Plus One

Typepad is back up and running.  Thanks to everyone who emailed me this morning to let me know my last few posts were missing.  I just republished them myself instead of waiting.

So I guess I'm going out tonight after all.  God bless all the boys who have figured out that the way to this girl's heart is through guest lists and free drinks.

 

Comments

[Matt]

Other Girl Fridays.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4815510

What is the origin of the name?

[Alexis]

I get a few Google hits now and then for that band.

Origin:

http://girlfriday.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/05/reader_mailbag.html

[Dave]

We read above:

"*The movie was actually made 3 other times, too: The Front Page in 1931, The Front Page again in 1974, and Switching Channels inplay 1988."

Yeah, and the dudes who wrote the original play (and screenplay) were Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, best pals and longtime collaborators on innumerable Hollywood screenplays - so much so that Hecht was, for awhile, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. He wrote Hitchcock's Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and others, along with Guys and Dolls, Wuthering Heights, September Affair, Kiss of Death, yadda yadda...

Ben Hecht worked in the same dingy office as poet Carl Sandburg at the Chicago Daily News back in the 1920s. (They were both cub reporters at the time.) Hecht also wrote a number of stories and novels, including one called Fantazius Mallare that was banned for indecency in 1922 and landed him in federal court, where he was defended by none other than Clarence Darrow. Hecht got off with a fine. The story is pretty racy and depraved, and the book has very graphic, sexual, woodcut illustrations. I have one of the original 2000 or so copies, and unfortunately I don't have a scan, but just imagine a giant woman-as-tree (bark and all), head back towards the heavens in an ecstatic pose, roots/"legs" splayed wide, with the young male protagonist, nude, copulating feverishly with her down below, along with some borderline S&M images, giant phalluses, etc. You get the idea.

Now, where were we?