When Thora Birch was a tween, she appeared in typical tween fare like Monkey Trouble, in which she looked something like this:
At the time, I was not inclined to extrapolate from the available data. Add a decade and change, though:
She turned twenty-eight on Thursday. And “Thora,” apparently, is the feminine form of “Thor.” Yeah, that Thor. Do not mess with this young woman.
Maybe it’s just me, but each year the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue seems just a (simulated wayward) hair less inspired than its predecessor, and I think it’s just that the young ladies sporting the suits, or semblances thereof, are just freaking bored with the whole concept.
The one possible exception this year, I’m thinking, is Anne V, who isn’t immune to the standard-issue Petulant Pout, but somehow often manages to look like she’s about to break out into the giggles, even in moments of feigned sultriness.
And when the situation is clearly goofy:
I’m pretty sure she’s not laughing at Cubs fans.
Historical note: Technically, this post title became obsolete when she was about four years old.
And Rudy Huxtable is thirty now:
Um, wow. This is Keshia Knight Pulliam, a winner at last week’s NAACP Image Awards, for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Tyler Perry’s House of Payne).
Only about 0.07 percent of the population was born on the 29th of February, what with the day showing up only once every four years or so, and this year isn’t one of them. While as a rule I object to anything that makes February, a generally tedious month, go on any longer than it has to, sometimes there is redeeming social value to that extra day:
You’re looking at Dinah Shore, long before she urged us to see the USA in a Chevrolet. Dinah was born on the 29th of February in 1916, the last year Chevrolet operated as an independent car company. Her late-1950s variety show on NBC was something I could never bring myself to miss for some inscrutable reason.
Another Leap Year babe, after the jump:
According to the cover, the March Maxim presents “The Hottest Girls from Australia, Turkey & New Jersey.”
Hey, I’ve been to two of those places.
Representing the Republic of Turkey is model Simge Tertemiz, who looks something like this:
Now where are all those Jersey girls?
The second track on Prince’s infamous Black Album is, in fact, a song about Cindy Crawford:
Don’t all girls look the same?
They don’t? Oh, what a shame.
Inasmuch as this fact is at the heart of the raison d’être for Rule 5, and since Saturday is Cindy’s birthday — and since this isn’t the same picture I ran three weeks ago, here’s Cindy on the beach last summer (and here’s where I found the picture).
Just incidentally, I am in receipt of the gas bill for last month, a period which featured three consecutive days with lows below 10° F. This had nothing to do with the choice of photographs. Really. Pinky swear.
Then again, Prince asks in the next track (“Dead On It”): “What does that have to do with the funk?” Let there be irrelevance, and let us glory in it. Happy birthday, Cindy C.
On the subject of Linux Barbie, Jeffro observed:
Maybe it’s just me, but if this Barbie ate a cookie or three, she’d really remind me of Bonnie Hunt. Which would be a very good thing.
My picture collection being woefully Hunt-deficient, I set out for the Web, and turned up this one from The Late Show with David Letterman:
I can see it, I think. Although Barbie probably doesn’t have comic timing like Bonnie Hunt.
“Kerry Washington,” said noted asshat John Mayer, “will break your heart like a white girl.”
I have no idea what he meant by that, so here’s a picture of Kerry Washington in a little navy-blue dress by Luella, circa 2007.
Eat your heart out, John.
From left to right: Abigail Adams (John Adams, 2008, played by Laura Linney), and Joan Berkman (The Squid and the Whale, 2005, played by Laura Linney).
The thinking man’s sex symbol? How would I know?
Anyway, happy mumbleth birthday to Laura Linney.
Cindy Crawford says that she’s experimented — with Botox:
“There’s a doctor here in London who I’ve gone to for Botox,” she said.
“I did a whole skincare line with him. But I haven’t done Botox for ten years. And I didn’t do collagen, I don’t think.”
Wouldn’t you remember your collagen days? Then again, they probably didn’t look like this:
Not exactly Denis Leary’s dream come true, but what the hell. And forget about hotdots, the magazine; it’s dead.
The first time I saw Anne Jeffreys, she was invisible.
Well, sort of. She was playing Marion Kerby in Topper, a mid-1950s TV sitcom based loosely on the 1937 film, which in turn was derived from a novel by Thorne Smith. (There was a second novel, Topper Takes a Trip, which spawned a second film; a third film followed.)
Anyway, the premise is that Fun Couple George and Marion Kerby have been killed, and their shades are spending some time haunting stuffy old Cosmo Topper. The ghost shtick requires them to vanish and reappear at irregular intervals for reasons which aren’t always, um, clear.
The show was old news when I got around to seeing it for the first time, and my attention was largely fixed upon the special effects, so cheesy I wondered if Velveeta was the alternate sponsor. So it never quite dawned on me, even when she was actually on screen, that Anne Jeffreys looked like this:
She’s still with us: she turns 87 today.
From twenty-two years ago, here’s Geena Davis (who turns 54 this week) pretending to be one of those easy Earth girls.
They never seemed all that easy to me.
Once one of the super-er of supermodels, Angela Lindvall was born 31 years ago today in Midwest City, Oklahoma, just east of the OKC, and grew up in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. About ten years ago she looked like this:
Today Lindvall, divorced, lives in Topanga Canyon with her two seriously-cute boys and devotes herself to environmental causes and sustainability; she started the Collage Foundation to support, she says, “an engaged alternative to apathy.” The camera, for its part, clearly still thinks she’s wonderful; the shot to the right comes from a summer ‘09 session for the British edition of Vogue, and demonstrates pretty nicely that bewitching and bucolic aren’t mutually exclusive. Those jeans, though, have pretty much had it.
Disclosure: I used to have a picture of Lindvall — a trifle more revealing than either of these — as wallpaper on my trusty Toshiba notebook.
Jessica Rabbit comes to life, kinda sorta:
This is Annette Edwards, 57, former model and present-day rabbit breeder, who has decided that it’s worth rather a lot of dieting and plastic surgery to look like Mrs. Roger Rabbit.
The surgery reportedly cost in excess of £10,000. She’s not bad; she’s just overdrawn that way.
It’s Gabrielle Reece’s 40th birthday, and I dare say, neither volleyball nor motherhood has wrecked her physique.
Here she is on the orange carpet at the 42nd Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in May 2007. Her second child was born on New Year’s Day in 2008, so she was ever-so-slightly pregnant in this shot.
Even today, Audrey Hepburn both inspires and puzzles:
A half-century after her iconic turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hepburn remains an ideal of simple elegance, eminently approachable and attainable. She evokes a sensibility composed of both sophistication and innocence — a combination that’s considered practically oxymoronic in our more jaded times.
What I can’t figure out, though, is the desire by women to emulate the classic Audrey look, even when it’s not necessarily a natural fit. In separate instances, I’ve been told by female acquaintances (including one via tweet) that they were sold on a dress, hairstyle, etc. because it gave them that Audrey Hepburn quality. In each case, the women in question had physical features that were decidedly unlike Hepburn’s, i.e. curvy, blonde, or olive-skinned. That such a diverse representation of femininity would all aspire to be Audrey says something about the idealization at play.
Perhaps it’s not so much The Look as it is the suggestion of the lifestyle: one does not simply put on “sophistication and innocence” as though it were a costume. And said lifestyle might not be the glorified escort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s — the character in Truman Capote’s original novella was a bit more, um, streetwise — so much as the slumming Europrincess of Roman Holiday.
It didn’t hurt that Hepburn had an ongoing arrangement with Givenchy, who designed her costumes for many years. And while Givenchy didn’t invent the Little Black Dress — Coco Chanel was showing one back in the 1920s — the one he worked up for Holly Golightly proved to be iconic. How iconic, you ask? One of three copies made for the film sold at a charity auction in 2006 for £467,200, and it wasn’t even one she’d actually worn.
Then again, it could be something else entirely. Claire Goldsmith, granddaughter of eyewear designer Oliver Goldsmith, who made glasses for Hepburn, says it’s the eyes:
“…Those big, brown, warm eyes. Women relate to her because she was unthreatening, and for men she had that innocence.”
Of whom can this be said today?
Back in the days when David Letterman was actually funny, he took pains to distinguish between mere supermodels and leggy supermodels, who, he said, were something of a breed apart.
Despite the perceptions of fashion magazines, researchers have found that most people do not find leggy women all that attractive.
After being shown pictures of women with the same body shape but varying leg-to-body length, most people found women in the middle leg ranges most attractive.
It’s not clear whether this preference is gender-based:
[W]hen researchers chose eight images and asked 705 women and 235 men to rate the attractiveness of each shape, five of the six focus groups rated women with longer legs less attractive.
They also did not prefer women with short legs, a body shape often associated with poor health.
This latter seems a bit unfair, since a woman 5′1″ or so might be perceived as having short legs whether or not they’re actually in proportion to the rest of her.
Then again:
This is the towering presence of Kylie Minogue, five feet zilch, and she looks just fine. In an earlier survey, the respondents expressed a preference for gams five percent longer than “normal” — but not much beyond that.
For more than forty years, when asked what I was looking for in the way of purely superficial characteristics, I have always said, “Give me a sweet smile and a decent pair of legs, and everything else is negotiable.” By the time I’m dead and gone, though, expressing preferences of this sort will surely be forbidden by the Federal Bureau of Copulation.
Danica Patrick: the Sarah Palin of NASCAR?
There’s little in the way of middle ground when it comes to Danica. People either love her for her gumption in taking on the boys, dislike her for her sometimes surly persona and penchant for self-promotion, or really really REALLY can’t stand her. A large percentage of the latter devote an even larger amount of time to expressing this sentiment, be it in assorted sordid columns for various publication channels or in the comments area of same.
Never seen Sarah surly, but that makes sense. And besides:
Both Danica Patrick and Sarah Palin have a lot of fans who adore them regardless of how media elements tell them otherwise. There are throngs of people waiting for Palin at every stop in her book promotion tour not to jeer but cheer, fueled by political and personal admiration. Patrick also has her group of followers, young girls invariably decked out in #7 gear in attendance at every IRL race. They’re there because their heroine is there, the girl who takes on, holds her own against and sometimes bests the boys.
On the other hand, Sarah’s never done this:
Not for Sports Illustrated, anyway.
Not everyone loves orange as a fashion color. From a thread on this very site:
Duyen Ky: “Orange should be reserved for road-hazard cones by federal law.”
Lisa Paul: One fashionista once observed that orange is a hard color to wear: “In general, if you look good in orange, you’ll look even better in another color.”
There are, admittedly, few really stirring examples of going orange — although I confess I am slightly shaken by this one:
From not quite a year ago, Alyssa Milano, who turns 37 this weekend.
Bonus orange content: An actual rhyme, sort of, by Tom Lehrer:
Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.
Your inflection may vary. See linguist for details.
The American Association for Nude Recreation has posed a question to its membership:
Padma Lakshmi is just the latest in a long line of celebrities who reveal in interviews that they enjoy being naked, have gone skinny-dipping or have tried some kind of au naturel experience such as nude gardening. Do you think they help further the cause of nude recreation or not?
Hard to say, really. I don’t know anybody who, having dismissed the idea of trying it out, changed her mind after being told that [fill in name of celebrity] does it, so it’s not a direct benefit to The Cause. Then again, if she did change her mind, why would she tell me?
That said, Lakshmi, six months pregnant, posed in pretty near nothing — there’s a sandal strap visible, anyway — for Page Six magazine earlier this month. And she’s comfortable with pretty near nothing, as both that cover and an earlier photo indicate. Whether the individual reader will be inspired to go and do likewise, I have no idea. On the other hand, it makes for an obvious Rule 5 ploy.
You know, it’s really not absolutely necessary to wear some monstrously high heel, even if (1) you’re an actress, (2) you’re at a Hollywood premiere, and (3) you’re known for, among other things, a better-than-decent pair of gams.
And I’m not about to demand an explanation from Susan Sarandon, either:
[Sarandon] looked glowing as she attended the U.S. premiere of The Lovely Bones at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
But, after wearing towering heels at the world opening in London last month, she slipped on a pair of comfy blue flats.
It had the unfortunate effect of making the 5ft 7in actress appear a little flat-footed and failed to match the rest of her sexy-at-63 look.
Well, they’re not exactly ballet flats, which are considered semi-trendy these days, but maybe you have to be Sofia Coppola to pull that off. Me, I might grumble about the color — it doesn’t really go with the dress — but I would argue that at this age, if you don’t do as you damn well please, there’s something seriously wrong.
(Via Fark.)
Today is Tyra Banks’ 36th birthday, but this picture is from a third of a lifetime ago: in 1997, when she was sporting the Victoria’s Secret “Fantasy Bra,” street value $3 million.
For comparison, here she is in the 2004 version, ostensibly worth $10 million.
Disclosure: When I pulled that picture out of the archives, I had no idea Tyra was wearing something hyperexpensive. Then again, I’ve always believed that expensive lingerie is good for show, not so good in actual use.
Further disclosure: Edited to fix date.
“I’ve got so much on my plate,” said Anna Nicole Smith in 2003 of her busy work schedule, “that I’m probably gonna die at 37 like Marilyn.”
She was 36 at the time. Anna Nicole, I mean.
She would have been 42 today. I have to think she’d still be with us if she were still just plain Vickie Hogan from Texas, although she was never really “just plain.”
The taller of these two ladies goes by the name “Eve,” and allegedly she’s the world’s tallest model, 2.05 meters in height, which puts her nearly a foot taller than the Hollies’ highly-memorable long cool woman in a black dress, and somewhere between a shooting guard and a power forward, basketball-wise. (She’s taller than six current players on the Oklahoma City Thunder roster, if you’re curious.) Her friend is a modest five-foot-three. Then again, they’re wearing heels, so you can’t truly be sure.
The question always arises: “Are guys intimidated by such?” The Bureau of Post-Rectal Statistics says that 72.4 percent indeed are. (The rest, I suspect, are lying, blind, or lying and blind.) And while I have to pay proper respect to someone who has to file an environmental-impact statement just to cross her legs, I suspect I’d also be intimidated by the shorter one.
(Found by Vanderleun.)
Since she has a birthday this weekend (she’s, um, never mind how old she is, it’s just a number), here’s a shot of Jamie Lee Curtis during a May appearance on the Tonight Show; Mr. Leno is properly appreciative.
(You knew she was married to Lord Haden-Guest, right?)
Atypically for an all-American bullet-headed not-even-slightly-Saxon mother’s son, my favorite novel for the last four decades and odd has been Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which I discovered in high school and which I still reread once a year or so. I admit up front that I was scared spitless when they made a movie out of it, but Tim Fywell’s film was true to the spirit of the book, and Romola Garai won me over as the young Cassandra Mortmain, described thusly at the end of the third paragraph: “I am no beauty but have a neatish face.”
Like hell.
(Photo from InStyle Australia, 11/07.)
The Instant Man quotes Marlene Dietrich: “A man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him, than a woman with the most perfect legs in the world.”
Close enough, I suppose. On the other hand, were I to encounter a woman with divine gams, what have I got to lose by trying to draw her interest?
Although Dietrich herself insisted: “The legs aren’t so beautiful, I just know what to do with them.”
ZZ Top was not available for comment.
One thing I left behind the last time I moved was a very old Tina Turner poster. (How old? It was a promotional poster for a video, which was available in Beta, fercrissake.) It was tucked away on the inside of a closet door, which may explain why I forgot to bring it with me to the palatial estate at Surlywood: simple brain fart.
After her 2000 tour, after which she was supposedly going to pack it in, Tina had said:
It’s time to hang up my dancing shoes. I can’t sing without jumping around and it’s getting harder. I’m happy I can do it one last time so people can remember me at my best rather than as a caricature.
Oh, she can still jump around. This particular shot came from a performance in Germany in January 2009, kicking off the European portion of her 50th Anniversary (!) tour, at which time she was sixty-nine years old and still manifestly poster-worthy.
A caricature? Never. This is Tina. This is the only woman on earth who could cover both Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back” and Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” — on the same album.
Wouldn’t quite go with my current decor, but it’s a very nice chair, and its occupant, the lovely Natasha Henstridge, is even less likely to show up in my living room.
Last month I put up a perfectly lovely photo of Diane Lane, and drew this comment:
She and Sela Ward are the two most beautiful women in the biz. Hands down.
Fortunately for all concerned, last Sunday Parade did a feature on Sela Ward, from which I have swiped two photos by John Russo, on the basis that one just wasn’t enough.
I suppose we are now accepting nominations for Number Three.
