She Doesn’t have Bette Davis Eyes

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Looking in the mirror this morning I look like Bette Davis on a bad day with a semi swollen face and bags hanging under my irritated eyes. I took a cold drug last night before bedtime which is giving me a drug-induced hangover today.

I decided to write a blog called “I Look Like Shrek” and then chose not to share it with anyone. Do I really want people to have that impression of me? If I really was Bette Davis I would have ‘my people’ helping me get through this awful day. But I am not she, so instead I daydream about how I longed to be a movie star when I was very young.

Most of my friends know that my favourite actress is Bette Davis. There is absolutely no one that can get her point across in three seconds or less like she could. As a child I used to buy Popeye candy cigarettes and flash them back and forth yelling in my mother’s high heels,

“It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”– or something to that effect.

My father would just roll his eyes and say I was living in a “Modern Screen” fantasy world like my mother. Bernice Ethelyne had named me Linda Susan after her two favourite actresses: Linda Darnell and Susan Hayward. From her hospital bed to her wheelchair at home she commanded my father to enrol me in every dance class known to man. Mother Bernice wanted me to become another Joan Crawford as she was her favourite actress and lived, ate and breathed Crawford.

One Tuesday when I came home from school I stopped dead in my tracks eyeing my mother and her canasta club having a Joan Crawford makeover day. Sitting like glamour queens, I am sure each one of them thought they all looked like MGM starlets munching on pineapple squares with bright red lips, short bangs and evil eyebrows. It was the scariest thing you ever saw and I swear I didn’t sleep for days after that gut wrenching experience.
My mother who also tone deaf thought I was born to sing like Deanna Durbin. Every week Reverend Brown would choose one person to perform a solo and my mother called and suggested that I participate.

Sunday came way too fast and barely standing next to the choir I begin to sing.  I hear no bravos in the congregation, but by verse three people are covering their mouths with their handkerchiefs. At the end of my song Dickie Diner in the front pew breaks out into a fit of laughter and ends up on the floor.

 

I go back to my seat and see Reverend Brown look down at me through his bifocals in bewilderment. Miss Smith, age 69, the spinster church organist, stamps on the organ pedals and rolls into the next hymn at death defying volume. My musical career ended that day but Bernice kept insisting that it was okay because they always had stand-in singers for Joan.

 

Daydreaming over, I come to the conclusion that I’m going to use up a box of Kleenex every hour and it’s going to be a bumpy ride for the next 24 hours. I just don’t get it. I am so offended when my body decides to be sick. Like I gave you a vegetable last week.. How dare you!! LOLOL

 

“The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?– Bette Davis

Come and visit the Lanark County Genealogical Society Facebook page– what’s there? Cool old photos–and lots of things interesting to read.

Information where you can buy all Linda Seccaspina’s books-You can also read Linda in Hometown News

About lindaseccaspina

Before she laid her fingers to a keyboard, Linda was a fashion designer, and then owned the eclectic store Flash Cadilac and Savannah Devilles in Ottawa on Rideau Street from 1976-1996. She also did clothing for various media and worked on “You Can’t do that on Television”. After writing for years about things that she cared about or pissed her off on American media she finally found her calling. She is a weekly columnist for the Sherbrooke Record and documents history every single day and has over 6500 blogs about Lanark County and Ottawa and an enormous weekly readership. Linda has published six books and is in her 4th year as a town councillor for Carleton Place. She believes in community and promoting business owners because she believes she can, so she does.

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