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?

TRAVELLING IN WEIGHTED CLOGS

black and (A)broad:

traveling beyond 

                                                                               the limitations of identity

“Child, who’s going to do your hair if you take off with this man to Holland?” challenged a voice inside my head not even a minute after my Dutch boyfriend of two years asked me to move back “home” with him. And rightly so because Holland wasn’t exactly known as the Mecca for black hair care. It wasn’t like when I’d moved to Washington, D.C. (a.k.a. Chocolate City), where I could get my hair done on every other street corner.”

The opening chapter of this memoir brought back memories, when I moved to the South of France many year ago, before TGMOBTE  (The Great Migration of Blacks to Europe).  I had moved to an area in South Eastern France, and feared that I might have to take a train to Marseille (three hours each way back then) or fly to Paris, just to “touch up my roots”.

What I found, though, was that French people can do almost anything, with panache style and creativity.  Even when meeting  up with the challenges of black hair.

But I digress…

Carolyn Vines was raised in the United States.  Her memoir  chronicles the journey of a black American women from the restrictive baggage filled with  American racial, class and cultural  attire to the challenges of  recognizing the opportunity that awaited her outside in the larger world as a unique member of the global community.

One only has to look at her family photo at the beginning of the book to see that the cute, bright inquisitive looking child in the center would have a destiny outside of a restricted cultural climate.

The catalyst of her journey was her Dutch boyfriend and future husband, whom she met in The United States and eventually moved with to Holland.

Her novel spans a twenty year roller coaster ride of living, travelling and working abroad.

Thank you, Carolyn, for your wonderful and inspiring memoir.  

Now, I look forward to your novel.

author Carolyn Vines

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

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.

A HO' IN ITALY: a book review

This tale is told as a back-story.

Mira and Nick , now divorced and remarried to other people, look back on the demise of their marriage.

Only a hot minute after the elaborate wedding of this golden, Ivy League couple, the wife allows herself to be picked up in the business class lounge of an airport.  You see, her husband left before her to take a job in Rome and she was to follow later.  

Well she did, and got detoured along the way, in the airport lounge, by a wizened,  aged, Italian billionaire, named Zenin.

Despite the glamorous scenes of the high life of Rome, Paris, Monte Carlo, Tel Aviv, London and Venice, it’s a pathetic tale of betrayal without the requisite love which generally accompanies it.  It’s a tale of  sterile materialism and moral bankruptcy.

Personally, I believe someone had slipped a Mickey on the golden couple back at the wedding.  The way I see it, the story makes no sense any other way.

On an even more cynical note: let me inform you that this is a triangular,  interracial romance story, with a black female protagonist, her cuckolded white husband and her detached and self-absorbed European toy manufacturer.

author Andrea lee

Lost Hearts is a most interesting novel taking place in the most appropriate setting for such a  dubious subject…Italy!

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