(hi-ho-spaghetti-o)

Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached  her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…

Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him. 

Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…

Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!

Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)

This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it. 

Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….

Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.

The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins… 

So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.

hey! ducks are adorable and everybody likes feeding them, but bread causes a number of environmental and health problems that could easily be avoided. instead of bread, consider feeding duckies:

frozen peas or corn that’s been defrosted!

romaine lettuce (torn into small pieces)

bird feed of any kind

rice (cooked or uncooked!)

uncooked oats

grapes cut in half

After that you have 2 options: drive away or protect yourself from the radiation.

Option one is tough because literally everybody else is going to want to do this, and you could get stuck right in the fallout. And lemme tell you, if you’re stuck out there when the ashes first fall for more than 15 minutes, you’re dead. Radiation poisoning.

Option two is harder, but has a better success rate. Get underground. Most houses have a crawlspace, but in this bad time just saw a fucking hole in your floor. Put table over hole. Pack some large containers (like tubs), with dirt, tight, and stack them on your table or wherever you’re going to be directly underneath. you need 36 inches if dirt to be protected from the radiation poisoning. You could preemptively buy lead and stick that in a container with a lot of serface area, i forget how many inches you need vertically.

How ever much serface area the dirt/metal/lead covers is how much you and your party will be able to move around. As long as there’s enough inches vertically you’ll be good so long as you stay under it.

they are in love