Beatrice Arthur discusses her experience working as an understudy
for the legendary stage and screen diva Tallulah Bankhead in a 1956 Broadway revival of Ziegfeld Follies during an interview from 2002. Though Tallulah had been dead for over thirty years at this point, Bea was still clearly hurt and annoyed by Bankhead’s inference
that she wasn’t attractive enough to be a star. Bea’s colorful language was bleeped and an abrupt “fade to black” was made when the interview aired. Cast as glamorous stage star Vera Charles in the Broadway musical Mame opposite Angela Lansbury in 1966 (a role which she later reprised in the 1974 film version opposite Lucille Ball), Bea won
a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance. Tallulah Bankhead, fully aware that Bea had become a star, died two years later at the age of 66.
Just a reminder, but you do not need to “earn” being tired.
You’re allowed to be tired, even if you haven’t “done” anything and you’re allowed to be tired even if you did less than someone else.
Being tired is a normal thing your body does for a whole plethora of reasons, and is a basic bodily function. You don’t need to “earn” basic bodily functions, no matter what anyone else tells you.
hey hey hey this is really important, especially as a reminder to people with disorders that cause chronic exhaustion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion in Judaism, and being kind. In that light, I would like everyone to know that my current favorite Jewish supernatural headcanon is that, instead of driving vampires away with crosses or stakes through the heart, we say the Mourner’s Kaddish for them. I mean, that’s just so adorable. You see this threatening undead creature, and instead of yelling murder, you feel bad for them, and you mourn for them. Imagine being a vampire at the receiving end of that, having been chased away for years and years and told you’re a monster when you come across someone who sees you and your existence and accepts that you’re in a pretty bad place and offers help in the best way they can. I’m actually tearing up about this a little. If someone adds to this post I’ll love them forever.
It doesn’t work for zombies.
This is one of the hardest things she learns, in the business. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish will slow a vampire, to stare at you with wide shocked eyes (and once, memorably, to weep blood-tinged tears), unable or unwilling to lift a hand against you. It will calm a dybbuk, enough to make it stop whatever destruction it’s begun, and almost always enough to start a conversation about why it clings so desperately to the world of the living, what it’s left undone, how it can be freed to move on. You have died, the Kaddish says, and we mourn you as we would mourn our own dead, because someone must.
But there is no soul and no mind left in a zombie, no vestige of the self it once was, nothing left for the Kaddish to speak to.
She says it anyway, with every head-shot, with every flung grenade.
Not because she still hopes one might hear her, but because they are dead, and the dead should be mourned.
…this is gorgeous.
I would buy the hell out of this book.
It almost works on ghosts. The freezing, electric wind of their presence slows to a soft chill like the last breath of winter. The ectoplasmic glow flickers, dims, and steadies. They seem to be listening.
But they do not leave. Jewish or not, and whether or not they knew Aramaic, they seem to sense the Kaddish’s meaning: Blessed is He beyond blessing and song, beyond praise and consolation that is uttered in the world.
In their half-world, half forever lost and half still ours, the ghostly voices lift. No longer do they moan and scream. They sing: May there be peace. Their words linger when the living song has ended, when the mortal must stop for breath. The dead hold their notes. The song rings on.
Perhaps they will sing until there is peace upon us in truth.
