Happy Leap Year Day!
{Marilyn Monroe | Photographed by Philippe Halsman, Jump Portrait Series | 1959}
Happy Leap Year Day!
{Marilyn Monroe | Photographed by Philippe Halsman, Jump Portrait Series | 1959}
Maybe more famous now then during her lifetime, Hollywood starlet, Marilyn Monroe seems as at home in the kitchen as she did on the silver screen. Auctioned off during a 1999 sale of her personal effects at Christie’s, heralded two well used cookbooks and a set of bright yellow enameled Le Creuset pots and pans. She had a love affair that fans never knew of, she was a kitchen goddess, long before it became a “thing” to be.
I know that today, for many, is a day of preparation and if I was at home celebrating Thanksgiving with my family, we would already be in the kitchen working away on family favourite’s and much loved recipes. In case you are looking for something new this year or haven’t quite finalized that Thanksgiving menu, I thought I would share this little recipe.
This recipe, like a recipe from your grandmother or mother, is scrawled on letterhead from an insurance company, probably the nearest thing she had to hand. Recipes written on the back of receipts or in the margins of a book always seem to me, the best kinda recipes! And like many old recipes I have, there is not a clear step-by-step directive, but you can still follow along or hazard a guess at her meaning. However, the NY Times Cooking section has researched and refined her scribbling in to an exact recipe and I shall include that below, in case you don’t have the time or inclination to decipher this yourself.
{Recipe Image From “Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe”}
“Whatever blows your dress up”, is something that my grandfather likes to say. It has always made me laugh, and is the first thing I thought of, when my Mom asked me if I had read about Chicago’s new statue.
It is non other than a famous Marilyn Monroe poised 26 feet high, with her dress undulating around her in the iconic image from The Seven Year Itch.
I know that there has been controversy surrounding it, namely people keep walking under her to see if she has on undies. Others appear to even question the integrity of the piece itself, seeing it as a tourist ploy, rather than a piece of Art; Pop Art even. But this, to me, is Art.
And as the saying goes, “Whatever blows your dress up!”
(The statue was created by the Artist Seward Johnson)