Thursday, December 25, 2008

A Utah Yuletide.

Have yourself a very Morman Christmas,
Make your loafers light.
From now on our homos will be out of sight.


Have yourself a very Mormon Christmas.
Make the Yuletide gay.
If they win, our weddings will be wiped away.


Here we are, what a pity,
Salt Lake City,
Oh wow.
Faith-based friends who are queer for us,
Can't be near to us,
They vow.


Some day soon the courts will all resolve this,
If the Latter-Day Saints allow,
But till then, tell Brigham Young to screw a cow,
And have yourself a very Mormon Christmas now.



Cheers darlings.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for clarifying the true meaning of Meet me in St. Louis.
And for the non-Christian America quotes. But why is it they're never handy when you need one.

Almost as fun as the RW modality, where you lift or repeat a quote from historical icons either completely distorted or taken out of context, end with "So true!" And "Whattaya thinka' THAT!" and an encouragement to forward the email on to 10 other imbeciles.
But they mean well.

Tallulah Morehead said...

Buck darling,

There's nothing distorted about the quotes in my previous piece, although I did cut down the second Jefferson quote, as indicated by the ellipsis, as he went on rather a bit about other religions he also despised.

Jefferson is often blamed, I mean credited, with "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." He didn't write that.

What the agnostic Jefferson wrote was: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of Life and Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It was the Continental Congress, eager to have the credulous religious majority support the Declaration of Independence, that added a Creator, and fueled 2 centuries of "We are a Christian Country."

Thomas Paine's atheism was so well-known in his own time that he was denied burial in his native theocratic England.

The 18th Century was The Age of Reason, and our country was, in the main, created by a group of secular, intellectual rationalists.

As for the true meaning of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, well obviously it was about Gay Marriage. It was while making this film that Judy Garland fell in love with Vincente Minnelli, and he convinced himself he was in love with her also. That's one Big Gay Marriage right there. This then resulted the creation of Liza Minnelli, the Queen of Gay Marriage, as she's had even more gay marriages than her mom, and that took some doing.

For a real laugh, read Lorna Luft's memoir. She claims Vincente was straight (Oh please. I met the man. To borrow a phrase from Mart Crowley, he was about as straight as the Yellow Brick Road.), then on the next page practically, she talks about how Barry Manilowe was passionately in love with HER!

Judy and her daughters never met a gay man they couldn't believe was in love with them.

Thanks for dropping by. Cheers darling.

Anonymous said...

Well, you now also know when I get home from work. Sorry can’t drop in more frequently, but will try to make up for that here in volume and effort. Hope you were just stating a fact about the quotations, and not a defense; because I certainly didn’t mean to imply yours (or TJ’s) had been distorted. Only that the adjusted variety seems to have evolved into its own art form, more so with the Net.

Although I must confess to having once distorted at least one forefather quote – but does that count if it was for a cheap laugh? Spinning records on Nathan Hale’s birthday, I felt it of educational value for the listening audience to know that I had actually lived in a cottage adjacent to the Nathan Hale homestead in Coventry, Connecticut. In relating that experience, I told how Hale was hung as a spy at the age of only 21 – then having the poor judgment to speculate on air this was because, in Connecticut at the time, you weren’t allowed to hang anybody until they were at least 21. Also that, to be accurate, the man’s last words were not, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” My understanding was that, due to the unfortunate circumstances, the lad had been cut short at, “I only regret that I have but one life to l-ch-ch-ch-ch-chhhhhhhhhhh….”

In the small world department, you will probably be honored to learn that one of my closest friends, Arthur, had been pressed into service in the early 60’s as a witness to Ms. Garland’s last (or second to last?) marriage to a young actor named Mark Herron in a Las Vegas wedding Chapel. I am not making this up. I only later learned the name, because for years I had only heard the groom referred to as “some gay chorus boy.” Incidentally, the wedding was apparently quite a spontaneous development. The one other witness she dragged over to the chapel…Don Rickles. Must have looked like a scene from one of the groom’s Fellini movies.

It is also my understanding that in the Garland/Minelli tradition, a wake commemoriating her funeral earlier in the day was the event underway during the first Stonewall Riot. Given the fan-base, I do not find that any more unlikely than the fact the the senior arresting officer was a man named Seymour Pine, or that the gentleman later retired to the community of Whippany, NJ.

What brought the above to mind this weekend was Arthur’s habit of showing up Zelig/Gump-like in the strangest places. On his father’s boat with the queen mother of Siam, another voyage with King Faruk, with David Niven, Jr. and Winston Churchill, Jr. at Franco’s summer house on the Spanish Riviera…need we go on? We remembered the 60 Minutes interview with Eartha Kitt, where she was asked if there had been one great love in her life --- and she pulls out a photo of Arthur!

Incidentally, coming full circle in the small word dept., I believe Judy’s groom’s immediately prior affair had been with a certain namesake of yours, whose father had once been Speaker of the House (or was it Dancer?)

Tallulah Morehead said...

A. Buck Short said...
Well, you now also know when I get home from work."

We'll try to have all your furniture out by 5 PM then.

"It is also my understanding that in the Garland/Minelli tradition, a wake commemoriating her funeral earlier in the day was the event underway during the first Stonewall Riot."

This is correct. It was the police raiding an informal gay wake for Judy at The Stonewall Bar that sparked the riot. The drag queens were just trying to mourn Judy in their own way when the pigs intruded, and that was THE LAST STRAW. They had had enough, and these drag queens fought back. The Stonewall riots and the funeral for Judy are inextricably linked.

Ah Mark Herron, one of Judy's gayest husbands, and that is saying something. Judy at least, alternated her gay husbands with straight ones. Certainly neither David Rose nor Sid Luft were remotely gay, nor Artie Shaw for that matter, though she didn't marry him. In fact, they were so straight that even being married to Judy couldn't turn them.

Must have something to do with Daddy Issues, as Judy, like Liza, had a gay dad.

I have to ssume that by "a certain namesake of yours" you are referring to that shameless copycat Tallulah Bankhead, whose father was indeed Speaker of the House from 1936 to 1040. I can find no evidence that Mark Herron, nor Judy's actual last husband, Mickey Deans, were ever involved with Tallulah Bankhead. As it happens, I have Joel Lobenthal's book TALLULAH: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A LEADING LADY lying here beside me, purchased in the mistaken belief it was about me. (It has a very misleading title.) Neither Herron's nor Deans's names appear in the index. Nor are they in Bankhead's autobiography, although it was published back in the early 1950s, so it would be before she didn't know them.

So I'd need a source to believe that Miss Bankhead was ever involved with Mark Herron or Mickey Deans.

It says on the IMDb that Judy's wedding to Mark Herron was performed in Mandarin by a Bhuddist monk, which would be unusual at a Las Vegas wedding chapel. I find this stretches my credulity. What says Arthur to this?

Such a tangled web. Thank heaven my life was so uncomplicated.

Cheers darling.

Tallulah Morehead said...

William Bankhead was, of course, Speaker of the House from 1936 to 1940, not 1040, as he wasn't Benjamin Button and did not live backwards, let alone survive for 900 reverse years.