Le Beaute de la the Haute Savoie

Le Beaute de la Haute Savoie

The northern wind hummed against the hotel room's windows. The blonde actress stripped off her clothes and lay naked on double bed. The pillow embraced her face. Downstairs in the hotel bar the film crew celebrated the film's wrap. Wine wine and more wine. The English loved their drink and loved the cold. Belgrade gave them all the cold they could handle. Not the actress. She was thin. A pale beauty from Quebec. The douvet provided warmth. To her skin. To her flesh, but not her spine. It was winter in Yugoslavia. Tomorrow she was flying back to Paris. Her home, but in two days she was traveling across the Atlantic to Montreal. More cold weather with her family. She shut off the lights. Her next role was that of Marie Therese Louise de Savoie-Carignan. 's best friend. The Princess of Lamballe could have walked from the doomed queen, but honor required honor. The mob screamed, "Off with her heads." Marie Therese Louise de Savoie-Carignan's head ended up on a spike. Her skull danced before the doomed queen's windows. An English movie star was casted as Marie Antoinette for the French TV Series. She possessed lovely hair. The blonde actress shivered in her bed. The twin spires of Vlaska glowed outside the window. Another place in her life. Montreal, Paris, LA, Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, and the North Pole. Why couldn't she be in the Sahara once? But in truth she had no worries. She was a working actress and actresses liked work. Especially in 1989.

THE BIRTH OF THE BOUFFANT by Peter Nolan Smith

The bouffant coif supposedly gained popularity in the late-18th Century.

Supposedly Marie Antoinette' coiffeur sought to camouflage the Queen's early balding by upsweeping her thin tresses atop her head to cascade over her ears. The style lost its popularity after the Bourbon Queen's decapitation by the guillotine, however almost two centuries later Jackie Kennedy, JFK's fashionable wife, reincarnated the fashion with the help of her hairdresser Mr. Kenneth.

Everything about Jackie was fabulous in the early 60s and whether they lived in New York or Iowa women across America imitated the First Lady's glamour with a visit to the local hair salon.

The country was soon awash with bouffants with movie stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak furthering the cause of the extreme hair-do. Only the nuns at Our Lady of the Foothills rejected the trend with their hair to the skull, although none of their students saw what was under the dimple, so the reverend sisters also might have been sporting bouffants too.

The bouffant died out with the coming of the hippie era. Young women grew their hair long and the style seemed slated for extinction, only to stage several rebirths with the coifs of lead singers of the B-52s and another with the late English singer Amy Winehouse and the actresses in TV Show MADMEN.

Last week ago a woman walked into a New York bar in the East Village. Her bleached blonde hair was piled high on her head. She looked so very 60s. I was sitting with Jamie Parker, who was recently back from Thailand and the 50 year-old ex-con said, "She looks like a 1960s transvestite."

"You don't like the bouffant?" The hair style resurrected my youth and my first yearnings for women instead of girls.

"Not at all, but this Mr. Kenneth who re-invented the hair style for Jackie Kennedy was gay." Jamie smirked at the passing beauty.Her stiletto heels were almost as tall as her hair and we caught the scent of Chanel No.5.

"You have something against gays?" Back in the 60s they were called homos and they were to be feared by young men, unless they were looking for a good time.

"Me, I love gays, but I looked at the bouffant hair style as a strategy gay hairdressers used to make straight men not want to have sex with their wives or girlfriends. It might have turned Kim Novak and Leslie Gore gay." Jamie spoke with no trace of rancor. His first love was drugs.

"I liked the bouffant. Back in 1965 I met a girl from Mattapan at the Oriental Theater. Her name was Jo with dirty blonde hair as stiff as a store mannequin's wig. She was my Kim Novak.

"Figures."

"How does it figure?"

"You're from Boston. Men from Boston love Jackie Kennedy. You probably went to bed jerking off to the First Lady."

"Not that I can remember." Jackie O rode horses and spoke French. Women like her were destined to marry rich regardless of their hairstyle. "I know my place."

"Don't we all." Jamie was in the States to visit his mother. She lived in the Bronx and thought that he was teaching school in Thailand, instead of running the Pigpen A Go-Go featuring fat pretty bar girls and skinny ugly pole dancers. Jamie was a man of the street no matter where he lived on this Earth.

"Easy to know your place when it's only us and them."

The them was the rich. The 'us' was the rest of the world and no bouffant would make a woman Jackie O or Marie Antoinette, except in Thailand, where some of the boys are girls and twice the girl any woman would be, even with a bouffant.

Jackie O would have love them.

Shut Your Hole

The quote "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" or "Let them eat cake" has been wrongly attributed to Marie Antoinette to highlight the contempt of the aristocracy or upper classes for the poor, however the phrase coming from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's CONFESSIONS didn't stop the mob from taking their vengeance on the Bourbon queen and today Asia richest woman Gina Rinehart announced at the Sydney Mining Club, "The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business. Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country's future. The mining magnate whose wealth from mineral sales to China climbed from $1 billion in 2007 to $18 billion in 2011 went on to say, ""There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you're jealous of those with more money don't just sit there and complain, do something to make more money yourself. Spend less time drinking, smoking and socializing and more time working." Thus spake the rich in the days before the Second Coming of Slavery.