HOLY SH_T!!!!!!

Clarence Lusane's book Hitlers Black Victims includes interviews with Black survivors of Nazi concentration camps in Germany.

Enough said.

author, Clarence Lusane

Next...a lighter topic, I promise.

A FANTABULOUS LIFE ABROAD!

The American Prohibition Era , one can say, enhanced the lives of many black Americans who might have otherwise been relegated to a life of banal existence accompanied by predicable racial repercussions.  This would definitely appliy  to one West Virginia born Mullato, named Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith.

Born into humble circumstances to a Black American mother and Irish father, in Alderson West Viginia, she discovered early on that she was a party girl.  She left home at 16 to work in Vaudeville, touring with The Theater Owners Booking Association…the TOBA…better known by the Negro performers of the time as the ‘Tough On Black Asses” agency.

She became known as “Bricktop” beause of her bright red hair, inherited from her father (“I’m a hundred percent Negro with a trigger Irish temper”, she often said).  When she landed in Chicago during one of her tours, she found herself drawn to its bawdy raucous saloon life.

Somehow, through extraordinary twists of fate, this ordinary everyday sistah from ‘round the way, who enjoyed dancing the Charlston and knocking back Remy Martins, found herself the “Toast of Paris”…no pun intended.., as soon as she arrived in 1924.

Among the rabble….rousing, expat high society of Paris in the Roaring 20s she found a backer who helped her 

open her own Nightclub called Chez Bricktop.  There she partied with zillions of the legends of the Lost Generation including  Mabel Mercer, King Farouk, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and others "down to the big boy himself”, the Prince of Wales, teaching everyone to dance the Black Bottom and the Charleston.

I mean…these were giddy times, as you can imagine.

Anyway, World War II arrived and she returned to the US until it was over.  She returned to Europe, opening a new Bricktops in Paris, until mobsters chased her straight to Rome.  Rome is where she opened another Bricktops where she welcomed and then introduced the old time “high end” customers to the newly minted Hollywood glitterati.  Fun times were had by all, until, again, she was chased by the Mob all the way to Mexico City, where she opened yet another Bricktops.

She has been called ”…one of the most legendary end enduring figures of the 20^th century American cultural history.”

Hummm….

Anyway, after all that partying and carousing “Miss Brickie” died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 89.

Ya gotta love her. Non?

A MIDLIFE CRISIS ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA

Ladyfingers: a novel by Delorys Welch-Tyson

Review of Ladyfingers: A Novel

“Black folks on the French Riviera?  Get outta here!  The French Riviera is a location for F. Scott Fitzgerald characters, not Terry McMillan people,” most would probably think.

 Well, let me tell you,  us American colored folks have been living down there on the coast as well as in Paris. 

That’s how I got here myself. 

Yours truly was inspired to explore the South of France by one of my favourite American authors, James Baldwin.  Not only did he live in Paris, but he spent most of his adult life until his death in Saint Paul de Vence, on the French Riviera.  Then there was black American  entertainer Bobby Short.  There were the jazz impresarios, George and Joyce Wein, the founders of the Nice Jazz Festival who had secondary residences in Vence. Let’s not forget the fact that Josephine Baker spent her last years with her Rainbow Tribe in Roquebrunne, on the French Riviera.  Among many others who I won’t name out of respect for their privacy, I will add Miss Tina Turner, the author of Ladyfingers, Delorys Welch-Tyson as well as yours truly.

The author Delorys Welch-Tyson has taken characters usually associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald and paralleled their lives with characters you might find in a Terry McMillan novel to create hilarious midlife crisis tales of American women living on the French Riviera.

Basically, the story is that a famous American filmmaker (no…it isn’t Spike Lee) is planning a wedding banquet at the Negresco Hotel on the French Riviera.  A ban of East Somarians plan to kidnap the American guests in order to demand ransom for their Anti-Sanction Society rebel organization.  The kidnapping plan is foiled due to the lack of strategic planning and general confusion which seemed to prevail during the post 9/11 Bush Administration.

Then there's the internationally famous Pop Diva (hints of Diana Ross, maybe?) in love with both a sadistic Belgian Mime and a manipulative record mogul.  But that a whole 'nother  parallel story!

This novel is written as humour and political satire

 Is the story plausible? Yes.  Absolutely, yes!

authro, Delorys Welch Tyson

 Believable?  No.