“Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz,” sang Janis Joplin in a kind of rhetorical celestial beg. The words were recorded for her album Pearl three days before her death, and the song stands as a melodic plea for heavenly recognition of rather mundane earthly accomplishment. Presented as clever wheedling for a just reward, Joplin co-wrote the lyrics from her haze of addiction and indie rock star entitlement, tongue only half in cheek. The song has a great anthem beat, and the words rolled through my head as I read this morning’s paper studded with stories of people urging us to just believe what they say.
First there is the harrowing and nauseating testimony of two NYPD officers on trial for raping a young, intoxicated fashion designer after helping her inside her home from a cab. The two policemen returned to her Manhattan apartment three times after midnight to “check on her” because she couldn’t stop vomiting. Amazingly, according to the cop accused of the rape, the woman took a break from barfing to seduce him. So it wasn’t really rape, you see. It was HIM who was the victim; he was just doing his job helping out a citizen. All this while his partner was asleep on the couch in the next room WHILE THEY WERE BOTH ON DUTY. As if the story couldn’t get more disgusting, the pair fabricated a 911 call in order to be dispatched to her neighborhood so they could visit her again that night. Asked why the officer didn’t tell his napping fellow cop about the seduction afterward, his response on the stand was, “I didn’t want to embarrass her. I don’t kiss and tell.” Apparently the urge to barf spread throughout the courtroom.
Further along in the paper in the fluff pages comes the denial by Bristol Palin that she had plastic surgery. The story is flanked by her then and now faces, one chubby, the other slender with well-defined cheekbones. Ms. Palin insists that the transformation is the result of necessary medical surgery to redefine her jaw so her teeth align better. I’m just reaching here, but I got my kids braces for that. It’s called an overbite. Without looking hard you can see that it’s still present in both pictures, the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ so I don’t know exactly what she was looking to fix here except for a chubby face.
And finally, those crazy Italians over in Florence are searching for the remains of Lisa Gherardini, the woman thought to have posed for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The paper says Italian researchers are using a geo-radar device to search for underground tombs in a Florence convent where the body is thought to be buried. The plan is to locate and identify compatible bones, carbon-date them, and extract DNA to compare it with that of Gherardini’s descendants. Just like on forensic crime shows, a facial reconstruction model will be created. One has to wonder about the reason behind this time-consuming, expensive search. Perhaps a job offer. I would imagine the fee commanded for artist sittings by famous skeletal remains is astronomical.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos put all the Pieces Together
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