De Amerikaanse schrijver en essayist Edmund White werd geboren op 13 januari 1940 in Cincinnati. Zie ook alle tags voor Edmund White op dit blog.
Uit: A Saint from Texas
“When I was seventeen I started planning my debut. Bobbie Jean hadn’t met a lot of “the good people,” as she called them, and I think she was planning to social climb through me. She hired Honey Mellen, a “party planner,” as she called herself, although we called her our “society coach.” The fiction was that Bobbie Jean and I were too busy to look after the million and one details involved in coining out, though the truth was we didn’t have Honey’s little green alligator-skin book of names and numbers, we didn’t know who to invite or the right florist or photographers or musicians or caterers. But Honey knew, she knew all about that—she also did weddings. It’s funny, weddings and debuts are all about getting a girl hitched to a man or at least in the right marriage sweepstakes, but both events involve women alone. Whoever heard of asking a man his opinion? At least in Texas, if not in France, women decided the kind of lace, the length of the train, the tiny buds in the tightly bound bouquet, the church, the preacher, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the reception and its hors d’oeuvres, hiring Lester Lanin’s real orchestra and some rinky-dink local band to fill in during the breaks, even if they knew how to play only “Tenderly” and Johnny Mathis’s “It’s Not for Me to Say.” We all liked Mathis. He was Texan. Sort of. Bobbie Jean told Honey the sky was the limit price-wise. She wanted her Yvonne to be properly launched in society. She and Bobbie Jean decided on the theme for my dance, “Venetian Night,” at the Brook Hollow Golf Club, complete with gondolas and men dressed in tights and straw boaters singing “0 Sole Mio,” and a Bridge of Sighs, two-thirds as large as the original, and a campanile-shaped pizza oven. Honey must have been in her forties, but energy! And she wore the trapeze look from Neiman’s, natch. Her hair was thick and wild, turbulent actually, and peroxided a platinum blonde. She wore nearly black lipstick and matching nail polish (she called it aubergine, though at that time I didn’t know that meant “eggplant”). She drove a red Cadillac convertible with fins out to here and she always kept the roof down. When it was raining she drove faster, honking all the slowpokes out of the way. She played loud colored music on the radio, music from Memphis, she called it race music. She wore a very strong perfume, dizzying really; I think it was an attar of roses, meant to be diluted to eau de cologne, but she used it full-strength and old ladies at concerts complained about it (“a real invasion of our privacy,” they muttered). She was always laughing loudly and jangling her costume jewelry bracelets, a dozen of them, bangles like a slave girl’s, as if she were on Benzedrine. She never finished a sentence but constantly interrupted herself with some new extravagance. She was never catty and never bad-mouthed her other clients, much as I tried to lure her into a good chin-wag. She was as discreet as an agent or a psychiatrist, which she was for all of us, I suppose. She always started out brimming over with excited enthusiasm for my ideas, no matter how dumb, but the way she shepherded you back to a more original concept—and the way she made you think it was your own—was truly astonishing.’
De Duitse dichter en schrijver Adrian Kasnitz werd geboren op 10 januari 1974 in Orneta, Polen. Zie ook alle tags voor Adrian Kasnitz op dit blog.
Elckerlijc
de ogen lichten op bij de geldautomaat. een gelukkige glans
die wordt weerspiegeld in de lcd. je bent jong, je ziet er goed
uit, je vindt je jurk in een hip filiaal
(zoals in elke stad). naar de city, dat is jouw gevoel
na het werk, na het eten, na de liefde. maar wat jouw
man zegt, blijft gewoon: naar de city, dat is zijn gevoel.
uit de geldautomaat vallen biljetten, jouw gunst & van jou het kraak-
verse. het papier is maagdelijk, iedereen vindt het leuk
hoe je je beweegt van boetiek naar boetiek gaat. koop je iets
leuks, een kind, zoals het lacht in de reclame, omdat de wens
gemakkelijk af te rekenen was met de gouden kaart.
een chip die jouw gegevens draagt, jouw afmetingen. jouw slip
wordt hij nat bij de aanblik van de flacons? Bij de muziek die de
warenhuis dj oplegt voor je persoonlijke cashflow?
Vertaald door Frans Roumen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 13e januari ook mijn blog van 13 januari 2019 deel 1 en eveneens deel 2.