Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Monday, March 24, 2003


I can think of a lot of past sensations that are unreadable, unwatchable, and unlistenable today. (It goes without saying that Frank Rich will always be unreadable.)

Does anyone here remember the number-two best seller of 1924 -- The Plastic Age? A raging satire of collegiate life, "critically-acclaimed." Scarcely years after it was published its author, Percy Marks (who was forced to quit from Brown University because of it) wrote to a fan saying his book was unreadable. I read it. It's unreadable.

P. S. The film version the following year starred the adorable It Girl, Clara Bow -- the most popular female film star of her age. Just thirty-three years later Oscar Hammerstein 2nd wrote this lyric for Flower Drum Song:

Tonight on TV's Late Late Show,
You can look at Clara Bow!


to which the chorus yells, "WHO?!?!?"

One other note: in Clara Bow's heyday he wrote a lyric for one of Sigmund Romberg's operettas, The Desert Song, called "It."

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