Free Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino Page B

Next to the winsome and somewhat sad tale of Miss Doodle and her doughty admirer, is a small epic, housed in a glass-topped case, and entitled, rather puzzlingly, “The Thunderer.” Here is a photograph of Jimmy “Throw ‘im Down” McTater, doing a Polovetsian dance in the garb of his native Bowery, with a denizen of that infamous purlieu, Molly O—short for O’Spud. This is the notorious photo concerning which a pardon came too late to spare the lensman, little “Boy” Blue, from being trampled to death by the march of the raging dwarfs. Another image from that era of loose morals, tight trousers, and see-through skirts shows McTater and Molly as two little girls in blue, both wearing flattering huckleberry “do’s.” When the roll is called up yonder, so Vesti LaGiubba cracked, they’ll be admitted as the waltz of the flowers—“one a peach and the other a pansy.” The final presentation, a photocollage, recreates the frenzied world of Dunderbeck, Texas, home of the honeymoon march, sometimes called the humoresque halfstep, or, more crudely, the pull-me-off-in-Buffalo. Shown are women whose lovely hair is hanging down their lovely backs, each protected, in a manner of speaking, by the pseudonym, “Margery Daw.” One is revealed in shamefully demeaning acts of routine housework, much of it in the kitchen with Dinah (whose Rastus is, yassuh!, usually on parade). The streets of filthy Cairo saw no harsher labor, the sunshine of noisome Paradise Alley illumined faces no sweatier or grimier, not even, for goodness’ sake, on Poverty Row. There were, clearly, no creatures more badly used than the poor sluts and pot-wallopers who slaved as “Margery Daw,” each and every one. America, beautiful America, is what they yearned to see, or to but hear the bells and ogle the belles of Avenue A; but “King” Cotton March, a vile lecher and taskmaster, urged them to backbreaking labor. “Your sweetheart,” he would mock, “your only sweetheart’s the man in the moon, you little pussies,” he would bellow at each exhausted girl as he mounted her, while she continued her labors. It is quite obvious from these disturbing images that nothing was done to assist these young women, for one can see, if one looks closely at the last photograph of the series, a group of sullen musicians herded together for the monthly Dunderbeck football-and-strawberry social, directed by one Cotton March, Esquire. And the band played on.
    [MONTAGES ARRANGED ACCORDING TO BURLOWSKI’S “THEORY OF CHANCE ALIGNMENTS”]

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    MODA MILLENNIUMA FOR SPRING: La Verne’s new glittering array of silk shirts in vibrant, slambang colors, boldly inspired by the works of famed abstract painter, Mark Rothko, whom La Verne says that she has “just adored” since she first encountered his thrillingly pulsing blob-like shapes; Chic Keaton’s profligate dazzle of skirt stylings, sexy and marvelous drapes patterned directly on the “wonderful architecture” of famed abstract painter Piet Mondrian’s “Manhattan” pictures; famed abstract painter Jackson Pollock’s tragic yet inspiring representations of his teeming tragic emotions and repressed homo-eroticism are brought to tingling life in the hipper, “less unfriendly” versions to be discovered in the “urbopolitan” bedding designs of Percy de Abramowicze; the primal, deeply honest, abidingly tough, slashingly calligraphic strokes of famed abstract painter Franz Kline’s hommages to unknown Japanese masters, as well as to his Polish-German coal-miner parents, discover a new, quietly content life in the warmly masculine and chastely acerbic spring loungewear collection by Renatita Iglioni, the “queen of the pointed tongue” turned fashion giantess; the unlikely and even somewhat disturbing stylistic marriage of famed abstract painters Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns, astonishingly breathes forth jagged yet strangely beautiful designs for beachwear, cruise togs, and