Sublime

Then she stood and lifted the stool carefully off Benny, who continued to sit there, looking somewhat wobbly and exposed, like Jell-O taken too soon from the mold.

1946 revue film The Ziegfeld Follies, “A Great Lady Has an Interview

BABETTE IS TALL and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack t

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

Stella—a woman who resembled her just as little but would be a better version of her mother.

—Charlotte Clingstone presented a kind of ideal. She was bohemian but accomplished. Worldly but rooted.

She’d always found something steadying in looking at her own clasped hands, but she didn’t know if it was the hands or the shirt, the impeccable white cuffs. Clothes are armor.

Martha Stewart wears her perfectionism on her sleeve to roaring acclamation instead of being told to “be more balanced” (i.e., temper her powerful drive) because her interests stay within the realm of what is acceptable for women to be publicly ambitious about.

Martha Black and white, wide shot: filmed from the wings of a concert hall, the image shows a woman from behind, sitting at a piano in a black dress with white polka dots. She puts her fingers on the keys and starts to play.