Word: kiki
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They knew her not as Alice, but more romantically as Kiki. Though she was flamboyantly real and fabulously full-blown, she was to most of the artists, revolutionaries, Babbitts, drunkards and dreamers more a symbol than a person. To the tortuous '20s in Paris, Kiki was what George du Maurier's lovely, fictional Trilby (whose tiny feet were called the most beautiful in the Quarter) had been to a former generation of Bohemians. Nobody ever looked at Kiki's feet...
...Kiki grew up on a Burgundy farm with her two sisters and three brothers. "We were six little bastards," explained Kiki in her autobiography, Souvenir. Her careless mother brought her to Paris...
Lusty and busty, steatopygous and sinful, Kiki swung along her Paphian way from scullery maid to artists' model to become one of Montparnasse's topflight nightclub entertainers. The artists who immortalized Kiki's curves in oil and marble sometimes forgot to pay her, and Kiki never cared. Unconcerned, she tramped the streets in a threadbare overcoat and man's hat and some artist's castoff shoes. Later, in fancier finery, Kiki lounged in the wicker chairs at the Cafe du Dome or sang in her Pernod-husky voice ("I could never sing...
Maxine did not mind so long as everybody looked nice, had some traces of manners, played games and were not "too tiresome" about Kiki. Kiki was Maxine's pet lemur which used to attack the guests, upset breakfast trays, invade beds, leave "traces of its passing wherever it chose...
...Chinese use four tones, the Bulus have five-two high, two low and one in the middle. So distinct are the pitches and rhythms of the language that sometimes a couple of people "too far apart to hear actual words call back and forth using only the syllables kiki in the tones of the words they would employ in ordinary conversation." The thick and the thin sides of the drum are played in pitches and rhythms to match the language...