I Want to Live!

Live on, Roxie! Live on! Live I say -- damn you, LIVE!!! -- Historiann, 6/30/09

Oh, dear. What can a dying dog say to that, the cri de coeur of a beloved, if virtual, friend? What to say, in a week when feelings are raw because one cannot turn around without hearing news of yet. another. celebrity. death? It won't do merely to say that Moose finally returned from her trip to the remote kingdoms of Illinois and Indiana this evening to find me alive and, if not exactly well, at least, well, ALIVE! That was a happy occasion for all the denizens of Roxie's World, but Historiann's passionate exhortation seems to call for something more. We called in the archivists who work for our Task Force on Divas and Drama Queens and ordered them to comb through their cahiers du cinéma until they found some moment of death-defying Diva-hood that seemed to match the feisty mood here in the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC. Many hours and several bottles of absinthe later, the kids in black emerged from their smoky lair to say that they had found just the thing:

Susan Hayward, chewing the scenery on her way to winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for 1958's I Want to Live!, a grim film based on a true story that shows being slutty and running with the wrong crowd can get you the death penalty. (Hey, Historiann, we think there might be a Lessons for Girls in this flick!) Anyway, here's a clip that shows a defiant Barbara Graham settling in to life in the slammer. We're a little disappointed that Barbara's bold nonconformity apparently doesn't extend to imagining the possibility of engaging in some criminal intimacy with the dames with whom she is incarcerated, but it's fun to watch her get a rise out of the two dour prison matrons who seem to have invested considerable energy in imagining and thwarting such intimacies. (We actually like this clip even better, but it's not embeddable. And here's the original trailer for the film for those of you who somehow managed to miss the best films of 1958.) You go, Barbara. If they're going to put you to sleep, let 'em know you're gonna sleep raw. I think I'll keep that in mind, thank you very much.



All the bitches are back in the pack, kids. Thanks for all the good thoughts. And, tell me, were we the only ones who were really, truly, deeply disappointed that this "statement" from Jenny Sanford, first lady of South Carolina, blaming her husband's infidelity on gay marriage turned out to be a parody? I am sorry, people, but some things are just so funny that they really ought to be true. You try to keep that in mind, okay? Peace out.