Retro Radar - Vintage Living at its Best! » Dixie-Land

DOUBLE DIP

the editor — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:53:25 +0000

Thanks for the Mammaries
By Dixie Feldman, Contributing Writer

The fabulously flat-chested Myrna Loy

One of my favorite things about classic films is the soothing normalcy of all the bosoms. In the Golden Age of Hollywood there was a reassuring diversity and sanity where breasts were concerned. Sure, in the Fifties we were treated to some pneumatic marvels, but for every Jayne Mansfield there was an Audrey Hepburn. These days, popular culture gives us just one ice cream flavor, and in two superhuman scoops.

Today when you’re graded on your curves no one wants an A , cup, that is. We live in a world where a D-plus means you’re far from failing, and perfectly adorable little bosoms are wilting under waves of public apathy and their owner’s own self-loathing. While many men will quote the great Will Rogers by proclaiming they’ve ‘never met a breast they didn’t like,’ the truth is we’ve all lately been schooled to believe chests must be super-sized to make the grade.

Nowadays there are humungous boobies everywhere you turn. They bob in and out of blouses like two bald men on a raft, they protrude from billboards, and they say a fuzzy, pixilated hello every time robotically wild girls dutifully lift their shirts from the streets of New Orleans to the sands of Ft. Lauderdale.

It’s almost impossible to tell the women’s magazines from the men’s magazines, or from those on photography, music, fitness or motorcycles. Periodicals of every description have at least one pair of breasts pushing up, peeking out, or playfully handheld by their coy celebrity owner. So why are newsstands hawking the hardly newsworthy, secondary sex characteristics found on half the populace? Why do movie posters bludgeon us senseless with hefty preternatural chests that stretch credulity as much as sweaters? (Remember the poster for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer? I still don’t know how Jennifer Love Hewitt was able to stand erect, much less fend off a psychotic killer.) Why do physicians who presumably champion healthy physiognomy place ad after ad suggesting your average-sized breasts are in desperate need of slicing open? Just when did such big boobies become such big business?

Classic starlets from Mansfield to Hepburn prove beautiful women come in all cup sizes.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like bosoms as much as the next guy. (Some of my best friends are breasts.) I recognize that sex sells. I even understand that our economy is built on building up insecurities and seducing us to purchase what we don’t have and now desperately need. Fine. Breasts good. No problem. My problem is not with bosoms but with the domination of these large, largely fake, manufactured mock mammaries. Mass media and the proliferation of pornography on VCRs and the Web have acclimated the population to see and expect a fabrication of female form that rarely really exists. Slim women with two mammoth mounds of fat protruding from their svelte carbo-scoffing bodies are no stranger to the scalpel. Big ole tetherballs tethered fixed and firm on otherwise pliable God-given frames inundate us day in and out, so much so that when a real bosom sheepishly rears its silicone-free heads it appears inadequate and even weird.

Most television ta-tas are cantilevered into Wonderbras or so surgically amplified that there’s nary a flat chest left on the flat screen. In shows like Baywatch and their ilk, there’s likely more saline on the beach than in the ocean. Pamela Anderson and her V.I.T.s have left us thinking the caricature is the norm. Now lovely ladies from nine to ninety are wanting breasts up to snuff, padding themselves with those flesh-colored, chicken cutlet-y inserts you buy at drugstores or disfiguring their figures with sacs with a twenty-year shelf life.

While it’s fitting that breasts be appreciated, even celebrated, that celebration turns sour when respect is replaced by an irreverent drive to build a better mantrap. These features great and small are wonderful even when they’re Wonderbra-less. Breasts are fantastic just the way they are. The real miracle is not to be found in a Miracle Bra, but in the gorgeous, genuine variety of fabulous flesh in the mammary mosaic.

Dixie Feldman is a writer and public speaker, television personality, and die-hard retrophile. She is currently working on a book about The Lost Art of Being a Dame.

MEMORIES OF MOM

the editor — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 22:11:17 +0000

Or: Why Finding Closure Isn’t for the Birds
By Dixie Feldman, Contributing Writer

Mama Peggy and her rootin' tootin' offspring

I’d like to talk about my mother, and a parrot named Butch. But I’d first like to tell you why my mom was way, way better than us. Well, way better than me.She was also the kind of mother that left space for you to be yourself. For example, when it came to clothing, Mom was the classy type who once told me her favorite color was taupe. I, on the other hand, never met a rhinestone I didn’t like. Whenever we were shopping together we had an expression we’d use whenever one of us held up an item for the other’s inspection. “Isn’t this shirt cute?” I might say.

“I wouldn’t choose it for myself,” she’d charitably reply. And in turn when she invariably held up what as far as I was concerned might as well have been a burlap sackcloth, I’d answer, “I wouldn’t choose it for myself.’ And we’d each go on to buy our tawdry and tasteful frocks, respectively.

Mom was the kind of person who:

* Found a $20 bill on the floor in the mall and took it immediately to the nearest store where she turned it in to the cashier, “in case anyone comes back looking for it.”
* Would buy a second teddy bear for her car’s backseat window so the first one “wouldn’t feel lonely.” (OK, that I’d do, too.)
* Let her children have Jiffy-Pop and those little hors d’oeuvres pizzas for dinner on Saturday nights.
* Celebrated Valentine’s Day with gifts delightfully inappropriate for small children. (I still have the glamorous bottle of Calandre perfume I got when I was six.)

Peggy in her prime.

These examples speak of some of the things I most cherish about mom: her unfailing honesty, and her attentiveness to the really important things in life, important things like holidays, and the well-being of stuffed animals.

Even though I’m the kind of person some folks generously call “a character,” Mom always let me do my own thing, no matter how wacky, or unsettling. When I was a teenager Mom didn’t worry that I listened to Alice Faye instead of REO Speedwagon. She didn’t balk when I wore thrift store nightgowns to school, or plucked my eyebrows into Harlow-like oblivion. Mom wasn’t fazed when I had dozens of adult pen pals I’d met through the “Nostalgia Book Club” (a fine organization I’d encountered in the back of TV Guide.)

RetroRadar Editor Leslie Thompson with Dixie Feldman in her Manhattan abode

But it wasn’t just that Mom didn’t flinch at my unrelenting nuttiness, she was also really supportive well beyond the call of maternal duty. One summer she drove an hour to North Miami nearly every week so I could pick up one of a succession of hideous objets d’art I kept winning from this late night movie trivia contest on local TV. The first time we went to pick up the indescribable lampesque item I’d won, the store didn’t believe 14-year-old me was the Miss Feldman who’d known so much about Adolphe Menjou. When they questioned my authenticity Mom indignantly defended me, saying “Go ahead! Ask her, ask her anything!” To this day I don’t know when I’ve ever felt as button-poppingly proud.

Mom also supported my old movie jones by letting me stay up late to watch one of my favorites–and on rare occasions even stay home from school. Sometimes when I was very young she’d let me stay up past the “Wonderful World of Disney” to watch a socially relevant movie. This is how little girl me came to see Patch of Blue with Sidney Poitier, The Diary of Anne Frank, and, inexplicably, Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Our own Craig Thompson gets his teeth cleaned by a member of Dixie's menagerie

The Birds was scary, but The Diary of Anne Frank was scarier. It made a big impression on me, maybe because Mom had always made sure to impress upon us the tragedy of the Holocaust and spoke of her own family that perished during the War. After seeing the movie I dropped my previous imaginary friend, “Susie Chindergarten,” like a hot potato for my new non-fictional pal, Anne Frank. In retrospect, this turned out to be a mistake, as it’s hard to ask for sympathy, or complain about the horrors of recess, when your confidante is Anne F. Still, there was something comforting about my imaginary friend, this sad, sweet, silent companion who accompanied me everywhere like an invisible little black balloon.

Though I’m older and have outgrown a need for secret friends, I haven’t outgrown needing and wanting my mommy. Now that Mom’s lustrous soul has trailed Anne’s into some softer, sweeter world I have to face this new mommyless world where the sun will shine not quite as bright, I will sing not as often, and where Christmas can never be the same. But I’m comforted knowing that Mom is comfortable, finally, in a better, brighter place. And I now have a new hidden friend in whom I can reliably confide and find solace. I feel that Mommy will always be here with me, for me, when I need a friend. When I need my mommy.

There’s something primal about the word “Mommy.” It seems like a small, childish word, but there’s something there that’s deep and enormous and eternal. And sometimes, when life is like the ocean–rough, and salty, and threatening to pull you under–you can feel like you’re floundering in a vast sea that’s scary and deep and dark. But then something huge and smooth rises from beneath to lift you to a dry, safe shore. Some people call that glossy big-ness “God.” (Sometimes I call it God.) But always–that gentle, loving hand FEELS like–feels like “Mommy.”

The comfort of a mommy–and the longing for a mommy–is powerful, unalterable and universally understood. The words Ma, Mama, Mommy are the heart’s Esperanto, transcending time and culture. And perhaps more.

Which brings me to my parrot, Butch.

Like my Mom, I am utterly, constitutionally incapable of buying just one of something I like. She bought shirts in every color–me, I have five parrots. Butch is one of them, a talkative African Grey whose conversations are primarily confined to cashews and admonishing my dog, Lulu. But he also says important things, like “Good boy,” “Hello!” and “I love you.” But, as I sat and tried to write words that might sum up how I feel to be without my beautiful, beautiful mother, I found I couldn’t come up with anything truer than the words Butch says whenever I leave the room. These words tick loudly like a Metronome in my brain, and wail incessantly from deep inside my chest. Butch implores, over and over, “Where’s Mommy?” “Where’s Mommy???”

And Butch says something else. From the bathroom and the hallway outside my front door I hear this sad, simple message. I repeat it now, with all my heart:

Goodbye Mommy. I love you.

Dixie Feldman is a prolific writer and public speaker, popular television personality, and die-hard retrophile. She is currently working on a book about The Lost Art of Being a Dame.

BOTTOMS UP

the editor — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:12:44 +0000

Don’t Be So Cheeky
By Dixie Feldman, Contributing Writer

Esther Williams looked super sexy even with all her curves demurely covered.

One of the many things I cherish about “old movies” is the way their denizens are refreshingly clothed. This era of scantily clad Britneys and Christinas is enough to make one pine for the soothing subjection of a burka. My classic movie heroines can always be counted upon to do their livin’ and lovin’ without the alarming possibility of me glimpsing their hoohas dangling above my head like the Sword of Damocles. Amazingly, stars like Irene Dunne and Esther Williams always remained delectably dressed, with no danger of my ever having to see either squirm, writhe or crawl oily and half-naked.

But today, just when you thought the fashionistas had exhausted body parts to expose and espouse, it has uncovered yet another way for those with long legs and short attention spans to demonstrate their appeal. Take a walk through any suburban shopping mall, and you’ll notice “buttage” has become the new cleavage, as the behind leads the way in a relentless parade of cheeks peeking out over the top of their inadequate denim prisons. Forget hemlines rising or falling, the only thing dipping these days is waistlines.

Tsk, tsk, Tara. The leading ladies of Hollywood's Golden Era relied on talent, not tailbones.

Of course low-rise pants’ ubiquitous buttage also means miles of midriff. Has anyone ever seen Tara Reid in public without an expanse of precariously pubic flesh on display? This eternally disheveled four-minutes-twenty-seven-seconds-and-counting-on-the-fame-o-meter “It Girl” is clearly smitten with her belly and throws her midsection’s paunchlessness in our faces in a seemingly bottomless array of bottoms hovering mesmerizingly close to her starlet crotch. But then why shouldn’t lithe, little Tara celebrate this all too transient window of midriff-exposing opportunism? Since the brevity of her outfits is eclipsed only by her even briefer moment in the spotlight, why shouldn’t she take full advantage of this fortuitous convergence of scanty fame, scantier clothing,and the scantiest of all, the sweet waistline of youth.

If these grapes seem awfully sour, well, you’re probably right. The rise of low-rise pants is fine if you’re young, super-skinny, and not averse to having strangers picture placing a tiny cocktail umbrella in the crevice of your bum. (Okay, maybe that’s just me.) However, if you’re in the 99th percentile of females who don’t always feel lucky in their Lucky Brands, you’re likely to feel rear ended by the buttage juggernaut.

Irene Dunne kept her pants up and still managed to snag Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.

Nowadays, women whose hips are freakishly wider than their waists (imagine!) are somehow driven to wear clothing that is at best unflattering, and at worst, faintly obscene. I’m personally reluctant to wear my pants ultra-low. Not only will my legs put one in mind of a dachshund, these low-slung waistlines are designed to give one hips, and Mother Nature has already beaten them to it.

But thanks to Fashion’s torso totalitarianism, a woman without hip-huggers looks hopelessly un-hip. Thank goodness designers’ mercurial dictates have decreed the high waisted pant “in” for fall. (Why do they always say “pant” instead of pants?) While the hip and hipless will likely keep their crotch-hugging trousers, the rest of us fleshier females can now emerge from our closets with our dignity and our chic intact. We can once again look forward to a bright future behind us.

Dixie Feldman is a prolific writer and public speaker, popular television personality, and die-hard retrophile. She is currently working on a book about The Lost Art of Being a Dame.