On March 10, 1956, Americans weren't as gullible as they are today. The myth of a golden west coast was understood to be just that, a myth. Southern California was well known to be the Jersey Shore where all the movies were made since Edison invented the moving image camera. As more of the overcrowded NorthEast crowded into the Garden State's shore line something had to give. So the politicians in Trenton hired a Madison Avenue public relations firm to redirect the blind masses flocking to their waterways.
Florida would have to become the new southern California. Alligators, orange groves and swamp land speculators were going to have to make way for Americans seeking a new start in life. The myth of California was never given much attention except in children's and comic books, a land of cowboys, movie stars, car hops, and burger joints. Where wine was grown on wine vines and vegetables sprung out of seeds planted in soil without the nourishment of virgin's blood or cat eyes. It was a joke to adults until the Great Depression struck and John Steinbeck wrote a gritty fantasy about Mid Western farmers who travel to an Oz called California.
Marguerite Annie Johnson from Saint Louie, Moe, about as far west as you can actually go on the real North American continent, escaped her abusive childhood and studied Modern Dance in the part of northern Florida that poses as San Francisco. Born in the month of Ape in 28 she was shapely, eloquent, talented in voice and movement and making a living at the famous Purple Onion jazz nightclub. She was a negro as the saying goes at that time. Before Stokely Carmichael would declare her black and the Gestopo of political correctness would hyphenate her a bridge between two continents (African-American).
In her dressing room after an exhausting turnabout in silver corset and high feathers entered a tall stretch of curvy nature path looking for a friend and model for her next magazine cover. Linnea Eleanor Yeager who marched out of her mother in 29 to leave the fashion world blind with sunshine and color. Who popularized the bikini on both sides of the camera. Took girlie peekaboo to new heights and subtle depths undreamt of in the then current erotica.
Both women forged their own destinies and identities. Marguerite became Maya and Linnea chose Bunny. Maya partnered with Alvin Ailey, sang Calypso on records and in movies, wrote great autobiographies and books of poetry and became a spokeswoman for her race. Bunny took a Parisian curiosity and made her own bikinis for herself and her models- when they were wearing something- and popularized tasteful and even artistic glamor girlie photography, outdoor shots and Bettie Page. Bunny also authored books, acted in movies and sang in nightclubs.
Both perfect marriages of brains, beauty and creativity.
Maya was skeptical of the tall brunet with the camera. She looked like a chorus girl and competition though she knew few women could do what she could do. Maya had been a sex worker and Madame just down state in supposed San Diego and knew what kind of pictures men wanted of healthy women of her race. She could believe that this Bunny had posed herself many times but what was her angle? Natural? That's just buck naked. What else could natural mean?
Maya looked at Bunny's book. Strange photographs of pretty white women naked in cars or on the beach. There were a lot of a woman with a girl's face, big behind and black bangs sitting in a leopard skin with two leopards. Was she nuts? Maya was becoming My Angelou so she declined the opportunity to share her considerable endowments with the masses.
Though she didn't offer her image to Bunny to bounce photons off of, Maya offered her salt sister this observation:
I can see you can see
On land and sea
In air in night in dark in light
That which escapes the drooling ape
Gaping at dirty pictures
Of women who disappear as they undress
Reduced to gross anatomy
Lost is their personality
Their spirit and their unique beauty
You take pictures of girls
Dancing in women's bodies
Banishing inhibition, shame and claiming ownership
To what their mothers and Mother Nature hath bequeathed them
You are a true revolutionary
Their paths would never cross again in this life. In Florida-afornia, where the Gulf of Mexico masquerades as the Pacific Ocean for Asian tourists and computer geeks remaking the world in the valley of plastic tits, all history is bent by the mirror of memory and manipulation. Maya never stopped believing in California as she stared left of Texas into the infinite desert that stretched to the Sun. Bunny never hopped past Chicago where Hugh Hefner's empire was her stepping stone to independence.
In the last week of May this year both finally went to California and I'll miss them.
Don Arrup
Satire1
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