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in dreams begin (ir)responsibilities
Aug. 20th, 2007 03:18 pmI week or two ago brought my personal rediscovery of Eric Schaal’s photos of Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus surrealist funhouse at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Ingrid Schaffner’s book of that title illustrated by Schaal’s photographs (Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus) has sent me back to Lewis Kachur’s Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations., with my response to the whole probably prepared for by the Surrealist Design show and catalogue from last May in London. But I discovered Schaffner’s 2002 book because I had saved a leaflet announcing the first exhibition of Schaal’s photos, one of the many pieces of paper being cleaned out of my desk preparatory to a complete office makeover.
Perhaps because of exposure to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in adolescence, or maybe Brecht later on, I find myself reading famous events in terms of the minor characters. What were the later life histories of the young women who cavorted semi-nude (or not so semi-) in Dali’s enterprise, which he renounced at the last minute as an unworthy travesty of his original scheme? (He must have been foreseeing its 1940 version, which featured a tangle with an amorous octopus.)
Google searches do not locate the Living Liquid Ladies, who would be ninety or so if any of them are still living. What became of Betty Kuzmeck, of Kelcey Carr, of Eileen Mitchell or Mary Spence Francis, both of whom did stints as the unclad sleeping Venus who gave the pavilion its name? They were interviewed and were sometimes wittily eloquent, else we wouldn’t know their names (unless the payroll books are somewhere in the archives). And then they disappear from history.
I had thought jokingly, “Maybe they found postwar jobs as mermaids at Weeki Watchee,” so I was delighted later that day to tune in to an NPR story on the travails and plucky survival of that vintage Florida tourist attraction, the Spring of Live Mermaids that also required swimmers with glamor and stamina.
Perhaps because of exposure to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in adolescence, or maybe Brecht later on, I find myself reading famous events in terms of the minor characters. What were the later life histories of the young women who cavorted semi-nude (or not so semi-) in Dali’s enterprise, which he renounced at the last minute as an unworthy travesty of his original scheme? (He must have been foreseeing its 1940 version, which featured a tangle with an amorous octopus.)
Google searches do not locate the Living Liquid Ladies, who would be ninety or so if any of them are still living. What became of Betty Kuzmeck, of Kelcey Carr, of Eileen Mitchell or Mary Spence Francis, both of whom did stints as the unclad sleeping Venus who gave the pavilion its name? They were interviewed and were sometimes wittily eloquent, else we wouldn’t know their names (unless the payroll books are somewhere in the archives). And then they disappear from history.
I had thought jokingly, “Maybe they found postwar jobs as mermaids at Weeki Watchee,” so I was delighted later that day to tune in to an NPR story on the travails and plucky survival of that vintage Florida tourist attraction, the Spring of Live Mermaids that also required swimmers with glamor and stamina.
