Do not be concerned, in a mere flick there will be neat and delicious Mabel tales zooming towards you. She was the striking, xylophone-playing wife of great touring illusionist McDonald Birch. Was she ever.
Here are those promised extra tales. Buckle up:
This is a kind of private entertainment for me as the later ambulance story will show. I have the original Maurice Seymour photograph of the scan you see, hanging in my hallway. Ah yes, the beautiful and oddly crazed Mabel Sperry, wife and box-jumper to that terrifically glamorous US stage trickster McDonald Birch; he of the swift red jackets and sweep of silver hair in his latter years of nonchalant decline.
It is a striking image Seymour has made of Mabel. Though it's a lost one. It submerged itself under the thousands of photographs he shot of show business royalty. Some of them so shimmering that they they've burned their way into human brain history. Try a little search and you'll be thinking, 'ah yes, that one of musician Duke Ellington in a top hat'. And so on.
Somehow I know that Maurice fuddled around in a pile of props strewn on his Chicago studio floor and came up with this spectacular headdress. I am guessing that the stack of outfits was supplied by Mabel. The head decoration looks exactly like one worn by her in the Chinese sequence of their 1940 shows, In those she looked as usual like a knock-out drop but her husband's oriental outfit suggested he'd hopped straight out of bed and wandered onstage in his pyjamas.
But when the headdress emerged from that pile of knick knacks, that sharp Maurice Seymour 'eye' honed in. He slipped it on to her head and before she could react in any other way the shutter was released for keeps with this sublime image resulting.
Now for an anecdote of the local sort. Whenever my father fell over I had to call an ambulance. Inevitably when the ambulance ladies turned up and before anything happened of a health nature, each one of them went into a fainting spell coo-ing alarmingly as Mabel's picture loomed near the front door. This was a common thing and my dad and I used to wait for it each time there was a medical disaster. I sometimes had to drag the ladies away from the picture to perform the emergency work at hand. Though now I know precisely what kind of gal can thrill the lesbian delight valve. I look on my Mabel picture in the hallway as a public service.
Oh damn it, here's another snap of Mabel and that husband of hers. This is their classic 'money in the bank' publicity shot. And it was so lovely of Mabel to throw in her trademark 'Hollywood knee' just for us. She was generous to a fault.
Oh and I must confess that I tossed in something too. Yep, that eye-zinging Ken + Julia Yonetani artwork chandelier made from uranium glass and lit with ultra violet, no less ... that's what I did. It is just so beautiful [sigh]. Those bedazzling Birches deserve it.
IB.
