Posts

Showing posts with the label Cyd Charisse

OPEN POST: Manor Music Monday With India Adams!

Image
Greetings music sloots, and welcome to another edition of Manor Music Monday. Today, we're going to meet a ghost - but not the spooky kind. This is a "ghost singer," one of the select few who did not make a name for themselves by providing the singing voice for popular movie stars during Hollywood's Golden Era. It was all very hush-hush. For years this ghost singer remained silent, as her contract forbid her from saying a peep, but tonight, at the Manor's "Bean Flick Lounge," DJ Li'l Scratch will be playing some of her best tunes sung for other people - and more. So let's unveil her, shall we? Why, it's that ghost-tacular singer herself, India Adams, who began her career as a high school lass singing with a friend's three-piece band, performing at various clubs around Los Angeles. It didn't take long for an MGM talent scout to take notice and to hire her for a prime ghosting role in 1953: providing the singing voice for none other th...

OPEN POST: Gene Kelly Was The Sex!

Image
  Fred Astaire had the skills and the polish. Gene Kelly had the skills and the sex. Though he left us in 1996 at age 83, he remains the premiere Hollywood practitioner of dance as brash bravado and potent, earthy sexuality.  Some might say that Rudolph Valentino was the better dance-as-sex practitioner, but time has not been kind to his tango scenes, which now look strained, and at times, comical. It really was another time. Gene's endures because of his seemingly effortless moves and brawny masculinity, which was at once thrilling, but never crude. The old adage "women wanted him, men wanted to be him" must have been conjured up with him in mind.  Before Fosse revitalized dance for the modern age - giving it a refined and cooler-than-cool touch of sleaze - Gene was the go-to for dance and eroticism. Only Cyd Charisse was his rival, a dancer whose every move seemed to say, "Touch me if you dare." Together? They were a bonfire.  Yet no matter how many dancers an...