“True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.” — John Waters

Posted on April 22, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

To anyone who is old, like myself, and into subversive art, like myself … watching John Waters becoming an elder statesman of mainstream cinema has been not only hilarious but GOOD AND RIGHT, as my friend Jackie says when she comes across something satisfying. “That is good and right.” He basically stormed the castle. Or … he just hung around across the moat, observing the goings-on inside the castle with a glint in his eye – seeing all – and he basically just lived long enough to stroll across the drawbridge. He himself laughs about this. Like, his movies are on Criterion now. In the ’70s, this would have been an outrageous thought. Well, there wasn’t a Criterion then. But still.

John Waters is steeped in the Golden Age of cinema – he has seen everything, knows every shot, every color scheme, he knows the biographies of everyone involved in every single movie ever made – and so he took all of that, every single thing he absorbed, and made these outrageous exploitation films which were his OWN versions of classic Hollywood films. He was making “women’s pictures” and melodramas and musicals, starring the outlaws of the world. He is a true independent.

John Waters is the Poet Laureate of Jayne Mansfield. I wouldn’t trust any other guide. The special features of Criterion’s release of Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It includes an interview with Waters, and I wish it was 4 hours long.

He refers to himself as a “filth elder”, and seems to get such a kick out of showing up at retrospectives of these fancy establishment places, like MoMA and the Academy Museum.

It’s good and right.

“We have to make it cool to be poor again. When I was young we wanted to kill the rich.” — John Waters

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“After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!” — Bettie Page

Posted on April 22, 2026 by sheila

“I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.” — Bettie Page

It’s her birthday today.

There are probably as many photographs of Bettie Page as there are of Marilyn Monroe. In the pin-up world, there is no one who even comes close. What was it about Bettie Page that elevated her above others? Why the myths, why the decades-long (and counting) adoration and fascination? This gets into one of my primary obsessions, and that is: charisma, star power, the blend of exhibitionism and withholding that all the great stars had (and have, although it’s rarer today, in our more literal and explicit era). When you blend “come and get me” with “you’ll never have me totally” – and both of these are organic and true to the person exuding them – that’s star power.

Bettie Page’s comfort with nudity (she often said she considered joining a nudist colony) is part of her appeal, because there is no shame in it. We don’t feel like she was being exploited. We don’t worry about her, and so we can just relax and enjoy her. There’s a famous story about Page getting arrested, along with a little camera crew, during an outdoor photo shoot. The charge was “indecent exposure.” Page protested. Not the fact of her arrest – she knew that was a risk she always took – but the word “indecent.” There was nothing “indecent” about nudity. One of her most famous quotes was the one in this post’s title. It was the DEVIL who made nudity sinful, not God. So why in God’s name (literally) was humanity taking the Devil’s side? THINK about it.

This question still needs asking.

Page said, “I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times. I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”

She experienced many traumatic events in her life, including rape. There were the photographers who loved and valued her (who stood in line to photograph her: she was the perfect subject), and those who were assholes. Page came up rough. She knew there were good appreciative men and bad mean men. She did her best to avoid the latter. The bondage shoots she did were not her thing, but they paid well, which meant she had a little bit more freedom to do the kinds of photos she liked doing.

Page got out of modeling when she was in her 30s, and then proceeded to have a harrowing time of it for many decades, including 10 years in a mental institution. Her life as a model was a Paradise on Earth compared to what came after. She then had a conversion experience and became very religious. Her newfound spiritual devotion did not lead her to renounce her past (as often happens). She accepted her past, and felt gratified that she still had so many fans across so many generations. But she chose almost-total seclusion in her later years. She didn’t want her fans’ fantasies of her to be ruined. She understood the power of fantasy, and how fantasy can actually be life-giving, life-affirming, a positive thing.

Her collaboration with pin-up photographer and pin-up model Bunny Yeager resulted in some of the most famous photographs of Page: the ones with the cheetah, the ostrich, the ones of Page splashing in the ocean, her gorgeous shapely legs kicking up into the air.

You can almost hear her laughing. I wrote about Bunny Yeager here. Here they are, Bettie Page totally chill, bookended by cheetahs. She’s like Snow White.

More of Yeager’s photos of Page:

It was through Bunny Yeager that Bettie Page got the 1955 Playboy centerfold. A major moment, but it was the moment right before Page stepped away.

Back to my initial point:

The secret of her enduring appeal is that – despite her obvious charms and beauty and vividness of expression – there is still a secret about it. Charisma is never easily explained. It’s like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 definition of pornography (speaking of which): You know it when you see it. Charisma is natural. It exists. Cats have charisma, for example. Cats have perfected the “come hither + yet also stay away” alchemy. But charisma can also be cultivated. Cultivated charisma can only exist in someone who, to some degree, knows who they are, knows what they have to give, and knows how to give it. There are those who would wish Bettie Page could have found other ways to give it, and unfortunately some of these people call themselves progressive. Look out when progressives join hands with conservatives in condemning something as immoral. This attitude casts women as victims. Bettie Page was a victim of many things – the world was horrific – but being a pinup model saved her, or represented her saving herself, wrenching joy and pleasure out of something the world called dirty. She did what she did because she wanted to do it and then when she no longer wanted to do it, she stopped doing it. You know what that sounds like? It sounds like the most over-used word at present but applicable here: It sounds like agency. Page had it. You can SEE it in the photos.

I had some serious issues with the documentary Bettie Page Reveals All, but it’s worth it to see just for Page’s revealing voiceover.

To hear Page’s voice – after only becoming acquainted with her through photographs – is a revelation. It’s a cynical voice, a humorous tell-it-like-it-is voice, an unsentimental voice, a voice that knows the world, recognizes its sins, a voice that still – even after everything – refuses to feel ashamed.

“I was just myself,” she said.

That’s really the secret, isn’t it. So few people manage it.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” — Charlotte Brontë

Posted on April 21, 2026 by sheila

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” — Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was born on this day, in 1816. Here is perhaps the most famous image of the Brontë sisters, a portrait done by their dissipated brother Branwell:

I particularly love how Branwell painted over himself? Perhaps? What was he trying to do? Whatever it was, he did not succeed in X-ing himself out of the portrait of his famous writer sisters. He remains, a ghostly golden pillar, very strange, like so much about the Brontës is strange.

Jane Eyre is one of my forever books: it hooked me in young and never let me go. Its scope is vast and, again, very strange. Gothic melodrama runs through its veins, seeping out in the midst of the almost-Dickensian opening, the orphan, the horrid school, the deprivations and poverty, the dead children. And then moving into Mr. Rochester’s house, where his mad wife literally lives behind the walls, moaning in anguish. The book ends with the now-blinded Mr. Rochester calling out across the space-time continuum – literally – for his love, his Jane. She, having moved on (geographically, at least), hears his cry.

“Reader, I married him.”

One of the best closing lines of all time.

Cary Fukunaga’s film adaptation is fascinating and the closest – in my opinion – the real spooky power of the original. Although it skips Mr. Rochester cross-dressing to get intel about Jane’s feeling for him – from Jane herself. Wild! Mr. Rochester is WILD. Mr. Rochester is also not supposed to be gorgeous. HOWEVER. I appreciate the casting of Michael Fassbender because … if you’re a Jane Eyre person, if the book hooked you young, before you had your critical-thinking brain firmly in place, if you were a lonely teen, or a yearning Miss Lonelyhearts teen – then Mr. Rochester, in all his trapped torment, was the ultimate in Romantic. (Indeed, Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is on the tail-end of the Romantic movement, but clearly steeped in its influence.) And so casting a sexy handsome guy reflects the fantasy of the book, and I approve. I reviewed that version for Capital New York. I broke down Mia Wasikowska’s striking physicality in the lead role here.

Brontë poured her heart into her books. Unlike her sisters, she lived away from home for a long stretch of time. (Emily tried, but couldn’t bear it.) She worked for her living, and had a (failed) love affair. The wild godless belljar of Wuthering Heights comes from another universe. Emily’s solitary nature and self-reliance (“it vexes me to choose another guide” she wrote) vibrates in those upsetting pages, with Catherine and Heathcliff breathing adolescent self-involvement, deathly and single-minded, not at all touched by the real world or wide experience of a diverse array of humans. Wuthering Heights is disturbing in a way Jane Eyre is not. The books share a supernatural element, the ghostly hand knocking on the window in the opening sequences of Wuthering Heights, and the final sequence of Jane Eyre.

Charlotte was in awe of Emily. Emily was a titanic figure, a woman of immensely dominating personality – by all accounts. Charlotte was not. The sisters all wrote. They spent their childhood creating a massively complicated and intricate alternate universe. They lived in isolation (although, as Juliet Barker laid out in her definitive biography of the family, the isolation wasn’t as total as the myth of them suggests). Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, a family friend, wrote a biography of Charlotte, published in 1857, just two years after Charlotte died. She used Charlotte’s letters, excerpted at length and in full. (Because Charlotte lived away from home for a time, we have a ton of correspondence from her. Emily, who stayed at home, remains silent to us.) Gaskell’s book is a must-read for any Charlotte fan, and any fan of biography in general (the book has never been out of print. Astonishing. Most biographies have a shelf life. New trends come into play, new information is dug up, a reputation has to be looked at again and re-assessed). Mrs. Gaskell knew all of them and she puts you there.

The amount of tragedy endured by this family is not unique. In a time before modern medicine, and antibiotics (let’s hear it for science), people died of the common cold. I’m so glad we’re bringing back children dying of measles. Progress is for the birds. In Charlotte’s day, people died from the littlest things. You had no recourse, no way to fight things off. One after the other after the other, in quick succession, the Brontë siblings fell. Reading about it is harrowing.

I can’t say Charlotte’s books have always been a comfort to me. “Comfort” isn’t the right word. Her stuff is too unnerving. Her books stir the depths, and sometimes I wish the depths would remain unstirred. Yet I return to her work again and again (although I don’t know if I can bear to subject myself to Villette again. I didn’t read that one as a hopeful romantic teenager, like I read Jane Eyre. I read it as an adult, in a very difficult phase of my life. Villette was viscerally upsetting, which is obvious from this post.) I’m afraid to revisit. What I love most about her books is how much she still surprises me. Nothing can prepare you for Mr. Rochester. No matter how many times I have read Jane Eyre, he is still startling. The final chapter, involving astral travel or ESP through the ether, remains one of the most moving passages I have ever read.

Charlotte Brontë was a magnificent writer and it does her a great disservice to loop her in with Jane Austen (another writer I adore). They don’t even come from the same world. I only bring up Austen because the Brontës are often “looped together” with her – which I suppose is unavoidable albeit annoying: they were all women writing in the same period, when there weren’t too many women players on the board. Okay. But they are two completely different writers, with different styles and sensibilities. Austen lived a social life. Her books take place in heavily populated worlds, filled with gossip and leisure time. Children don’t die of malnutrition and cold in Austen;s novels. Charlotte’s writing has a messy, passionate, urgent PUSH to it, unique to her, and not present in Austen’s impeccable structure. Charlotte MUST get it out. Her writing sometimes trips over itself in its forward-momentum. She’s thrilling that way.

Her books do not become predictable with repetition. They elude capture. They sweep you up in their narrative, and you forget you know already how it ends.

QUOTES

Charlotte Bronte, letter to a friend who asked for a reading list:

“You ask me to recommend you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don’t admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don’t be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting; you will never wish to read them over twice. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain, of Byron, though the latter is a magnificent poem, and read the rest fearlessly; that must indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII, from Richard III, from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Scott’s sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm. Nor can Wordsworth’s, nor Campbell’s, nor Southey’s — the greatest part at least of his; some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can; I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s Life of Nelson, Lockhart’s Life of Burns, Moore’s Life of Sheridan, Moore’s Life of Byron, Wolfe’s Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audobon, and Goldsmith, and White’s History of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, adhere to standard authors, and avoid novelty.”

Charlotte Brontë:

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.”

L.M. Montgomery, journal entry, after reading E.F. Benson’s biography of Charlotte Brontë:

I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the domineering little shrew he pictures her, anymore perhaps than she was like the rather too saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography. I do not put any faith in Beson’s theory that Branwell wrote parts of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and inspired the whole. There is no foundation in the world for it beyond the assertion of two of Branwell’s cronies that he read the first few chapters of it to them and told them it was his own. They may have been telling the truth, but I would not put the least confidence in any statement of Branwell’s. He was entirely capable of reading someone else’s manuscript and trying to pass it off as his own. No doubt he was more in Emily’s confidence than Charlotte ever knew and had got possession of her manuscript in some way. Benson blames Charlotte for her unsympathetic attitude to Branwell. I imagine that an angel would have found it rather difficult to be sympathetic. Benson cannot understand a proud sensitive woman’s heart. I love Charlotte Brontë so much that I am angry when anyone tries to belittle her. But I will admit that she seemed to have an unenviable talent for disliking almost everyone she met … And the things she says about the man she afterwards married!

William Makepeace Thackeray after reading Villette, 1835:

The poor little woman of genius! … I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame … she wants some Tomkins or other to … be in love with.

Oh, stop it.

Michael Schmidt on the Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë in his Lives of the Poets:

The poems are often the fruit of their big gestures, their brimming hearts and earthquake heartbreaks. This does not mean the three women are a composite creature, what R.E. Pritchard calls a Brontësaurus. In their verse, though Emily is by far the best of the tree, there are differences of emotional intensity and of prosodic and formal skills. All three are gothicized Romantics. Their settings are often nocturnal, wintery – the long dark winters of the Yorkshire Moors around Haworth, where they were born and lived through a litany of bereavements (two elder sisters, their mother), and where they received their education and wrote tirelessly and voluminously. The weathers and settings reflect extreme states of mind and emotion and the forms are somber: balladic and hymn stanzas for the most part.

Charlotte Brontë:

Once indeed I was very poetical, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen years old – but I am now twenty-four approaching twenty-five – and the intermediate years are those which begin to rob life of its superfluous colouring.

L.M. Montgomery, journal:

It is customary to regret Charlotte Brontë’s death as premature. I doubt it. I doubt if she would have added to her literary fame. Resplendent as her genius was, it had a narrow range. I think she reached its limit. She could not have gone on forever writing ‘Jane Eyres’ and ‘Villette’s’ and there was nothing in her life and experience to fit her for writing anything else…

There was a marked masochistic strain in Charlotte Brontë — revealing itself mentally, not physically. This accounts for Rochester. He was exactly the tyrant a woman with such a strain in her would have loved, delighting in the pain he inflicted in on her. And this same tendency was the cause of her cruelty to Lucy Snowe — who was herself. She persecutes Lucy Snowe all through ‘Villette’ and drowns her lover rather than let the poor soul have a chance at happiness. I can’t forgive Charlotte Brontë for killing off Paul Emmanuel. I don’t know whether I like Lucy Snowe or not — but I am always consumed with pity for and sympathy with her, whereas Charlotte delights in tormenting her — a sort of spiritual vicarous self-flagellation.

Jeanette Winterson:

Who should the poet serve? Society or the Muse? This was a brand new question and not a happy one. If the woman poet could avoid it, the male poet and the prose writers of either sex could not. Of the great writers, Emily Brontë chose well. Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot continually equivocate and the equivocation helps to explain the uneven power of their work.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

The first novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, published the same year, revived out-of-fashion Gothic style. They share rugged, brooding heroes and a wild atmosphere of mystery and gloom. But the books belong to different genres. Despite sex-reversing moments, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is a social novel governed by public principles of intelligibility. It records the worldly progress of an ingenue from childhood to maturity, culminating in marriage. Emily’s Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, is High Romantic, its sources of energy outside society and its sex and emotion incestuous and solipsistic. The two Brontë novels differ dramatically in their crossing lines of identification. Charlotte palpably projects herself into her underprivileged but finally triumphant heroine, while Emily leaps across the borderline of gener into her savage hero.

Charlotte Brontë:

Look twice before you leap.

L.M. Montgomery, journal entry:

Charlotte Brontë only made about 7,000 by her books … It seems unfair and unjust. What I admire most in Charlotte Brontë is her absolute clear-sightedness regarding shams and sentimentalities. Nothing of the sort could impose on her. And she always hewed straight to the line. I have been asking myself, ‘If I had known Charlotte Brontë in life – how would we have reacted upon each other? Would I have liked her? Would she have liked me?’ I answer, ‘No.’ She was absolutely without a sense of humor. She would not have approved of me at all. I could have done her whole heaps of good. A few jokes would have leavened the gloom and tragedy of that Haworth Parsonage amazingly.

People have spoken of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘creative genius’. Charlotte Brontë had no creative genius. Her genius was one of amazing ability to describe and interpret the people and surroundings she knew. All the people in her books who impress us with such a wonderful sense of reality were drawn from life. She herself is Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe. Emily was Shirley. Rochester, whom she did create, was unnatural and unreal. Blanche Ingram was unreal. St. John was unreal. Most of her men are unreal. She knew nothing of men except her father and brother and the Belgian professor of her intense unhappy love. Emmanuel was drawn from him, and therefore is one of the few men in her books who is real.

Here are the opening paragraphs of Jane Eyre:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

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“Good acting is thinking in front of the camera. I just do that and apply a sense of humor to it. You have to trust the audience to get it.” — Charles Grodin

Posted on April 21, 2026 by sheila

It’s Charles Grodin’s birthday today. Here is a re-post of the piece I wrote when Charles Grodin died in 2021.

Heartbreak Kid. Ishtar. Heaven Can Wait. Midnight Run. Muppet Caper. Rosemary’s Baby. Seems Like Old Times (not as well-known, but I loved it as a kid.) Charles Grodin was so cranky, so anti-social (his talk-show guest spots were legendary … was he putting it on? Was he “acting”? Why was he being so RUDE and surly? It didn’t matter, because it was so funny.) Why he was so funny is difficult to quantify or even explain. He came from a comic/improv background (mixed with Actors Studio): it’s a killer combo. Maybe even THE killer combo. (I wrote about this in my piece on female comedians, i.e. why actors who start out in “comedy” often make the best dramatic actors.) It’s why Grodin was able to not only go “toe to toe” with Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, but was so spontaneous he seemed to even surprise De Niro. The film was a true two-hander. Grodin was so good at being off the cuff. With Grodin, everything important happened between the lines. There was always a certain amount of SEETHING happening beneath the surface. It gave him his edge, his honesty.


Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, “Midnight Run”

Please please read my friend Dan Callahan’s beautiful and insightful tribute to Grodin up on Ebert. His analysis of Heartbreak Kid is spot on. (The film has been unavailable forever. You can’t find it. It’s infuriating. Someone uploaded it to YouTube. Go see it while you can, particularly if you haven’t seen it.) Dan makes this essential point :

Grodin is a figure of and for the cinema of the 1970s. Like Alan Arkin and the recently departed George Segal, Grodin had a manner that matched the neuroticism and self-obsession of that decade and also the breaking down of limits and prejudices that could allow an unambiguously Jewish sensibility to be the center of films without any softening for the WASP masses.

I want to talk about his first book, a “memoir” of how he got started as an actor. It is called It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here.

More after the jump.

Continue reading →

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“I do love Alice in Wonderland though. That’s something I think I could do very well.” — Edie Sedgwick

Posted on April 20, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

Her influence on me was massive and I came to her young. I discovered her in high school through the famous oral biography by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, which I inhaled, over and over again. I must have run across it in my after-school job as a page at the library. I discovered a lot of books through re-shelving them. I was deeply intrigued by what I read, drinking up all the pictures. It scared me a little bit. I had no frame of reference. She came to me with no context. There was a darkness in her story. An anecdote that made a huge impression on me was a friend describing going to see The Blue Angel with Edie – maybe at the Brattle? This was pre-Warhol – and when Emil Jannings cracked and goes insane, Edie apparently shrank down into her chair, staring up at the screen, horrified, shook. There was madness in her family, the ancestral line peppered with early deaths and suicides. Her family tree was wild. (Andy Warhol’s movie Poor Little Rich Girl was basically the vibe. She really was.)

The entire Factory scene was long over by the time I read about it, but it exerted a pull. I was young and impressionable and I am trying to put into words the FEELING I absorbed. It wasn’t particularly coherent at first. Edie worked ON me.


Poor Little Rich Girl (1965)

In high school, I had a ripped denim jacket which I decorated with purple magic marker, a peace sign, other things, and across the back I wrote “Ciao! Manhattan”. I was a very NICHE type of nerd. I have a picture of myself in it, at a street fair in Chicago (we were walking advertisements for our friend Christina’s hat-making business.)

My dream of going to New York City wasn’t really about joining a downtown-cool-kid group, like Edie at the Factory. When I dreamt of New York, I dreamt of All That Jazz. Edie was a model, she was compelling and charismatic, and of course drew people to her, the movers-shakers, the fashion designers and magazine people and art-scene people. She was glamorous the way Hollywood actresses were glamorous, but she was somehow divorced from actually having to DO anything to PROVE she deserved to be looked at. She just WAS. In other words, she wasn’t waking up early to go to cattle calls, dragging her dance bag around town, going to auditions, dance class, working a waitressing gig after your jazz class at Broadway Dance. There was this whole other THING going on below Houston Street. I discovered All That Jazz and Edie around the same time, and they hovered in opposition, almost, as versions of the New York City in my imagination. (Itt’s not like I lived in Kazakhstan: I went down to New York a lot as a kid. My aunt was an actress and singer, so my “version” and experience of New York City was already the All That Jazz one. What I’m trying to say is that discovering Edie – and Andy – and that whole scene, all those people, was a mesmerizing counter-point. I couldn’t really get a GRASP on it as a teenage kid, which I think is why I kept going back to the book again and again, staring at the pictures over and over. I remember just falling into this picture like it was a bottomless pit:

This was around the same time I was learning as much as I could about the Group Theatre, another close group of eccentric people, and far more my speed … but the dream was the same. Edie’s never really left me. By the time I tripped over the book, Ciao! Manhattan was available on VHS. So I rented it. There’s an insouciant overlay to the action – a sort of “look at the kookiness and freedom on display” but then … there’s shock therapy, and this desolation seeping into everything, a desolation of waste. You get the sense she didn’t stand a chance. The ’60s destroyed a lot of people. Or, the people destroyed themselves. There have always been addicts and the 60s drugs were particularly gnarly.

Most of Warhol’s stuff wasn’t accessible back then, I’d have to see those films later. But I inhaled Ciao! Manhattan and it freaked me out. It was so cool to actually see her in action, this woman who glimmered in my imagination. You can see her charisma. The charisma isn’t alive, though, somehow. It doesn’t spark with impulses, her inner life illuminating her face. Her charisma is somehow static. Another word for dead? A lot of the models in the ’60s were “flat” like this, and now, of course, deadpan is the accepted trend for models. Whatever the source, it doesn’t even matter, Edie is riveting with her huge tragic eyes. It’s a cliche but it’s true: You can’t take your eyes off of her.

When I got to college and met Mitchell, turns out he had a similar trajectory. He read the book. He saw the movie. He knew all about Warhol and that whole crowd. So we decided to be Edie and Andy for Halloween. This party was legendary – the whole town showed up it felt like (to be clear: we did not invite the whole town. But word got out). At its height, the party was like a Mad magazine cartoon. The cops arrived. People in full costume fled into the night. It was a mess. But we were so proud of our costumes. We fell asleep in bed, still in costume.

You never forget the people who come into your life at a certain moment when you are receptive to whatever it is they bring. If I had discovered Edie – and that whole crowd – in my 30s, it still would have been interesting, of course, but I would have had a bit more distance. I would have looked at it in a more abstract way, and I would have had a larger frame of reference for all of it. Also, by my 30s, I had been through a lot of heavy shit. I wouldn’t have been as afraid of Edie, or afraid FOR Edie. But Edie came into my life a year after I read The Bell Jar for the first time and a year before I read The Handmaid’s Tale. She arrived just in time.

“I’m in love with everyone I’ve ever met in one way or another. I’m just a crazy, unhinged disaster of a human being.” — Edie Sedgwick

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“The only cause I espouse is man’s right to find his own centre, stand firm, speak out, then be kind.” — Michael Davitt, “Dissenter”

Posted on April 20, 2026 by sheila

Save your breath,
Poem maker
Keep it under wraps
In the tall tree of yourself
— Michael Davitt

Both quotes above are English translations of the original Irish language versions, just to be clear.

Poet Michael Davitt, born (on this day) in Cork, didn’t grow up speaking Irish at home. He learned it at school, which he writes about eloquently in his poem “3AG”. Munster Irish! His academic background in the Irish language gave him a different perspective than a person who grew up bilingual, hearing Irish spoken in the home, etc. Irish was a language to be learned and conquered.

Davitt (who sadly passed away far too young in 2005) was an Irish language poet. Unless you speak the language, you must content yourself with reading his work in translation. Luckily, some great contemporary Irish poets have done wonderful translations of his stuff (Paul Muldoon – my post about him here, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide – my post about him here, and others), but Davitt’s work is meant to be read in the Irish. Something is always lost in translation.

To him, Irish was not a rural language. This set him apart from those who connected the Irish language with a pre-Industrial-Revolution society. He used the Irish language for contemporary subjects. He started publishing poetry in the 70s, when a lot of Irish language poets cropped up – a reclamation in a time of strife. Davitt was against “cultural McDonaldisation”, yet he disagreed with the thought that the Irish language should be isolated, or even COULD isolate those who spoke it. To him, Irish was not a “dead” language at all. Davitt did things with Irish that other more traditional writers wouldn’t. He wrote a poem for Bobby Sands. He wrote a heartbreaking poem about September 11, 2001.

Davitt founded a magazine – Innti – dedicated to Irish language poets (including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whom I saw read once at the The Ireland House in New York City: an unforgettable night). He was also a producer/director at RTÉ. A vibrant man and also a huge intellect, he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2005. He was only 55 years old.

First, I’ll post his poem Ciorrú Bóthair (Shortening the Road), which was translated by Irish author Philip Casey. I love that Davitt incorporates English words in his Irish, which gives the impression that ENGLISH is the foreign tongue here, the tongue that “doesn’t fit”. Of course I can’t read it, but I get excited when I recognize words. My sisters and I were driving around the outskirts of Áth Cliath (ie: Dublin), reading the dual-language street signs as we whizzed by them. We were lost. Jean sighed, “Well as long as we’re headed an lár …” (“city center”, “downtown”). She said it so casually. We still laugh about that. And we still say “let’s meet up an lár“.

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Much Ado About Nothing

Posted on April 18, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor

Much Ado About Nothing

I sometimes forget how very very strange Much Ado About Nothing is. Beatrice and Benedick are the scene stealers, their witty sometimes biting back and forth – covering up their longing for one another – they are living examples of “you both protest too much” … they are so dazzling, their chemistry sparking off the page over 400 years later… in other words, they are the only game in town. When you think Much Ado About Nothing, you think of them.

But … Beatrice and Benedick are not the leads. They’re always AROUND, but the play is an ensemble piece, and the main plot-line belongs to Claudio and Hero, a brief nearly silent romance which goes south at the altar, due to the lying scheming brother of the Prince (like, what is your DEAL, bro), who spread rumors about Hero, set up Claudio to doubt her chastity. The treachery is real, the betrayal catastrophic, seemingly insurmountable. The solution to the conundrum is suggested by the priest – one of the only truly helpful priests in Shakespeare’s entire canon. His priests usually veer from incompetent to downright corrupt and/or evil. So the priest comes up with a WILD plan. He wants to fake Hero’s death, launch a whirlwind of community mourning, led by Claudio, the now penitent man who was the cause of her disgrace. But then, the cherry on top: we will PRETEND that the still-alive Hero, in hiding due to the shame, is her own cousin, who looks exactly like her (just like Maddie in Twin Peaks). To “make up” for his awfulness, Claudio will marry this cousin, sight unseen. I guess as long as they look exactly alike then what’s the difference?

Like, this is a LOT and it takes up most of the air-space in the script. Beatrice and Benedick are onlookers to the unfolding tragedy, they get roped into it due to their care for Hero and Claudio, and they seem – frankly – like the only grown-ups onstage. They are not ingenues. They are seasoned. They’ve clearly already had a relationship. There is a treacherous maid, the treacherous brother and his two “knaves” who skulk around the manor making mischief – for no discernible reason. To round things out, there’s a group of “watchmen”, tasked with policing the grounds. They are led by Dogberry, puffed up with his own ego, but struggling mightily with language. He insists on using this lofty tone, and yet he doesn’t have the vocabulary. It’s malaprop after malaprop. You can tell what he means, in every instance, but he’s reaching towards something that isn’t there. When he arrests Borachio and Conrade he says, “Masters, never speak, we charge you, let us obey you to go with us.” What he MEANS to say is “…Please obey, and come with us.” “Let us obey you to go with us.” hahaha

There is so much eavesdropping in this play! People barely have enough time to plan for the wedding, they are so busy staging conversations for the person they know is listening. There’s a masked ball, where no one knows who anyone is. Lots of dirt is dished. The entire family decides to join forces to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love and … honestly, they don’t have to work that hard. Their love for each other is obvious from the start. They just needed the nudge, the sign that the coast was clear.

The revelation of their love comes just before the devastating wedding and Claudio’s horrible behavior. This leads to one of the most shocking moments in any Shakespeare play. Beatrice and Benedick have melted together, they still banter but they are now soft and open, admitting their feelings. Benedick pleads with her, “Come, tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” Whatever he might have hoped she’d say, whatever we in the audience might expect her to say – something soft and loving – she says, “Kill Claudio.”

I’ve seen this play many times and there are shocked gasps from the audience. And she MEANS it. She basically breaks up with him immediately when he hesitates. They’ve barely gotten together and she’s telling him to murder someone!

The play is called a comedy but … the overall sensation is uneasiness. There’s real terror and grief and horrific behavior. Honor has to die and then pretend to be her own cousin to find happiness. You don’t get stuff like this in Midsummer or As You Like It. Joy is threatened here, the happy ending is conditional, you find your love but there are still really bad actors out there. Claudio’s behavior is reprehensible, even more so since he seemed so nice and tender. (He is the Nice GuyTM. Look out for them. They’ll slut-shame you at the earliest opportunity.) Don John is a sociopath emissary from another play, and somehow he seems worse than Iago, although Iago is bad enough! But Othello is a mighty tragedy, and there Iago makes sense, even with his – as Coleridge calls it – “motiveless malignity.” Don John is sinister. What the hell is he doing in a romantic comedy?

The strangeness of tone is fascinating, especially since his next comedy is not only one of his best but one of the best comedies ever. Here, tragedy looms. In As You Like It, there’s pure joy coming out of overwhelming longing – longing that is sweet. Most noticeable, though, is As You Like It‘s prioritization of play above all else. Rosalind practices wooing with Orlando. She trains him through role play. It’s a game. Much Ado also features play, with all the mini “scenes” of people having audacious phony conversations so the person hiding in the corner can hear. This, too, is play. In As You Like It, though, play totally takes over. Play’s the thing. Don John would be laughed out of the forest.

Having gone through the sonnets, and drinking up Stephen Booth’s unbelievable footnotes, some of which stretch for ten pages, I have some thoughts on the title. At first glance, the title seems like a throw-away. Much Ado About Nothing means … you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill, you’re getting all worked up over nothing, calm down it’s not that deep, etc. Maybe this would fit for Merry Wives where the stakes are nearly nonexistent but here? The title doesn’t fit at ALL if you take it at surface level! There’s so much at stake in Much Ado. “Nothing” is a big word to Shakespeare, though. “Nothing” is everywhere. Cordelia’s “nothing” in King Lear is the most famous “nothing” in Shakespeare’s body of work. You can’t say her “nothing” means “no big deal”. Nothing is not a dead end, it’s endlessness. Booth’s breakdown of the multiple layers of associations with “nothing” was a permanent perspective-change. Once you know about the nothing thing, you see nothing everywhere. You grasp/grok the deeper meanings. And here it’s in the title! Pay attention!

“Nothing” has multiple layers of meaning. In one way you can think about it like “nothing” can also mean “everything”, like the infinity inside of a circle. Nothing is a starting point: anything can happen if you start with “nothing”. But – of course – there’s a sexual slang connotation. “Thing” was slang for penis and therefore if you have “no thing” then you see where we’re going. Gives Much Ado About Nothing a very different connotation than “Much Ado About Fluff”. So the “no thing” and “everything” comes straight from Stephen Booth, and one of the main topics of conversation and controversy in Much Ado is Hero’s virginity. She literally has to fake her own death in order to avoid the shame, which she shouldn’t even feel ANYway because she is guilty of nothing. (Nothing). And so here: Vaginas are a BIG deal even though the slang term describes what they are NOT. (Kinda like the Latin root of “pudendum” being “shame”. Misogyny baked into the language. If the Latin root for “penis” was also “shame” maybe it would be a different story, but no, the root for “penis” is “tail”, descriptive – sort of – of what it is as a body part. There’s no judgment attached to it.) In my research, I learned another potential meaning from Marjorie Garber. “Nothing” in Elizabethan English was pronounced “noting” – at least this is what people who know things believe – and Much Ado About Nothing or “Noting” – is FILLED with the word “note” (as well as “nothing”). Taking notes: Much Ado closes with the reveal of a torn-up sonnet, and earlier we watch Benedick struggling to write said sonnet. “Taking note of” means “paying attention” and/or “noticing”, and in this play where everyone keeps a close eye on everyone else “noting” is more than relevant. “Noting” is all anyone does in Much Ado. Take note (see how I did that?) of how many times the words “nothing” “none” “note” “noting” and, hell, “nobody” or even “no” show up in the play. I started a tally and finally gave up because it was tedious (“Neighbors, you are tedious”) and neverending. Suffice to say: examples on nearly on every page.

While Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version is so good, I also love Joss Whedon’s version from 2013, starring Amy Acker, Alexis Denisoff, Nathan Fillion (as the aforementioned Dogberry: hilarious), and many other people from Whedon’s repertory. Apparently Whedon hosts gatherings where all his actor friends come over for a night of Shakespeare. Their casual just-for-fun workshopping of Much Ado turned into a film, almost on a whim. They all made the decision to go for it, and they shot it over a long weekend at Whedon’s house. I highly recommend the film. It’s very funny and charming but doesn’t soft pedal the cruelty of Claudio, the pain of Hero, the malevolence of Don John.

In my Merry Wives post, I mentioned our local community theatre. Every summer they put on a couple of Shakespere plays outside, on the little landing behind the theatre building. We go to all of them. But their programming is year-round, just not outside. My niece and I went to see Much Ado. I basically insisted upon it because I knew she would love it. She was around 13, 14, and was afraid she wouldn’t understand the language. I told her the language was easy, she would totally understand it, and I gave her the bare bones of the plot. As I have come to expect, the production was wonderful. They chose a sort of Jazz Age milieu, with bootleg drinks at the celebration, and Charleston dancing before the wedding, etc. All of the eavesdropping scenes were so funny, with Benedick at one point hiding in a trunk for the entirety of a scene, listening to the gossip above him. Knowing he was in there the whole entire time made the scene even more hilarious. Lucy was losing it! Our favorite guy, the high school librarian, who played Caius in Merry Wives played the sinister Don John – two totally different characters – and he played the whole thing as a kid’s temper tantrum (which actually made Don John make sense!) Two women played Beatrice and Benedick (this company doesn’t care about gender, refreshing, especially when you consider neither did Shakespeare. How could he, when men played all women’s parts? Thereby making most of the love banter a comment upon the performance of our roles as people in the world. This sort of subversion was baked in to the original, because everyone in the audience knew Juliet was actually a 13-year-old boy, or Rosalind – dressing up as a boy – was, therefore, a boy dressing up as a girl dressing up like a boy. At a certain point, we’re through the looking glass as far as gender is concerned.) And, just as I predicted, Lucy understood every word.

I love revisiting the strangeness of Much Ado About Nothing‘s world.

Quotes on the play

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“I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair

Posted on April 17, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday.

I don’t mean to go on and on in a generational way because of course we are not a monolith (after all, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are Gen X. Ew.) … but “I don’t represent anything” – said by Liz Phair – who truly does represent something to MANY – is one of the most Gen-X comments said by a Gen X icon ever.

This is why talking about her is difficult. She didn’t set out to change the world, she was so shy and working in such isolation, but change it she did. She is beyond her own art, even though my initial response was about her art. In retrospect, it’s obvious what happened and why. But in the moment, it was beyond analysis. At least for me. I wasn’t a writer then. I was an audience. Her audience. She was a singer-songwriter. Maybe you’d have to be Gen X to really get it. I don’t mean this is an exclusionary way. I think of people who were actually teenagers when East of Eden came out. What that must have been like. I wasn’t there. But I love hearing about it. I try to imagine myself into it. The first time I saw East of Eden, I felt like I was in 1953. I was 13 years old, but it was as though the movie came out yesterday. I think of David Lynch’s comment on Elvis, something like “He wasn’t there and then suddenly he was there.” Liz Phair’s “arrival” was like that. The second she arrived – with a double album, no less – and no touring history, no bar band phase, nothing – it was like you couldn’t imagine how you had lived without her. Who WAS this woman, growling and murmuring in a flat-affect monotone about her life, her men – with such specificity you feel like you were IN those rooms, meeting those people? (The thing is: I WAS in those rooms, and not with those same people, but really they WERE the same people. It was the VIBE. The early-90s vibe.) Who WAS she?

Liz Phair emerged at a time when the traditional music industry had exploded (it would soon implode again). New voices emerged, blazing not just out of the Pacific Northwest, but everywhere. And it wasn’t just “grunge”. Rap and hip hop in the mid-90s? Forget about it. Everything was changing. There was always an indie scene, a punk scene, an underground scene, but in the early-mid 90s the indie went mainstream. The experience of it was amazing, and we didn’t know how good we had it. People like PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco were very big in my crowd, but then a new crowd burst on the scene and blazed out into stadium tours in a matter of months – Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, The Breeders – and it didn’t feel surreal, but in retrospect it was. Liz Phair is a Midwesterner but she was also a Chicagoan. She did not hail from New York or LA. She was midwest and also urban, a subtlety of her outsider context.

Exile in Guyville seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Liz-Phair-Exile-In-Guyville-608x608

The album – a track by track “retort” to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street – sounded like it was recorded in a basement apartment at 3 a.m. And indeed much of it was. So authentic the sound is – still – almost frightening. The album still has the ability to freak me out – and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since it was first released. The album is never far from me. I could not fucking BELIEVE it when I first listened to it, front to back. Song after song after song … I had never before had the experience of hearing my own life, exactly what I was going through at that very moment – and in Chicago, no less! – reflected in a contemporary musician. That first listen was almost embarrassing. She was saying shit I was going through, but afraid to say in such a blunt way. It’s an album where the track listing is woven into my consciousness. Back when albums were listened to in their entirety. Back when track listing had meaning, when an album told a story. So I listen to “Help Me Mary” and I know what comes next.

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“I don’t really know why, but danger has always been an important thing in my life – to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up.” — William Holden

Posted on April 17, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

Years ago, I wrote a long essay about William Holden for Slant, which focused a lot on his physicality (he was so athletic and he had great control). I really like that piece.

I reiterated my thoughts on Holden – and his physicality – in one of the most popular columns I ever wrote for Film Comment, on the art of the death scene. Because William Holden’s death scene in Sunset Boulevard is my #1 favorite. I do go on and on about it – and I broke it down here once, moment by moment – mainly because I just want people to GET how amazing it is, what he does with his body there.

I recently did an audience QA following a screening of Network at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY. Last year, same venue, I did an audience QA following a screening of Sunset Boulevard. A little tour of William Holden’s filmography. I keep mentioning Stalag 17 at these events. It’s not nearly as well-known as it should be. I hope they screen it eventually.

In a career of famous roles in famous films, I think his best – and perhaps most characterstic and essence-driven – of his roles is Sgt. J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17. Sefton has not just a hardness to him, but a sharp edge, an essence many call cynical but I call realistic.

Director Billy Wilder said in his interview with Cameron Crowe that Sefton was the closest stand-in to himself in all of his films. Sefton, in essence, was Wilder saying: “This is who I am. This is how I see the world.”

Sefton’s parting shot before he disappears into the tunnel underneath the prison camp – “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before” – sums it all up, sums up the movie’s unsentimental mood. Does Sefton mean it? Is he being ironic? I don’t think so. There is no romanticism in Sefton, and his memory of the prison camp – and what humanity becomes under such circumstances – will not be something he wishes to dwell on, and any later encounter will just be a reminder. No good-byes. No looking back. If I see you, I’ll pretend I never know you. And finally, to take the edge off, he pokes his head back up, and gives a little toss of the hand and a cocky grin. Aaaaand scene. What a movie star. What an actor.

Wilder:

“I liked having him around … The idea of making him a braggart … then we find out slowly that he is really a hero. As he pleads there with that lieutenant at the end, he tucks his head out again, from the hole they have there in the barracks, and says, ‘If I ever see any of you mugs again, let’s just pretend that we don’t know each other.’ And off he goes. And he only does it because the mother of the lieutenant who is captured is a rich woman, and he’s gonna get ten thousand dollars. He’s no hero, he’s a black-market dealer—-a good character, and wonderfully played by Holden.”

Playing Sefton required an almost stern resistance to expanding the role into the self-consciously heroic. One can see the traps for that kind of “commentary” all throughout the role. Holden resists. It’s a performance of great control. But within that control there is a jaundiced and knowing acceptance of the ugliness of human nature – the accusations tossed around and the willingness to throw people under the bus – Sefton is not at all surprised by these things. In a way, it’s a relief: civilization has broken down in the camp, and so now people can show themselves in their true form.

Obviously Stalag 17 is also a comedy, but it’s a black-hearted one, just like Wilder liked it.

Wilder worked with Holden numerous times. He loved him as a leading man. He loved Jack Lemmon too, for his “everyman” qualities, but Holden was not – was never – an “everyman”. He had stature and scope. Just watch Stalag 17. Sunset Boulevard may be more famous, more quotable – but Stalag 17 cuts to the heart of Holden’s essence. Because … Sefton is tough, does not suffer fools, but … my God, don’t you just ADORE him?

François Truffaut wrote about Sefton in The Films in My Life:

Sefton is intelligent; that’s why he acts as he does. For the first time in films the philosophy of the solitary man is elaborated; this film is an apologia for individualism. (Certainly, the solitary man has been a theme in films, as with Charlie Chaplin and many other comedians. But he has usually been an inept person whose only desire was to fit into society.) Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone. He has the qualities of leadership, and everything would tend to establish him as the barracks’ trusted leader. After the deception has been uncovered by Sefton himself, and the leader the man trusted has been unmasked and convicted, we may wonder if Sefton escapes in order to avoid being named to take his place, knowing his fellow prisoners would do exactly that, both to exonerate themselves and because they finally recognize him as their only possible leader.

What’s sure is that Sefton escapes to get away from the companions whom he despises rather than from a regime he has come to terms with and guards he’s been able to bend to his needs.

Sefton needs those whom he despises to despise him in turn. If he remains, he will be a hero – a role he rejects no matter what the cost. Having lost his moral solitude, he hastens to regain it by becoming an escapee, with all the risk that entails.

One final word about Sunset Boulevard: not too many actors would have submitted to the requirements of that role, to the mere suggestion of that role: to be a pretty-boy sex-toy. Paul Newman could – and would – do it. In Sweet Bird of Youth. Roles like that put the man in the stereotypically female position: of being owned, of being objectified, used for sex, trapped. It could be seen as emasculating. It IS emasculating, that’s the whole point.

Montgomery Clift was originally cast in the role Holden ended up playing, but Clift backed out (igniting Wilder’s wrath). Clift was, at that point, in a similar position in his real life, with a much older woman, AND he claimed he didn’t want to repeat himself, and the role was so close to the one he played in The Heiress. (Although … it wasn’t really that close. I mean, sort of, but not really.) Some friends of Clift’s wondered if Clift’s underlying torment about being gay, and being closeted had something to do with him backing out: to play an “emasculated” role might be too revealing. All of that being said: Holden, a golden boy (literally: he had played the role in the movie of the same name), an athlete, a stereotypical leading man – gorgeous, manly, strong – did not balk at taking on the role, at using his handsomeness in this subverted perverted way: that he could be “had”, he could be “bought.”

I am haunted by William Holden’s end.

I try to focus on his career, his work, how good he was, how controlled, how intelligent in his process and approach.

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“Some syllables are swords.” — Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan

Posted on April 17, 2026 by sheila

”I’ve always been much influenced by the 17th-century metaphysical poets like Donne, and especially Henry Vaughan.” — Philip K. Dick

It’s Henry Vaughan’s birthday today.

I was just thinking the other day about how I encountered certain famous writers in my childhood through hearing them mentioned in favorite childhood books. It’s a wonderful way to learn and grow, almost by osmosis.

For example:

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