Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
I once applied and interviewed at a bookstore cafe for a barista position. It was way closer to my home, and I had almost a decade of experience working in a coffee shop at that point.
Got to the interview, and it turned out they didn’t want a barista, they wanted someone to spearhead their new cafe, as the cafe that had been in the store before didn’t want to resign their lease with the bookshop. They wanted to put their own cafe in its place, all new menus etc. They needed someone experienced to train their new staff, to handle window displays, to communicate with the bookstore owners about changes and needs of the cafe, to be able to handle inventory and ordering.
Okay, I had basically done most of that stuff at my previous job. I asked if cafe positions would also be required/trained to work the bookstore.
They would. They would be required to run the book sale counter, stock and reshelf books, and help bookshop customers find things. They would also–despite having an outside cleaning company–have to help maintain bathroom cleanliness. They’d have to take out trash, and clean spills, and vacuum.
Wow, that’s a lot, I said. Is this a manager’s position, then?
No, I was told, it wasn’t, but there was a chance that after a training period it might become one. And that made me pause, because I’d been working as the front-of-house manager at my cafe, and I knew how much work that entailed, and what kind of money I was making, and it was only the commute that had me looking for a new job.
So I asked what the job paid.
$8. E I G H T D O L L A R S. Per hour. Barely above minimum. For all of that work. For someone they expected to get an entirely new cafe up and running, and then also do the work of the bookstore and the cleaning company as well.
I thanked the woman for the interview, said I’d have to talk to my significant other about the impact a four dollar pay cut would have on our finances, and that I wasn’t sure it was the job for me. She asked me to sleep on it, and she’d call me the next day.
This is a job I was way more than qualified for. I had years of experience doing exactly the things they wanted. It was a convenient location, close to my home–I could walk there if I absolutely had to. I did not go home and talk about that four dollar pay cut and what it would do to our finances. I knew as soon as she told me that not only was it not feasible for us, it was downright insulting. That little money? For a frankly ridiculous list of responsibilities and expectations?
She called back the next day. I thanked her again, and told her in no uncertain terms that my time was worth way more than what they were offering.
And whenever people bitch about Millennials being lazy, not spending money, not buying houses…whatever the complaint of the month is…I think about the very nice lady who conducted this interview, and how confused she was that I didn’t want the job.
just saw a video of a man chasing a woman down an alley at night claiming she was only scared/running because he was black lmao……like the first thing we teach ourselves as girls is how to protect ourselves against being raped/murdered!! no fucking wonder she was running!! you’re a man at night!! thats the fuckin problem!!
Irrational fear of men is why she was running, not irrational fear of black people? That doesn’t make it better.
You say that as if that justifies the guy chasing her down like that doesn’t give her a good reason why she was scared in the first place lmao
men: *chase random women down the alley late at night*
This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren.
Thanks to AD Michelle Mruk!
this is beautiful
So I keep wanting to reblog Cyborg Matriarch here, but I keep losing track of her.
Relatable FE Quote or Something 