once a fair and stately palace

 

Mick Jagger; Jerry Hall

goal:  to be more like Queen Elizabeth

and

Zelensky:  "I am not afraid of you!"

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---------------- [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures -- copyright 2010, Quadrille Publishing] ------------------------

        I had very little self-esteem.  I never considered myself good-looking and at junior high, I often got bullied.  They called me 'tall Hall', and the boys used to shout 'string bean'.  I was the gawky, geeky kid who didn't quite cut it with the in-crowd.

        We had very few books at home, but at some point my father had bought the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe.  It was a Reader's Digest special and it soon became my companion.  

I memorized many of the poems and when Daddy was on the rampage, I would hide in the bushes out back and recite Poe's poems over and over while red ants bit my feet.  I could always rely on Poe to get me through hard times and I developed a love of poetry as a result.

        The idea of becoming a model started when I was invited to a house party one weekend by a friend whose parents had gone away.  A boy there gave me some LSD, without telling me what it was.  I locked myself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out.  I didn't know what was happening to me -- all I remember is that I looked at myself in the mirror and thought:  'You're really beautiful.  

You should become a model.'  It was the first time that I had ever thought that. -------------------------------------------------- [end / excerpt]

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When they were children growing up, Jerry Hall + her four sisters went to stay with their maternal grandparents every summer for three months.  In the book it says their "Granny loved going to funerals (even if she didn't know the deceased)."

In her book Jerry included a poem she wrote about this subject.  I like it -- to me, it's quite evocative.

Strangers' Funerals

My grandmother liked to go to strangers' funerals

Whenever she heard about one we would go

She used to say 'Well, so and so knew them'

And it's nice to have a good turn out

We drove in her old oldsmobile

While she was swattin' flys

To little white plankboard churches

In the middle of nowhere

Fifteen people in attendance

There was an open casket

We filed by

And looked at the dead waxen face

And listened to the sermon

Sometimes we cried

When we got back home

Our grandad was sitting

In the same spot on the porch

Rolling a cigarette

'You girls enjoy yourselves?'

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