"Foxy Mama (She Leaves Me Breathless)"

Let’s pivot from focusing on white rabbits this Easter

 to instead celebrate *other* emerging forest dwellers…

12 in. x 12 in. mixed-media analog collage of magazine photos & “nature” book illustrations for subject/background with glossy black spray-painted edges on a square stretched canvas finished using Mod Podge sealant, with additional black acrylic paint and felt-tipped marker for shading details and sparkle “asphalt grey” washi tape sides

And now a correlating missive:  It truly is tragic and absurd how once precious, treasured assets can be consumed en mass by “advanced” cultures and then, so quickly depreciated with age, nearly forgotten or dismissed by following generations. “Them’s the breaks,” I suppose, for females once-hot in the spotlight of media adulation, tossed into metaphorical garbage dumps alongside broken burner phones.  At any rate, featured subject Rita Hayworth was an incontestable G.O.A.T. of the Golden Age screen sirens who had her fair share of troubles off-screen.

 

Among so many predatory, powerful Hollywood studio weasels, pushed into performing at a nubile age by her father (who made sexual advances on her), she was cursed with early-onset Alzheimer’s masked behind severe & public alcoholism, then near-blanket dismissal as her beauty and competency were increasingly ravaged by these twin diseases.

 

Although remembered firstly as a sexual “temptress” by many, this wildly gifted WWII-era dancer-actress conveyed a warm maternal presence (at least for me, as I only ever knew one of my grandmothers and embraced her musical romances and temptress-vixen noirs as a child, imagining her as somehow kin).  And also like me, her hair was distinctly red but not naturally, having been pushed upon her early in her career in attempts to mask her Latin bloodline.  Forever our Gilda.