magazines and books and culture

 ----------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina] --------------------

There was a whole family of Wrights...and some of the women were beauticians.  These people were very interesting to me, being a country girl.  They didn't work in the fields or any of that.  They worked in beauty shops, that was their business, and they did well, had their own homes.  

And that was when I really started to realize that there was another way of living.  Not in those little houses we had in the country, with the linoleum floors and the dirt yards, but in a neighborhood, with paving on the streets and grass lawns out front, white houses with green shutters.  

        And with nice furniture inside, and hardwood floors and carpets.  That was the first time I really saw that, what life could be like.  I was fourteen.

        But we weren't living with Florence Wright, we were living with Cousin Ella Vera, and that became hard.  You see, after my parents left, there was never any contact with either of them.  When my mother left us, she didn't send back money for food or clothes or anything, not a card or a letter.  

And when Daddy left, it was pretty much the same.  He had sent a bedroom suite along with us, and he sent money to Cousin Ella Vera for a while, but it wasn't a lot.  So we were forced to become independent.  That's when I started working for the Hendersons, a white family in Ripley.  And the Hendersons changed my life....  

        The Hendersons were typical young white people.  They'd gotten married and bought their first house - had it built for them, a nice brick place - and had a baby.  Miss Connie Henderson had been a teacher in the elementary school before she got married.  Her husband was Guy Tucker Henderson, who owned the local Chevrolet franchise in Ripley, and their baby's name was David. 

I started working for them after school, taking care of the baby and helping Miss Connie around the house.  I learned how to wash David's diapers and fold them and all that, and how to clean, how to organize things.  Before long, I was basically living with the Hendersons.  

        I'd stay with them on weekends, and on Saturday nights Mr. Guy would drive me in to the movie, and when it was over, one of them would pick me up....I was learning about this other world...with magazines and books and culture....

 

I worked for the Hendersons and I cleaned for them, but I wasn't just a maid.  I was a part of their life; I lived there.  And it was from being around them that I started thinking about marriage, and what it might be like.

 I had never thought about marriage before - not when I was living with my parents, with all their bickering and fighting.  But the Hendersons' marriage was different....And I realized that that was what I wanted, too - I wanted that kind of affection and caring and commitment.  A real romance, you know?  

        The Hendersons just being the way they were, opened my eyes.  They taught me so much, those people.  They were really like parents to me, and they corrected old patterns of mine.

       

 

{I, Tina - written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Hardcover edition published in 1986 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.  Copyright 1986, 2010 by Tina Turner.}

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big wheel keep on turnin'

 

---------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina - Tina Turner's memoir] ------------ At the Poindexters', Anna Mae [Tina Turner] caught glimpses of something that was missing in her own home - easy affection, solicitous commitment. ... But in her own home she felt frozen out, barely there.  It was more than just the pall that hung over Richard and Zelma's marriage.  They managed to find time for Alline between wrangles, it seemed.  But for Anna Mae there was little of the hearthside intimacy of a loving home life, only a grudging toleration.

        For it had been her misfortune to be the last, unwanted child of a foundering union.  As Richard and Zelma turned away from each other, their puzzled daughter, stranded in the middle, began to turn away too.  In those hours unoccupied by schooling, or later by work stints alongside her family in the cotton and strawberry fields, she took to roaming the pastures and the woodlands, searching for strength in solitude.  This, she came to suppose, was simply the way things were.

        But despair was never in her nature.  If there was pain, it would pass.  Another day would come, with a new sun to warm it.  Her life was just beginning, and as the 1940s took form she managed to pry a little girl's pleasures out of her uncomplicated backcountry world.  Despite the emotional dislocations, there was a redeeming sweetness to life then too, looking back.

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highway number 19 - the people keep the city clean

 

1939

movies:  Gone With The Wind

               The Wizard Of Oz

music:  Cab Calloway's record, "Jumpin' Jive" came out

             also - "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday

             that summer, a young black Oklahoman named Charlie Christian popped up in the Benny Goodman Sextet in New York brandishing an unsettling instrument - an electronically amplified guitar

theater:  Ethel Waters became the first black woman to star in a Broadway drama (Mamba's Daughters)

-------------------- Jane Bolin became America's first black female judge

--------------------------- black voters defied Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings to cast ballots in Miami

____________________________________

----------------------------- [excerpt] ------------------ Anna Mae Bullock [Tina Turner] was born on the morning of November 26, 1939, at Brownsville's Haywood Memorial Hospital, a two-story building whose basement was relegated to the tending of black patients.  

She was quickly transported back up Highway 19 to Nut Bush, home:  a four-room shotgun house ensconced amid the vast and bountiful Poindexter acreage.

Her father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was resident overseer on the Poindexter farm, supervising harvests and hands for the property's white owners.  

        A deacon of the Woodlawn Baptist Church, Richard (as everyone called him) was also (as everyone knew) a man in constant conflict with his wife.  Zelma Bullock, Anna Mae's mother, was a black Indian of high spirits.  

Anything but a homebody, she had been smoking cigarettes and shooting .45's since the age of ten, and was not - as Richard had come to be painfully aware - a woman to be trifled with.  

Richard and Zelma's fights, real wall-rattlers, were the dominant feature of the domestic landscape.  There was one other child at home - little Alline, almost three - and she greeted her new sister as an ally. ---------------------- [end / excerpt - I, Tina, written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Copyright 1986, William Morrow; Copyright 2010, Tina Turner]

Church house, gin house

School house, outhouse

Highway number nineteen,

The people keep the city clean

They call it Nutbush,

Oh, Nutbush,

They call it Nutbush City Limits

Nutbush City --  

Ike and Tina Turner in a 1971 television performance of "Nutbush City Limits"

Ethel Waters

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islands in an autumn stream

a poem

minute-hand of the seasons

The end of Summer and

the beginning of Autumn pass

each other with hardly a glance,

Moving inexorably forward, to

the next month, year, decade -

Oblivious of human beings' plans,

schemes, and wishes - 

bearing down on the future

with calm, terrifying equanimity

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knowledge and information

 

When we have the Internet, we can look stuff up all the time.  If I'm listening to (or watching) a TV series or a show, and I notice an actor or actress who did a particularly great job, I can pause the show, click on the "G" and look up the actor, see their life story - born in New York, one marriage or 55 marriages (whatever), what other shows they were in, what their name was originally, before they changed it for show business, etc.

        I like to do it - I like to have that information at my fingertips.  But then there's also this reality of doubt around the edges - - - is the information - correct??

Like - what good is it, if it might be wrong, right? Ha.  

Sometimes, you can "Google" something and get conflicting information.

If your phone gets wet, there are people advising you to put it in rice, the rice will soak out the moisture.

        Then, the latest thing on Google on that topic is, ----- Don't put it in rice, because the rice can leave a "starchy dust" that can turn into a "glue-like paste" that will mess up your phone.  Or - re-mess it up, because it's already messed up from being wet....

Ooooohhhhh - kay ... original mess getting - messier. ...

Not the goal.

But then again, maybe that's not true.  Maybe rice would fix the problem, but the people putting information on the Internet don't want your phone to start working again, they just want you to have to buy a new phone.

So it kind of becomes a question of - what, if anything, is actually true??

        I remember when I first began to get familiar with the Internet (in early 2000s) and I mentioned to a local veterinarian that I read something on the Internet, and she emphatically stated to me, "Don't take advice for your cat or dog from the Internet, there's a lot of bad, and wrong, information on there!"  [words to that effect]

She didn't want any animals to suffer because of lies on the Internet.

I agreed with that, and was glad she was giving that advice to people.

        The bottom line being:  'OK, there's information, but don't trust it. ...'

So - what good is it??!!

WHAT - IS - THE - POINT - ???!!!

A couple of months ago, I had a wedding to go to.  I had not been to a wedding in a long time - I looked in my closet - what am I going to wear?  I went through a couple of outfit ideas, and then thought the best idea was a simple ensemble of black slacks and pink top (plus buy some shoes to wear that aren't clunky).

        I got the shoe conundrum solved, non-clunked.... but wondered if it's OK to wear black slacks to a wedding, because I have heard you mustn't wear black to a wedding.

        But it would be black that isn't up by your face, so it isn't making any kind of negative statement, it's just slacks.

So I Googled - can I wear black slacks and a pink top to a wedding? - and "it" answered me, saying, 'You're good to go!'

So - I wore that outfit to the wedding, and I didn't get - ejected, so it worked out.

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it has a "ring to it"...

 

On The Golden Girls episodes, I started to notice that, on Betty White's left hand, on her ring finger, is a ring with a big sapphire in the middle, and surrounded by diamonds.

        It's just like Lady Diana Spencer's engagement ring from Charles, the Prince of Wales, in February of 1981.

Once I noticed it, I started watching for it, and kept seeing it.

Googled - didn't have time to read the whole thing, but yes, it's a ring like Princess Diana's.

        A headline on the Internet said that Diana's engagement ring "started a trend."

Betty White and Allen Ludden

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fashion of the early 1980s

 

        A video about then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983.  That's the year when they took their first trip to Australia.  They had been married for two years, and had their first child, Prince William - they brought him with them on the trip.

Diana's dresses:  pie-crust collars abounded!

I wanted to wear dresses like that!

        At the age I was, then, I kind of wanted to wear - everything.  Dreaming, and yearning, and wanting.  Wanting everything (well, not really, but you think  you do)....

        ---------------- Making an exception, perhaps, for the hats.  It's a British Royal Family tradition - ladies wearing hats.

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