Tuesday museday

Going through the Life magazine archives on Google Books yesterday I came across this startling photo from the May 20, 1966 issue. Two women with a device that looks like...well, you know what it looks like. It looks like a device that would bring a smile.

Queen Hope Cooke was all the rage for a while, in 1963 marrying the king of a small Himalayan country, but in 1970 the king was put in jail. She came back to he U.S., where she now lives. I wonder if she brought back the object.

I clipped "Spudboy" out of my local newspaper a few years ago, from an article about the local farmer's market. I cut off the information about the photographer, so I don't know who to credit. The picture is carefully posed to show off the very phallic looking potato the smirking boy is stroking. The young Harry Potter lookalike is holding it like Harry might hold his magic wand, with great respect.

The cover of the latest issue of Vanity Fair sells sexagenarian sex with Cher, who is now 64 years old. Cher has good genes and is still beautiful, but has the help of a skilled photographer, makeup, wigs, plastic surgery and Photoshop. I stood close to a stage one night in 1965, when she and then-husband Sonny Bono came through town and gave a concert. Cher was in her original incarnation, the 19-year-old in hip-hugger bell bottom pants and dark bangs in her eyes. Cher looked out and above the audience and did not see us. In front of me were three college guys with hats. They had it worked out so that every time Cher turned in our direction they would raise their caps in greeting to her. She never saw them because she never looked down from the stage to her audience. The boys lifted their caps four or five times, then finally gave up trying to get her attention.

Cher has had an amazing career spanning five decades, and she's a lot smoother now with an audience. She also has talent as an actor, with a new movie, Burlesque, coming out. She's survived in a tough business. If she cuts one more slice of cheesecake out of an aging body then more power to her.