Day 5
Modern time continues to try and invade my parachronistic life. I suppose I could have waited until Monday but I do not like my packages to sit in the post office where they are very likely to be lost or shipped back or used to prop up the gimpy leg on a table. I did take the opportunity to complain to the clerk about the price of stamps and how just yesterday it was only two cents to mail a letter and now it's a whole forty cents more! For forty cents, I could buy a hamburger and a Coke! Fortunately for me, the counter clerks are not the ones to worry about and they have grown accustomed to my face. The one I was talking to played along with me until she needed to help someone who wasn't acting foolish. I wish I could say the same for my grocery clerks, instead THOSE people question my grocery purchases and call me "Mrs."
I have been reading a lot about child stars of the silent film era but it's just sad. Those kids were the biggest stars in their day, and financially responsible for their entire extended families and most of them don't even have an entry in Wikipedia. Then they hit puberty and found their parents had squandered all their money on schemes and dope (the Coogan Act didn't hit until 1939) so their twelve hours a day, six days a week work schedule had been for naught.
Charlie Chaplin had a lot in common with Charlie Sheen, oddly. Both were playboys, had reputations as sexual deviants, were sued by various women for assaults of some kind and both fought their attention-whore ex-wives to prevent their children from appearing onscreen (Chaplin won, Sheen lost). Baby Peggy was a lot like Macaulay Culkin in terms of kiddie superstardom ruined by overly ambititous asshole fathers. Drug use was pretty prevalent in 1928 as well, heroin, cocaine and the occasional opium. Marijuana saw some use but mostly people liked to smoke heroin or drink morphine. Death by accidental poisoning seemed to be pretty common but that might be attributable to bathtub gin and such, on account of Prohibition.
This is not a new picture, it's from last year and was originally in color but it is in front of the Lalique doors of the Oviatt Building.
I have been reading a lot about child stars of the silent film era but it's just sad. Those kids were the biggest stars in their day, and financially responsible for their entire extended families and most of them don't even have an entry in Wikipedia. Then they hit puberty and found their parents had squandered all their money on schemes and dope (the Coogan Act didn't hit until 1939) so their twelve hours a day, six days a week work schedule had been for naught.
Charlie Chaplin had a lot in common with Charlie Sheen, oddly. Both were playboys, had reputations as sexual deviants, were sued by various women for assaults of some kind and both fought their attention-whore ex-wives to prevent their children from appearing onscreen (Chaplin won, Sheen lost). Baby Peggy was a lot like Macaulay Culkin in terms of kiddie superstardom ruined by overly ambititous asshole fathers. Drug use was pretty prevalent in 1928 as well, heroin, cocaine and the occasional opium. Marijuana saw some use but mostly people liked to smoke heroin or drink morphine. Death by accidental poisoning seemed to be pretty common but that might be attributable to bathtub gin and such, on account of Prohibition.
This is not a new picture, it's from last year and was originally in color but it is in front of the Lalique doors of the Oviatt Building.
Labels: 1928 House
posted by CMURB at 12:31 AM
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