I was gifted Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, a cartoon released back in the days when summer vacation meant more than having to deal with my kids all day. (I love my kids. I do not love the bickering.) It was released a few short months before the end of my freshman year in high school, which was also the last lingering summer I would spend with my older sister, who graduated that year and moved to another state. I would end up moving to the same state, but it would never be the same.

The assorted Tiny Toon characters are counting seconds as the clock inches toward 3:00 on The Last Day Of School. (I always had a half-day that day, and so do my kids; does anyone have a full day on the last day of school?) We then have two main stories and three minor ones. Babs (Tress MacNeille) and Buster (Charlie Adler) Bunny, No Relation, end up following what is clearly the Mississippi, encountering all sorts of animals who want to eat them. Plucky Duck (Joe Alaskey) goes with Hamton J. Pig (Don Messick) and his family to HappyWorldLand. Fifi La Fume (Kath La Soucie) ends up as the assistant to Johnny Pew (Rob Paulsen), Skunk Heartthrob. Shirley Loon (Gail Matthius) goes to the movies with Fowlmouth (also Rob Paulsen). And, sigh, Elmyra Duff (Cree Summer) pursues animals.

I’ll be honest—I was never a huge Tiny Toons fan. I watched a ton of Animaniacs. I adored Freakazoid! Something about Tiny Toons always left me cold; it was a gimmick, I think. What if your beloved Looney Tunes Characters But Children. With the characters you actually care about putting in duty as teachers. This was not going to win me over. I watched it with my kids. Zane, who turns eleven today, left partway through, telling me he found it insufferable. Sandy, who is seven, said it was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. This is probably not true, but she has the memory of a seven-year-old. I finished it, but I rolled my eyes a lot.

Part of it is, ironically, what critics at the time seem to have praised the most at the time. Many of the pop culture references have aged like milk. This is always a concern. What do you do? It’s a risk, and it’s part of the problem with Babs; her whole bit tends toward pop culture parody, and that usually-but-not-always relies on remembering the thing being parodied. My kids have no context for references to Arsenio Hall, Hee-Haw, or Roseanne Barr’s national anthem performance. I mean, they don’t get the Deliverance references, either, but at least that can be chalked up to being too young for that movie as opposed to not remembering the specific two-year period leading up to the one we’re watching.

Mostly it was that the movie appears to be nudging you in the ribs for its entire 79-minute runtime. There is no joke too broad here. There’s comedy to be gotten from the strange disconnect that comes from spending a lot of time around someone else’s family, but Hamton’s family is too ridiculous to take seriously. Babs spends her time trying to woo Buster, but why? Okay, so people at that age have no chill when it comes to crushes; we’ll draw a curtain over my own romantic misadventures from 1992. But part of the problem comes from my uncertainty about what age the characters are supposed to be; Buster’s obsession with spraying Babs with a water pistol reads as less mature than they seem to be intended to be. And Elmyra makes little sense at the best of times.

So yeah. Sorry; I wish I’d liked this better. I think I’ve been too old for it since it came out. It’s the second-ever direct-to-video animated feature, if only barely a feature, and it got a Laserdisc release. This is fascinating to me, much more interesting than the movie itself. It’s definitely got the feel of “this will be four episodes someday,” and indeed it was. About the only thing I will say it got right was the contradictory relief you could feel sometimes when school started again and a summer that had been miserable was finally over. At least school wasn’t supposed to be fun.

So, uh, did other people like theirs better?

Q: Media What Now?

A: Ah, yes, excellent question. Gets right to the heart of the matter. Has anyone ever told you how smart you are? Media Magpies is the name a group of us came up with for our new site. It will have a lot of the Solute writers you’ve come to know and read, not to mention a few new faces we hope you’ll enjoy. Regular Solute columns will now be regular Magpies columns. There are a few new columns, too, and of course the assortment of articles about random stuff you’d expect from us.

Q: Yeah, yeah, my mom says I’m cool. Why a new site?

A: For a long time now, a lot of us have not felt seen or supported here at The Solute. We have no control over the site. Suggestions we make meet with no response. Worse, though you may not know it as a reader, functionality for writers has been getting steadily more untenable. We’ve had to start deleting old images in order to make room for new ones. Scheduled posts do not always post until they’re manually told to do so. You may have noticed that the article about Mon Oncle in the “new messages” sidebar is not exactly new, fine though the article may be. The site was built new and so far as we can tell has not been upgraded since, and it’s starting to show its age.

Q: But if your new site isn’t done yet, why now?

A: Honestly, in part to combat inertia. We needed to make the move to keep our momentum as a group. We’d set a date, and we stuck to it despite some issues our coder was having that meant a slight delay. I can promise that, when the Magpies site is ready, it will be a beautiful, functional site that is easy to navigate and has features some of us have been wanting for a long time now.

Q: Okay, I can see that. But what if I don’t want to pay for the content I’ve been getting for free?

A: You don’t have to! It is not our intention to go to a paywall model. Yes, we’re on Patreon now, but every article will be available for the public. $5 members will get early access—yup, I’m going to have to start writing articles more than fifteen minutes before they’re due, I guess—and there are a whole lot of other membership benefits, including a Discord server. We’d like it if you’d at least get a free membership, to boost our numbers a bit, but it’s absolutely not required to keep reading our content, and a message will post there to announce the new site as soon as it’s ready.

Q: You’re hiding behind-the-scenes gossip from me.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: Can you share the behind-the-scenes gossip?

A: We’d like to not. It’s not our intention to broadcast a lot of scurrilous backbiting. This is as much a business decision as anything. You may or may not be aware of this, but Solute writers don’t get paid. Which is fine; we all knew it was volunteer when we took the gig. But a suggestion was made years ago to start monetizing the site so that we could at least get an honorarium for articles, and that was met with no response. Media Magpies will have a Patreon. We already have a Threadless store featuring the deathless visage of our mascot, Mortimer. (Future items are already under discussion.) There is vague discussion about some minor advertising. (This discussion brought to you by Nord VPN!) First, we’ll be paying for our site hosting. Then, we’ll be paying back some investors that have gotten us where we are. Then, we might want to start paying writers at least a couple of bucks, literally, per article.

Q: Can I be a Magpies writer?

A: Our board of editors will accept writing submissions and discuss it. We haven’t finished hashing out how we’re handling that, but the process is being worked out right now.

Okay, I think that’s all the major questions. If you have anything else, another of our board members will be regularly checking the comments on this—Disqus is kind of broken for me right now—and we’ll all be around. If nothing else, feel free to pester us on the Patreon. We hope to see you all at Media Magpies one way or another.

There are pages and pages on Wikipedia about Madonna. Madonna and religion, Madonna and sexuality, Madonna and philanthropy. Madonna’s filmography. Madonna’s discography. Madonna’s influence on pop culture. There is discussion on whether or not she deserves the epithet “the most famous woman in the world.” (These days, a title probably held by Taylor Swift.) You can spend hours on Wikipedia learning vast amounts of information about her and even more time reading the scholarly papers, which are many and varied even without getting into the tardigrade named after her.

At its heart, there is the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone to an Italian father and a French-Canadian mother. Not only is Madonna her birth name, she’s named after her mother. She was one of six children before her mother died of breast cancer when Madonna was five; her father remarried their housekeeper and had two more children. You don’t have to be a Freudian to understand her need for attention and affection in those circumstances. She was also an extremely smart and talented girl, getting high grades and studying both piano and ballet.

Her history in dance is one of those things people don’t seem to notice, but she took ballet because she pestered her father to let her. When she was in college, it was on a dance scholarship, and when she dropped out and went to New York, it was to be a dancer. She studied under Alvin Ailey, Pearl Lang, and Martha Graham. Sure, she took classical piano at her father’s insistence, but her dance training is first-rate, probably more so than any other pop star. She herself says she has dancer’s feet.

Some of the controversy she’s attracted over the course of her career is definitely more deserved than other aspects of it. It’s frustrating to hear her criticized for still being openly sexual as an older woman—criticism that was first leveled at her when she was younger than I am now—but it’s equally frustrating to hear that her handlers are instructed to keep fat people away from her as they give off the wrong energy. There is also real talk to be had about things like cultural appropriation and the issue of child trafficking for the sake of adoption in Africa and how it would be better to enable more families to keep their children instead of sending them away for a better life.

For decades, though, there has been no one quite like her. In shape-shifting, perhaps her only equal was David Bowie. She admired him, and it’s clear she learned her trick of self-inventing from him. However, what she brought to the music industry was an understanding of the art of the music video unrivaled by anyone. Director Mary Lambert of the “Like a Prayer” video has said that being on the set of a Madonna video is its own world, in which you find yourself saying things like, “Maybe we need more burning crosses.”

What Madonna has done more than anyone else—arguably even the openly bisexual Bowie—is bring LBGT culture to the mainstream. There’s controversy there, too; voguing was a black queer dance trend, after all, and it was kind of fading when Madonna not-quite-vogued her way across MTV. (I’m not an expert on that, but apparently there’s serious debate as to the authenticity of a lot of her moves.) And yes, her kissing young female artists as a sort of torch-passing was performative and absolutely a publicity stunt but also she kissed Britney Spears live on MTV, kids, and let’s not underestimate the importance of that moment.

What’s kind of frustrating, though, is all the people who phrase their complaints as “a straight woman appropriating queer culture.” Because last I checked, that did not in fact describe Madonna. I cannot, as it turns out, find the names of any women with whom she’s had relationships. Even Sandra Bernhard, whom I thought everyone knew she’d been involved with, only comes up in her main Wikipedia page for having introduced Madonna to Kabbalah. Their relationship is on Bernhard’s page, though. It is mentioned in several places that Madonna is open about having such relationships, but all you get is a list of men.

The funny thing, I suppose, is that it’s trivially easy to find a list of women any female movie star of the ‘30s slept with, all based on pure speculation. Like, is there documentation that Hattie McDaniel slept with Katharine Hepburn? Almost certainly not, but I’ve read that it happened. And I’m certainly not saying that Madonna slept with Katharine Hepburn, either, but there’s just as much documentation about McDaniel and yet here we are. It’s true that Madonna is still alive and in theory keeping a bit of a lock on her Wikipedia page, but there are an awful lot of her male lovers on it.

If nothing else, she’s a queer icon. An ally, for sure, who has slammed Putin and had drag queens perform alongside her. (Not that the kind of people opposed to drag queens and trans people like her any more anyway, of course.) She’s fully open about how much she owes her career to the queer community. No gay men, no Madonna. It’s pretty much that simple, and she knows it as well as the rest of us. Maybe it’s people like my sister doing the Madonna wannabe thing in 1984 (she didn’t have the clothes, but she wanted them) who finished pushing her to superstardom. But without gay men, they never would have seen her.

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Pryor’s early life was horrific; that’s no secret. He was expelled from a Catholic grammar school because his grandmother ran a brothel where his mother, in turn, worked. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child. He was expelled from high school. He enlisted in the Army and spent most of it in the stockade; apparently he and a group of other black soldiers had beaten and stabbed a white soldier who laughed at Imitation of Life in, shall we say, inappropriate moments. At his point, it was entirely possible he would live a short, brutal life.

In 1963, he moved to Greenwich Village and started performing. He was racked by stage fright; Nina Simone described holding him before every performance as he shook and sweated like a malaria patient. In 1967, he stopped performing for others and shaped his act to please himself. His act grew harsher, rougher, and more racially charged. In 1969, he moved to Berkeley. He developed further, meeting Huey Newton and Ishmael Reed, which presumably helped his outlook continue to evolve.

Starting in 1970, his career took off. This leads to Pryor’s superstar era, which is covered any number of other places. He was one of the biggest names in stand-up, and movie deals soon followed. However, at the risk of sounding maudlin, it’s clear he wasn’t happy. It seems that his “accident” was in fact a suicide attempt, one he himself later made light of but an obvious cry for help with that detail put in place. He was married seven times to five different women and had seven children, the first when he was sixteen. And, you know, there was the drug addiction.

Rain, probably the most famous of his children, denies claims from Pryor’s biographer, his fourth/seventh wife, and from Quincy Jones that Pryor was openly bisexual and had a relationship with Marlon Brando. Jennifer Lee, Pryor’s widow, says that Rain is in denial about it. Certainly it’s true that Pryor referenced having performed oral sex on men in his first special and at Pride rallies, so yeah. Lee says it’s because it was the ‘70s and everyone was sleeping with everyone. Or else Pryor was simply bisexual. After all, people are.

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Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the antagonist of the game Fix-It Felix Jr. The game cabinet is in an arcade full of vintage machines, and Ralph has been there for decades. Every day, all day, he destroys the building while Felix (Jack McBrayer) fixes it. At night, he goes to a villains’ support group. They’re celebrating the anniversary of the game, and Ralph isn’t even allowed at the party. He decides to prove his worth by getting a medal, because Felix has a medal and he doesn’t and maybe everyone will like him if he has one. This involves crossing into Hero’s Duty and Sugar Rush.

Honestly I have the deepest sympathy for Ralph. He really is just doing his job. Yeah, okay, he does break the building all day every day, but if he weren’t there, there would be no game. The Nicelanders are total jerks, frankly. They want Ralph to live in the garbage. He literally lives on the wrong side of the tracks from the apartment building. They’re afraid he’s going to go rogue, but what are they doing to make him feel comfortable in the game?

They’ve added Vanellope (Sarah Silverman, except voiced by her sister in the game) to my silly Disney game, and I can do without that. I like Ralph, but Vanellope is, well, a child. A particularly obnoxious child. She’s the kind of kid I wouldn’t have wanted to spend time around even when I was a kid, the kind who makes lots of bodily function jokes and is constantly putting people down. I get that she, too, is hurt and lonely, and she and Ralph bond over that, but I have a hard time caring because I wouldn’t want to spent time around her, either.

The voice-acting on this movie is choice. I like John C. Reilly and wish he’d make more movies I had the slightest interest in seeing. Jane Lynch is amazing as Calhoun of Hero’s Duty. This was the start of Alan Tudyk’s reign as King of the Disney Feature; here, he is doing his very best Ed Wynn impersonation and I love it. Any number of video game characters from real games are played by their real voice actors. Edie McClurg is always a joy, even if the character she’s playing is incredibly toxic—she’s basically playing Minnesota Nice here, which is arguably the perfect personality type for her.

It’s also full of video game references. I may not always get them; I don’t play a lot of classic video games. But I noticed the Konami Code as the code to the vault of Sugar Rush. About half the real characters were familiar. The varying styles of game animation were familiar, too, from the eight-bit of Turbo to the quasi-realism of Hero’s Duty. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that all the characters look roughly the same when they meet outside their games, but I imagine it makes the concept art easier.

Okay, so I was distracted from the movie itself by how much I loved “Paperman,” which debuted before it. It’s a fantastic short, and the movie’s merely pretty good. But it is pretty good, and it’s not the movie’s fault that it’s so overwhelmed by an outstanding cartoon. I still say the sequel missed a bet by not being called Ralph Wrecks the Internet, even if the name is less connected to the phrase they’re trying to call to mind. We all would’ve gotten it anyway.

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It’s easy to forget Mitchell’s early years with the Typical Hollywood TV Career. His first appearance was in a made-for-TV movie starring Lance Guest (the last starfighter) and Barry Miller (Ralph Garcey of Fame fame). He did an Afterschool Special with Malcolm Jamal-Warner. He did The Equalizer and MacGuyver. He did, sigh, Head of the Class, a show I loved and can’t watch anymore because one of its leads is so awful. At the same time, he was also doing a lot of stage, appearing on a couple of Original Cast Recordings. He received several Drama Desk nominations in those years.

And in 1998, he worked with Stephen Trask on a little thing called Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was originally an autobiographical work with Tommy as the main character, with Hedwig based on a babysitter he’d had when he was young. However, the character of Hedwig developed beyond his original plans and kind of took over to the extent that one of my friends saw it while pregnant and got her belly signed by Neil Patrick Harris, who was playing it in that production. The LA production was in part financed by none other than David Bowie.

It’s not that the phenomenal success allowed him to write his own ticket. Of course it didn’t. However, in certain circles, it opened up a whole lot of opportunities. He’s certainly been working steadily ever since. Shortbus went to Cannes. Rabbit Hole got Nicole Kidman an Oscar nomination. He does podcasts, several of which have become filmed productions. He’s active in front of the camera and behind it, not as famous as a lot of indie directors but a big name nonetheless. And he’ll always live on as Hedwig, of course.

Also, today I learned about the existence of the Radical Faeries movement, which seems to be a combination of gay pride, specifically focusing on gay men, and the neo-Paganism movement. I have a friend I can’t help thinking of as I read about it, honestly; it sounds like just his jam. Mitchell considers himself part of the movement, which combines anarchism, environmentalism, and secular spirituality. It was in part an attempt to separate gay identity form gay bars, to give gay men another place to meet one another and connect. I can definitely see why it would appeal. The movement has apparently broadened since then to cover more gender identities and sexual preferences, which in my opinion is even better.

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Now, disliking her family, I can understand. Her parents divorced ten days before her birth. She said her mother told her she’d tried to abort Patricia by drinking turpentine; a biographer claims that, instead, her father had tried to get her mother to have an abortion and her mother refused. Her mother and stepfather shipped her off from New York to Fort Worth to live with her grandmother when she was twelve, leaving young Patricia feeling abandoned. (You know, because she arguably was?) Her grandmother did teach her to read when she was very young, and at age nine, she was already reading Freudian analysis.

I can also sympathize with the desire to live in an old farmhouse surrounded by books and cats. Especially on a day when my kids keep coming in to talk to me while I’m trying to work; my daughter has a particular knack for asking me a pointless question when I’ve just gotten the perfect wording, thereby driving it out of my mind forever. I’m with you, there, Patricia, though she also said that being around people sapped her imagination. Most people seem to have disliked her right back, though David Diamond said her unpleasant traits were depression and Phyllis Nagy, who adapted The Price of Salt into the film Carol, thought she was wonderful and was friends with her for years.

However, let’s be real, she was racist. She blamed black people for the welfare state and accused Koreans of eating dogs. She was pro-Palestinian to the point of being deeply anti-Semitic (fun fact; it’s possible to not do that). She seems to have been almost-but-not-quite a Holocaust denier. These are not things you want to discover when you’re writing about someone. I’m kind of curious how she rationalized being Freudian, given Freud’s Jewish heritage. You’d think she would have distrusted analysis, especially given it didn’t “normalize” her sexuality the way she wanted it to.

Despite her vile personal nature, she was after all a brilliant writer. And she’s dead, so I don’t have to worry about giving money to a racist who also managed to be both a lesbian and a misogynist. She didn’t like being called a crime writer, one of the few things she disliked that I can fully go along with. She wanted her books to be thought of as psychological thrillers, which they were. I mean, not all of them, but after all The Price of Salt was published pseudonymously and wouldn’t have been part of that conversation anyway.

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Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) lives a quiet life in the suburbs. He doesn’t have friends; he has his dog, Sparky (Frank Welker), with whom he makes movies. Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau), the new teacher, announces a science fair. Mr. Frankenstein (Martin Short) says he’ll sign Victor’s permission slip if Victor will go play baseball. Unfortunately, at the baseball game, Sparky is hit by a car and killed. Victor has a new idea for the science fair, and things go seriously sideways.

Mrs. Frankenstein (Catherine O’Hara) seems to have a better feel for her son than her husband does. She’s the one who notes that he doesn’t have any friends. It seems clear that Elsa Van Helsing (Winona Ryder) would be his friend, but the culture with the boys in that town is unsettling. There’s Edgar “E” Gore (Atticus Shaffer), your standard hunchback Peter Lorre type, whose idea for a science fair project is a death ray. (It says on the sheet “no death rays.”) Nassor (Short again) looks like the Karloff Frankenstein’s Monster. Toshiaki (James Hiroyuki Liao) and Bob (Robert Capron) are not any characters I specifically recognize but definitely along those lines.

Weird Girl (O’Hara again) is visually a Village of the Damned type, yet another one of the references this movie is filled with. (Yes, I know she’s from a book of drawings Tim Burton did ages ago, but come on.) There’s even a clip from Christopher Lee’s Dracula, in part one assumes because of Burton’s deep affection for Christopher Lee. Yes, various characters do resemble Corpse Bride characters, too, but if you know even just the basics of horror movies, there’s a lot of references you’ll get. I’m particularly fond of Shelley; the name is an obvious play, but also Shelley becomes really neat.

I’m not sure I’d seen this movie since I saw it in the theatre, and that was a mistake on my part. This movie is charming. Burton apparently said that, were he not permitted to make it in B&W, he wouldn’t have made it, and good on him. This movie needs B&W. It needs to reach its horror roots. The flaming windmill, for example, absolutely has to call to mind James Whale, and it wouldn’t in colour. I’m a fan of the use of colour in Corpse Bride, but that had things said through its choices that aren’t relevant here.

For the curious, who have only watched one or the other, the original half-hour short, starring Shelley Duvall, Daniel Stern, and Barrett Oliver, is something of a framework that the story here hangs off. Various of the story beats follow the short exactly. The story as a whole is quite different, having added the whole “science fair” aspect of the plot and pretty much every character outside the family. The whole thing is still more of Burton’s fixation—not unlike King’s and Lynch’s—with suburbia and what might be hidden there.

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Really, if you were watching cartoons in the ‘80s, you heard the voice of Susan Blu. Oh, sure, she did some live action acting; she did an episode of St. Elsewhere, even, and therefore is in the Tommy Westphall Universe. But her most notable role is that of Stormer on Jem and the Holograms. And now every Gen-X woman who reads this column has said, “Oh!” as they heard her voice in their head, because Stormer was one of the Misfits, and believe me I could go on at great length about Jem lore. Perhaps another time.

I was trying to explain who she is to my partner, and he is less familiar with Jem than I am and unaware of Wildfire entirely. (Well, so is everyone else.) And the fact is, she did a ton of shows where she was one character on an episode, or three characters on three different episodes, or a handful of characters on fewer episodes than she did characters. As far as her actual work goes, she just has that sort of career. There are multiple episodes of the ‘80s Transformers cartoon where she was more than one character, and she did twenty episodes of My Little Pony ‘n Friends, doing at least two voices for probably a dozen of them.

In 1989, there was a show called Tugs. I haven’t seen it, but it seems to be “what if Thomas the Tank Engine but boats?” Blu did one episode as “Sally Seaplane,” but more importantly, that was the first show where she took on voice directing. At least if IMDb can be trusted [insert grumble about incompleteness of IMDb here]. There has been considerable overlap between the two jobs; she’s frequently on at least one episode of the shows she’s directing. But through the ‘90s and into more recent years, she’s got over a hundred voice directing credits.

Look, I’m never going to sing the praises of Special Agent Oso, one of the shows she’s worked on, but the voice direction is not the worst part of it. It’s perfectly passable Children’s Educational Cartoon voice directing. And Jenny Nicholson could certainly tell you more than I about her work on the Land Before Time movies. Still, she’s working behind the scenes in an important job, doing work that doesn’t get noticed, and that’s what we’re all about around here. Reminding you that people like that exist and celebrating their work.

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I will grant you that Aghayan’s designs were never as iconic as Mackie’s. He wasn’t a bad designer, but there are few costumes that he worked on that live on in pop culture fame, or even infamy, the way some of Mackie’s do. On the other hand, that’s okay. For one thing, as I was going through his IMDb page, I discovered that he did the costumes for the Cary Grant movie Father Goose, wherein one of the best parts is the outfits designed by the characters after stealing clothes from Cary Grant’s character. Which is iconic to me, at least, even if it isn’t the same as the Went With The Wind dress.

But also, you know, everything Aghayan worked on was something that needed costuming. I didn’t like The Glass Bottom Boat, but Doris Day needed to wear costumes in it. The ‘67 Doctor Dolittle. And what he appears to have done a lot of that I don’t hear talked about much is that he did costumes for awards shows, and also the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1984 Olympics, which I watched at the time. He did 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee, which I’d never heard of and now desperately need to see.

And, of course, I’m going to go ahead and assume that his IMDb page is incomplete. They all are, for people like this. There are enormous gaps in it, including most of the ‘80s. I refuse to believe he only did three things that would appear on IMDb for the entire decade. His bio is short; his Wikipedia page is not much longer. It’s longer than a lot of other people we’ve covered here, inasmuch as he has one at all, but there’s still only so much information available. I could probably track down more than what’s on those pages, but it would take a lot of work and I’d still probably be missing things.

What fascinates me is that his career started, he was thirteen years old. He came from a wealthy Iranian family, back in the ‘20s. At age thirteen, he designed a dress for the first wife of the last shah. That is bizarre to me for a whole list of reasons, and Wikipedia just throws this out as a fact, like this is a thing you should know is true. Why did he end up in that position, and in 1941 at that? No clue. Surely it could not have been true that all the adult costume designers were at war. That’s weird, and I want more information that I am not likely to get.

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