President Boop

At around noon today, I stood on my back yard deck, in shorts and barefooted. The warm boards felt good. Old Sol was my friend. Off in the distance, trees sported a lot of yellow and brown, but that didn't seem right. Yesterday was like that too, even warmish in the evening. I'm expecting, then, a freak snowstorm sometime later this month.

A few other things about Max Raabe. His show at the Paramount Theatre wasn't sold out, sad to say, except that it enabled me to order good seats only about two weeks ahead of time. When I called the box office to order them, I asked if tickets had been selling well. "Not as well as we thought," the gentleman who handled my order said. He speculated that had Raabe appeared downtown at Symphony Center, as originally planned, he might have done better. The Paramount seats about 1,900, and I'd say that only 1,500 of those places were occupied, if that.

Among those who did attend, the audience was a sea of gray hair and baldness. I felt young. A few few rows ahead of me was a younger couple, maybe not even 30. During the intermission, I heard them speaking German, so I suppose that explained that. I also spotted a handful of kids during intermission. But even our relative youth (40s) was a rare thing.

This Betty Boop cartoon supposedly has new currency in the blogosphere these days, and who I am to deny it? It's an interesting cartoon for a number of reasons, one of which for me is the caricatures of Herbert Hoover and (I think) Al Smith. Good old Al Smith. Though he really didn't have much of a chance against Hoover, it was a time when a candidate's ugliness didn't stand in the way of a major party nomination.

Betty Boop as president was later recycled in a Popeye cartoon, "Olive Oyl for President" (1948). A cartoon that begins like this:

Olive: "Popeye, why don't women run for president?"

Popeye: "Cause they're too busy running for husbands." (Popeye does his laugh.)

Later, though, Popeye comes to support the idea of a female president, specifically Olive, after she beans him with a really large frying pan. Here's that cartoon, to compare with Betty.