Happy Birthday to another legend: Florence Foster Jenkins!!

[stuartwsa]

I was astonished the other day to find out that our Miss Lizzie shares a birthday with another true legend, Florence Foster Jenkins.
For those not familiar with Mme. Jenkins, she is famous for off-pitch singing and her hen-like clucking of the classics.
She was infamous for her society concerts and tableaux vivant.
In 1943 she gave her famous (last) concert at Carnegie Hall. It was a sold out house and two thousand people had to be turned away.
Amongst those in the crowd were Cole Porter, Tallulah Bankhead, Lily Pons and Marge Champion. Word is that things got so raucous that Bankhead had to be carried out.
Legend has it that Mme. Jenkins realized during the concert that the audience--who usually kept themselves from laughing out loud by stuffing hankerchiefs in their mouths--was laughing at her and not with her. Supposedly heart broken, she died within a month.
For those interested, here is a link at Wikipedia on Mme. Jenkins. I believe there is a link at that site where you can listen to the famed diva.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Foster_Jenkins


Don't say I didn't warn you.

[1bigsteve]

Oh, was that a human voice?? I thought it was a chicken with a corn kernel stuck in it's throat.

That was Gawd awful! Didn't she ever listen to her own recordings? I like to think she was fooling us all. Maybe she was.

-1bigsteve (o:

[stuartwsa]

Glad you enjoyed her, BigSteve. Her records were made at for "vanity" record label in Manhattan. I think that one or two record shops might have carried them, but for the most part you had to order them (at no small price!) from Mme. Jenkins herself.
One very interesting point is that since RCA made her recordings available to the public in the early 1950s, they have never since been out of print!