Find a place inside to laugh...

... separate the wheat from the chaff...

Gladys Horton, the lead singer of The Marvelettes...

... has died at the age of 66.

As a student at Inkster High School, Horton helped found the group that would eventually become the Marvelettes, linking up with fellow glee club members Katherine Anderson, Juanita Cowart, Georgeanna Tillman and Georgia Dobbins.

A successful audition for Motown Records was followed in 1961 by the group's debut single, "Please Mr. Postman," with 17-year-old Horton on lead vocals. It became Motown's biggest pop crossover hit to that point, reaching No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.

The audio is a lot better here. And here are The Beatles covering the song, pretty much adopting The Marvelettes' style. (You know The Beatles took a large component of what they were from the great girl groups of the early 60s.)

My favorite Marvelettes song was always "Beechwood 4-5789." Another really cool one is "Don't Mess With Bill":



Love the bows! We girls used to go to school dressed just like that in the early 60s. Tried to tease our hair that big too. It wasn't easy! It wasn't even possible.

I love looking back at these old styles and this old music. I'm sorry that these days the occasion for celebrating someone from back then is an obituary. I'm sad to hear that Glady Horton has died, but let's talk about how great The Marvelettes were.

"Hoft gets this through Instadouche and, unsurprisingly, Ann Althouse, who has been looking at pictures again, something that never ends well..."

"... as also of course happens when she 'thinks things' and then 'writes them down' and 'alerts the public as to her thoughts.'"

Heh. I got FireDogLake writing in the anti-Althousiana genre.

ADDED: I guess Firedoglake is flouting the "civility" bullshit that's been bandied about lately.

AND: Here's the link to Hoft, where there is a nice juxtaposition of photographs along with my quote about the President's hair color change. (Let's call it his "mood hair.")

I think it's important to talk about the way politicians use their visual image in communicating their message. Clearly, we talk about female politicians' hair all the time. It is different to talk about men's hair, of course, because men aren't supposed to care much about their hair.

It's part of the conventional manly image not to pay attention to hair, and when a man runs afoul of that image, he gives his opponents raw material that... well, that can make a hilarious video. (That video was much funnier before the pricks that own the "Theme from Rawhide" asserted their candyass rights.)

AND: Here's how female politicians are treated when they change their hair:

"Washington's currency is power, and fashion helps to bring order to the power structure."

"Clothes provide the first hint of how we relate to one another and how seriously we should be taken. (Remember that, dear interns in your flip-flops and miniskirts.) Gentlemen may pull on a bespoke suit or rebel against that brand of traditionalism with rumpled jeans and T-shirts. Power is now a woman in a sleek sheath, not one in a frumpy suit and a pair of commuter sneakers."

Robin Givhan opines on fashion and Washington as she steps away from her fashion beat at the Washington Post (and into the more stylish Daily Beast). She thanks the Post and pleads for the importance of fashion writing — "fashion [can] provide a window on who we are... amid the frippery and parties, fashion is also business, politics, religion, sociology and ultimately, life." And she links to a few choice old items, going back as far as 1998 — I wish I were blogging then! — to a thing about Paula Jones:

She has smoothed the frizzy mane of curls that once reached to such dazzling heights. Her makeup is now subtle and based on natural, not neon, hues. Her clothing is inspired by the boardroom instead of the secretarial pool. She has embraced the markers of dignity, refinement and power.

So... the frumpy suit and not the sleek sheath? Funny how these "markers" get switched around, isn't it?

"I had been very aware of the horrible things the White House was saying about her. The main thing we looked at was what could we do to do away with all those things," says her California-based spokeswoman, Susan Carpenter-McMillan.

"She is not white trash," she says. "She is not a big-haired floozy."

Whatever the woman is, she needs to be the opposite. Do you have big hair and they're calling you a white-trash floozy? Get small hair! Wouldn't it be funny if men under attack made their big hair small or their small hair big and changed from — what would it be? — a conservative suit to a less conservative suit or a less conservative suit to a more conservative suit? Bill Clinton didn't alter his appearance when he got into trouble. (But see Al Gore.)

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grew out her hair."

"It was a fine rebuke to the accepted adage that a woman of a certain age must cut her hair - a symbolic gesture that she is leaving sex appeal and youthful flirtatiousness behind. Clinton's flattering shoulder-length style was a reminder to women who have unhappily submitted to the scissors that they should not allow cultural assumptions to dictate their own perceptions about themselves."

Writes Robin Givhan, collecting the "Best of 2010" items (from her fashion beat). Now, why did Hillary grow her hair out"? ("Grow your hair out" is a funny expression. It's not as if you can grow your hair in. I mean, ingrown hairs aside.) Did she grow her hair to express her perception about herself or to remind other women that they need not adopt the culture's assumptions about themselves? Was she trying to say — via hair — I think I'm sexy or you older women ought to feel that you're sexy and say it with hair? I think she was copying Sarah Palin.

But Sarah is quite a bit younger than Hillary, and the same thing looks different with an older face (and the texture of an older person's hair is different). If you really want to say that long hair on a woman over the age of 60 says sexy, then show us some examples of women that old who look sexier because of their long hair. Or is the point only how you subjectively feel. You don't actually look sexier with that long hair, but we know that it seems that way to you — though maybe signaling that you believe you're sexy is enough to make you look sexier.

But come on! Hillary isn't trying to say I'm sexy. She's trying to say I'm trustworthy and highly competent. Perhaps she's succeeded — look.

"There was a moment during the test when my mind drifted to her funeral and melancholy began to overtake me."

"At that point, I noticed a scent of hairspray—the same one my grandma used for the past 60 years. I teared up, knowing that she was right there with me and she was proud of me."

IN THE COMMENTS: Everybody's talking about what their grandmothers smelled like. Mine smelled like: 1. lemonade, watermelon, and chicken & dumplings, and 2. knitting wool and African violets.

"Bristol Palin was fixing a loose clip or an errant strand of hair for her mother...."

Oh! The injustice! Will the persecution of Sarah Palin never cease!

ADDED: "Over the past month, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has quietly altered her case for the presidency in a savvy shift of rhetoric."

"George Will is like a twelve-year-old girl for Mike Pence. Maybe they should have a sleepover, and George can braid Mike's hair."

From the Daily Kos "Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up."

Bonus cultural reference material:

Jerry: "Elaine, I really don't pay much attention to men`s faces."

Elaine: "You can't find beauty in a man?"

Jerry: "No... I find them repugnant and unappealing."

Kramer (entering): "Hey!"

Jerry (pointing at Kramer): "To wit."

Kramer: "What?"

Jerry: "No, Elaine and I were just discussing whether I could admit a man is attractive."

Kramer: "Hmm. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you who is an attractive man: George Will."

Jerry: "Really!"

Kramer: "Yeah! He has clean looks, scrubbed and shampooed and...."

Elaine: "He's smart...."

Kramer: "No, no I don't find him all that bright."

"Outside Madison's city limits... Althouse is largely known as the smugly inscrutable blogger with a platinum bob."

From a piece in The Daily Cardinal identifying me as the 10th "most influential figure" in Madison.

Is Althouse smugly inscrutable?
	Yes!
	She's inscrutable but not smugly so. But she is smug nonetheless.
	She's inscrutably smug.
	She's inscrutable but not smug.
	She's smug but not inscrutable.
pollcode.com free polls

I couldn't find a list of the top 10, but you can see them all at this search. The mayor, Dave Cieslewicz, is #1. Barry Alvarez is #3....

"Obama wants to take our penises."

One of many out of context quotes — 2 of which are from me — in this montage of sexy highlights from the last 5 years of Bloggingheads:



ADDED: Here's the context of my reference to "masturbating boys":

What's with powerful women and thick bumpers of bangs?

Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:



What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...



... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...



... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!



What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?

Which First Lady is taller?

Careful! Watch out for optical illusions!

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee writes: "Marie Antoinette's heir meets Marie Antoinette's hair."

"Jean [Harlow] did not like to wear bras and was advised by her mother to ice her breasts to keep them firm."

"Similarly, she did not like to wear underwear because she disliked lines and she also preferred to sleep in the nude. Although these clothing practices were considered racy, especially due to her sex-symbol status, she actually approached them with a child-like freedom from confinement."

That all makes sense to me. Except the part about ice!

I ran across that by accident after searching — unsuccessfully — for the old Clairol ad with the tagline "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde." While it made being blonde seem awfully important, I always thought it was bizarre to remind us that we're all going to die. How much compensation for that calamity could we get out of blondeness?

Another commercial from the same era tried to encourage us to use the product (Schlitz) with: "You only go 'round once, and you've gotta grab for all the gusto you can."



Wow. They really rub it in with the sharks that ate the guys in the shipwreck. Must drink beer! I guess it takes a heavier hand to use death as leverage against guys.

Anyway, what's this post about? Freedom, commerce, death as an incentive to live, an icy brew and... for the adventurous: icy breasts!

"No mention of Hillary's locks? You're slipping, Althouse!"

Says commenter E.M. Davis, who apparently thinks I do nothing but monitor and comment upon the internet all day long. But thanks for the tip, Eemie, old man. He links to a Daily Mail article titled "Oh Hillary, that hairstyle just doesn't cut it: Mrs Clinton prepares for huge UN meeting with lank locks."

The normally perfect bouffant was gone, to be replaced by what came to be known on Kate Moss at least as the Croydon Facelift.

Well, it's not "normally perfect" and the rest is British gibberish. Britterish.

Mrs Clinton's hair was scraped back and clipped on top of her head, but looked lank and in need of some love and understanding....

It's the clip that is objectionable. You only see it from the side. Maybe it was put in for a frontal photograph, but it looks way too casual (or even trashy) from the side — like showing up in curlers.

With minimal make-up, Mrs Clinton's 63 years came into sharp focus as she moved neatly from urging Pakistan to mend its reputation to an attempt to undermine Mr Ahmadinejad within his own country.

Now, there's a crazy sentence!

But, anyway. About the hair. We all know Hillary is growing her hair longer. Robin Givhan pointed that out a month ago:

Clinton's hair, now creeping toward below-the-shoulders territory, is practically radical for Washington's seasoned female power elite. Good for her....

Cultural pressure to submit to the scissors after a certain age seems rife with an unkind and unspoken subtext that because long locks are a sign of vibrancy and sexiness, it's a social contradiction to see such styles on women who have wrinkles and crow's-feet.

Another popular argument is that long hair drags down the face -- and a face that is showing the effects of gravity should steer clear of anything that might make it look even longer in the tooth.

Throw into the conversation the attitude that long locks are tools of flirtation. They are a handy excuse for a toss of the head; a strand might have to be girlishly flicked out of one's eyes or coyly tucked behind the ear. May a 60-year-old woman flirt?

I think we know what it's about: Sarah Palin. Suddenly, long hair has come to mean power, and there's no need to try to approximate the men anymore. Why ape the men when you can emulate The Divine Sarah?

New York Magazine rocks snarky headline, poor reading.

Their headline is: "Caroline Giuliani Rocks Smirk, Long Hair While Cleaning Toilets." You're invited to smirk at the notion of hair dipped in latrines and e. coli wicking its way scalpward:

[S]he was "decked out in an orange work vest," the Daily News reports, but she let her long locks flow down over her shoulders in a sort of "devil may care" way, we noticed, while donning a simple gray dress for photo-ops and, once again, showing off that camera-ready smirk of hers. Still got it!

Here's the Daily New story, the source of the photo NY Mag is riffing on. Caption: "Caroline Giuliani (in an older photo)...."

"Once again"... an old photograph looks the same as it used to look.

Asking to be insulted and getting it.

I just ran across this passage written by David Rakoff, in an essay — from this book — about Paris fashion shows:

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

Ted Olson...

... "softened"? By his new wife? I find it hard to believe. But if he gets a new haircut and new glasses, then I might believe.

A dubious album cover.

Via Roger Ebert's twitpic page, which is also the source of the previous 2 posts.

I remember when most girls tried to get their hair to do that. It's not easy, and it takes nerve — or possibly help from Jesus — to tease your hair that big. Funny... it was considered wrong back then — in the early 60s — to tease your hair. There were all sorts of warnings, notably that your hair would fall out, but also that insects would grow in it.

I remember one particularly harrowing — hair-rowing — story about a girl who kept teasing her hair, day after day, teasing and spraying, without washing it. One day, at school, blood suddenly began streaming down her face. Then, she died! Her hair detached from her head in one big clump. Somebody picked it up and then, in horror, threw it against the wall. Thousands of roaches ran out of it!

Think about that when you're teasing your hair. This was back in the days before the coining of the term "urban legend." It would give you pause. Most of us went for a relatively subtle "bump"...



... and denied that we achieved it through teasing.

Anyway, The Faith Tones... What I don't get is... Christian music, but they don't look wholesome. Maybe I'm still scarred from the adolescent lessons about hair-teasing. It would make boys think you were a bad girl. Is this the way to present yourself to Jesus? Sincerely? I couldn't find any Faith Tones music on Amazon or iTunes. They seem to exist entirely as an internet meme, based on mocking this album cover.

Are The Faith Tones themselves an urban legend? Or — alternate theory — is this album cover the work of the devil, who is tempting you to laugh at religion?

"In an act of shockingly retro, sexist stupidity, a local unit of the Republican Party of Minnesota..."

"... has broadcast a new reason you should vote Republican: GOP women are hot, and Democratic women are not."

My comments, in list form:

1. That's not just some guy's viral video, that's an official Republican group? Uh, speaking of "Who Let the Dogs Out," put a leash on those guys. They're not helping.

2. Did they pay royalties to appropriate "She's a Lady" and "Who Let the Dogs Out"?

3. There's a certain silliness to picking (what you think are) the prettiest pictures of one party's women and (what you think are) the ugliest pictures of the other party's women, which might be enjoyable if it was just some YouTube foolery.

4. I liked the natural look of some of the Democratic women who were supposed to be unattractive. Most of the ugliness had to do with making faces. Good for them if they can make faces. It means they aren't botoxed into expressionlessness. Too much of the supposed prettiness of the Republican women came in the form of glitzy TV makeup and hair. I got really tired of looking at them. Too much sameness.

5. The old cliché GOP argument that your women are better than your opponents' women is offputting and sad.

6.  Whoever made this video is ugly.

"Dear all. Cut my hair off a few days ago. Feels incredible. I love it."

Hermione's haircut. I say: Beautiful!

Just like Mia Farrow!