Word: tramp
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Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp--outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat--bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY. An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that precious, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot, when experience and delight become synonymous, and our investments yield the fabulous, unmerited bonanza we never get past expecting...
...emotional frailty. And in Christopher Guest's haphazardly delightful Waiting for Guffman she's a fast-food counter girl who gets the chance to co-star in a tacky musical tribute to Blaine, Missouri. Posey graces so many low-budget films that she has called herself "that indie tramp." An apter title would be Queen of the Indies...
...plot is always the same. People with problems--"husband says she looks like a cow," "pressured to lose her virginity or else," "mate wants more sex than I do"--are introduced to rational methods of problem solving. People with moral failings--"boy crazy," "dresses like a tramp," "a hundred sex partners"--are introduced to external standards of morality. The preaching--delivered alternately by the studio audience, the host and the ever present guest therapist--is relentless. "This is wrong to do this," Sally Jessy tells a cheating husband. "Feel bad?" Geraldo asks the girl who stole her best friend...
...Vamps & Tramps is an apt title, and not just because, as the author writes, it ``evokes the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism''-- the drag queens and prostitutes who are the stars of her cosmology. The title also summarizes Paglia's method. Toss her a pop-cultural subject, and she'll vamp on it, often brilliantly. Invoke her prim sisters in ``the feminist establishment,'' and she'll tramp on them with the Cuban heels of her rhetoric. Into any fray she bursts, a media Medusa, a Valkyrie for hire, Penthesilea fighting for Amazon rights. Is she fair? Nah--fair...
...Vamps & Tramps is an apt title, and not just because, as the author writes, it "evokes the missing sexual personae of contemporary feminism" -- the drag queens and prostitutes who are the stars of her cosmology. The title also summarizes Paglia's method. Toss her a pop-cultural subject (Amy Fisher, Lorena Bobbitt), and she'll vamp on it, often brilliantly. Invoke her prim sisters in "the feminist establishment" (Anita Hill, Catharine MacKinnon), and she'll tramp on them with the Cuban heels of her rhetoric. Into any fray she bursts, a media Medusa, a Valkyrie for hire, Penthesilea fighting...