Dietrich

It has been a Dietrich day. My friend Leif called this morning and said she has been asked to sing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" at some 4th of July celebration in Mississippi, and she had been listening to Dietrich's version, which is like a fist. It's angry, disgusted: "When will they ever learn?" is a moan of righteous disgust at war. Just as it should be.

I've always felt Falling in Love Again was a kind of anthem for me, for a woman with a "genius for passionate attachment" (words by a friend who spoke them of Dame Ethel Smythe, but I felt they fit me like Dietrich's tuxedo fit her). I admired her nerve, her political courage (she was violently anti-Hitler and was willing to lose her homeland to repudiate him). I admired her grace, her dignity. I admired her open bisexuality when it was certainly not trendy, her love for Edith Piaf, and her coldness: she swore she would never sing "La Vie En Rose" until Piaf recovered, and then she sang it, without a single tear, the night after Piaf died.

But what I didn't know till today is that her daughter felt she'd been a terrible mother and wrote some kind of tell-all outpouring of pain, shame, and blame after Dietrich died. I tried to get a copy of it, went to Powell's in search of it because I wanted to be angry about it, but they had to order it sent in from a warehouse somewhere. I looked at a whole stack of other books on Dietrich while I was there, and that's how this Blip was made, on the window ledge of the Pearl Room at Powell's. I bought four of the books and brought them home because I need Dietrich. I need her inner qualities. The hell with all that diva nonsense, the reputed drinking and pain meds and her old age as a recluse. Beauty, who cares? The real beauty was inside her. I need the Dietrich who was daring, who was terrible and dear, who was unwilling to live without passionate engagement and honesty and self-examination. I think we give our children the childhood we wanted ourselves; and it seldom fits their needs. It's too easy, too obvious to say we do our best. Our best is seldom good enough. But it's up to all of us to build on the rubble of our childhoods, and it's up to all of us to be the best parents we can be NOW, if we are parents at all. That's our responsibility. This moment. I think Dietrich knew that.