ON STAGE

"Cheerleaders have to date athletes.  It's the law"--FREAKS & GEEKS

Today I finished my latest PEANUTS reprint and started the third reprint volume of Leonard Starr's comic strip ON STAGE.  It's about Mary Perkins and her efforts to start and maintain a career as a Broadway actress.  It's one of the best-written strips, with sharp dialogue like "Oola's producer has the look of a man who invested all his money in 3-D glasses." (This was in 1959, five years after the original 3-D fad fizzled.  How much longer will the current revival last?) And the artwork is impressive too:  like Alex Raymond and John Cullen Murphy, Starr was a comics artist who knew how to draw pretty women!

The story I'm reading about just now has Mary coming to the Riviera to promote a movie she made that's in contention for a thinly-veiled Cannes Film Festival.  Her big publicity-hound rival is Oola LaBelle, a thinly-veiled Brigitte Bardot.  Meanwhile her photojournalist fiance Pete Fletcher is being held behind the iron curtain and she's trying to get him free, attracting a con artist's attention... (Later he did get free and marry her.)

This evening I saw the documentary SCATTER MY ASHES AT BERGDORF'S at the Bloor.  (The title comes from a NEW YORKER cartoon by Victoria Roberts, whose style clearly influenced the look of Milhous on THE SIMPSONS.) It's about Manhattan's high-class designer label store Bergdorf-Goodman's.  That store's window displays are truly stunning.  But I find something depressing about the luxury trade.  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...

After I got home, I saw the FREAKS & GEEKS episode on Netflix where Sam becomes the team mascot with a giant Viking head so he can be close to cheerleader Cynthia, but she has a crush on the basketball star...