper or a magazine and/ or summaries, links, or photos, the mainstay of this blog is its fresh material focused on the life and career of Mae West, herself an American original.
 
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Mae West • 1978 • •
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