Autumn is about half over, but it hasn't seemed like it to me. Shopping this afternoon I noticed the pumpkins still displayed in the market and briefly thought Halloween is almost here, and then remembering that it was over a week ago. I obviously need more pomegranates to get me into the properly autumnal time frame. Not for a couple of days yet, though, as my jaw is still sore from yesterday's jabbing with needles.
A 95th birthday greeting to "Dainty June" Hovick, aka June Havoc, the late Gypsy Rose Lee's younger sister. I wonder if she's still clinging to that last bit of resentment she displayed in this 2003 interview published in the N.Y. Times? One would think that a nonagenarian could finally let it go, but maybe not all of them can. It's an interesting life she's led, and yet it's odd how she misreads the musical "Gypsy" as being about her sister when just about everybody else in the world knows that it was really all about Mama Rose. Probably even Alex Witchel, the Times writer who did the interview, knows this, but she doesn't let on in the story, or to June. If I believed in reincarnation, I might suspect Witchel (b.1958) of being Mama Rose (d.1954) returning to engage in a bit more stage-motherly manipulation. Even without literal ghosts and reincarnated moms, the story is all very weird and a bit creepy. Rose Hovick had to have been the scariest stage mother ever.
