Summer and Smoke Screens

I recently got my hands on the novel The Queen Bee (1949) by Edna Lee remembered darkly and vaguely from adolescence as a seminal work in the creating of my ‘romanticism’:

Re-Reading it, in my present ‘woman-as-crone arch-typical goddess’ – isn’t that who I am supposed to aspire to be as a ‘women of a certain age’ instead of just being the sadder but wiser Gal.

Originally serialized in 3 parts in Woman's Home Companion magazine, May - July 1949, THE QUEEN BEE, owned by my Mother, reflected the view of women and romance of the time that preceded my arrival on Earth and would affect me and my sexuality when I came of age at the end of the 60ies – you can call that ‘good timing..!

I caught some phases I thought were key to my sensibility

you're young enough to believe life has value…the fairy tale like all fairy tales was shattered…Beauty, it’s like worrying about a dead man…when it’s love you know it - how, i queried - there was love and there was the biological urge, how could you tell which was which? did love come first or the urge? when would I be old enough to be treated like a grown up, how did one grow up?…I did not know that before this day was done I would have started to grow up, and then, much as I might desire it, I could never be a child again….Then he stood and taking my hands pulled me up beside him..held my hands, looked into my eyes steadily..some dark force, some potency I saw in his - inner trembling crept from my knees to my thighs even to my breasts - rapt and blinded…” and most important to me: when would I be old enough to be treated like grown up, how did one grow up?

So was the heroine of The Novel as she fell hard for the Rochester-like older man, husband of her selfish ‘feminine’(as in wiles)Aunt.

That was then, and now, not since women mourned the shock and awww of the outing of Rock Hudson, our romantic fantasy via the Hollywood Dream Machine has homo-eroticism reached a peak of extravagance with The Passion of the Christ and the passion of the Paul. (Passchendaele)

I know that gentile Christian males have a Christ thing and fear death at 33, but who are they fantazicing about, after all - a renegade Jewish Rabbi of Biblical fame, who’s mythology replaced the traditions of Greece and Rome and the Jewish Creator with a man-God, the son of God.

And in the Catholic catechism, “Who am I” “I am a child of God” “Who is God”? “God is Father in heaven”, the children chant as the incense of denial burns sexual repression into tiny brains that will one day persecute Jews for killing their ‘Saviour, who died for their sins’.

Maybe it has something to do with these mama's boyz fantasizing about their Mothers in childhood and freezing them in adolescent sexuality which is about where they are at sexually. The VIRGIN Mary is apparently the most famous woman of all time.

Images of Heff and his Playmates; Jack Nicholson cavorting on a yacht surrounded by nubile young things..just not too young as to cause Polanski type souris.

Jack Nicholson reputedly bragged that he's had sex with more than 2000 women.