Memorial Day

Remember the soldiers who fought the good fight on the side of good.

Captain America

Hooray! They stopped the Nazis!

From March, 1941, Captain America
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Memorial Day Weekend

Remembering the soldiers of WWII -- and one of their favorite pin-ups, Esther Williams. (click pic to enlarge)

Paris Entertains the Soldiers

No, it's not a new porno from Paris Hilton, she's "entertaining" US servicemen at the USO Swinging Salute to our Troops Fleet Week kickoff at The Union Square Ballroom in Manhattan.

It's Memorial Day Weekend, so take a moment to remember the soldiers, and Paris Hilton.

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Happy Mother's Day

God bless mothers... you never know who their kids will grow up to be.

Ann Dunham Obama and Barack Obama

Cock-a-Doodle-Do

A giant phallus (relatively speaking) is carried through the streets Sunday during the Kanamara Fertility Festival in Kawasaki, Japan.

It's the biggest dick cheered by crowds since Richard Nixon served as Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade in 1960.

Rim Shot sound bite Cool Sounds sound bites

Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

Betty Deuce and Beattie

Betty Deuce and the royals family emerged from the Easter service at St. George's Chapel today, stunning the crowd in this lavender ensemble... fit for a queen...


Princess Beatrice was not.

Ben Stansall/WPA Pool/Getty Images
Indigo/Getty

Happy Passover

6.2. Speech by Rabbi Herschel Schacter
Rabbi Herschel Schacter was a U.S. Army chaplain who participated in the liberation
of Buchenwald and aided in the resettlement of Displaced Persons after the
Holocaust. This reading is an excerpt from a speech given at a conference convened
by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council at which eyewitnesses to the
liberation shared their memories. In the excerpt Schacter refers to some of the other
speakers, including Elie Wiesel.

Source: Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, eds., The Liberation of the Nazi
Concentration Camps 1945—Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators (U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council, 1987), pp. 35–37.

Dear friends, so very very much has been spoken. All of us here, I know, have seen so
much, have read so much, and yet I am convinced that we can't begin to fathom the
enormity of the cataclysm, of the tragedy that struck our people and so many other
peoples of the world.
During the Second World War, I served as a young Army chaplain, perhaps not as young
as Leon Bass or Alan Rose, but not much older than they at that time. I worked my way
across with front-line combat troops through Europe. I was attached to the VIII Corps
Headquarters of the Third Army.
The most unforgettable day of my life is April 11, 1945. I learned from some of the
officers in my unit that early that morning our forward tanks had entered the notorious
concentration camp called Buchenwald, outside of Weimar. I had heard the name before.
My mind's eye conjured up all sorts of images. I quickly ascertained the directions and
drove at high speed to Weimar and then to the camp.
As I drove up to the main gate, I was struck by the large German inscription over the
gate: Arbeit Macht Frei—what a tragic travesty. I drove through the gate into the open
Appellplatz [inspection or roll call area] and there I was in Buchenwald. This was about
4:00 in the afternoon, just hours after the first columns of American tanks drove through
and liberated that dungeon on the face of this earth.
I did not know where to go first. Happily, a young American Army lieutenant recognized
my Jewish chaplain's insignia, and he approached me almost reverently. He urged that I
follow him to see first the crematoria. We've heard descriptions. As I said, we've read,
and we've seen pictures. As long as I shall live, I will never, never forget that gruesome
scene that is indelibly engraved upon my heart and my mind. There simply are no words
in the human vocabulary. Yes, our Polish friend this morning told us how difficult it was
for him to find the words in any language.

I slowly approached the site of the huge ovens from which the smoke was still curling
upward. I could smell the stench of the charred remnants of human flesh. There were
literally hundreds of dead bodies strewn about. Dr. Kelling, you were right, but many of
these bodies were not stacked neatly like cordwood. They were just scattered, waiting to
be shoveled into the furnaces, which were still hot.
I stood riveted to this scene for what seemed like an eternity, tormented within with
searing agony, until I finally tore myself away, my eyes burning from the smoke and,
even more so, from my inner rage. I walked back from the crematoria toward the endless
rows of barracks still dazed by what I had just seen.
I asked the young lieutenant who was there at my side, and who seemed to know his way
around, whether he knew if there were any Jews still alive in this camp. He led me to an
area called the Kleine Lager—the little camp within the larger camp. I hurriedly walked
into one of the dilapidated, filthy, foul-smelling barracks, and there again I was smitten
by an indescribable scene. There on a series of shelves—and again, you've seen the
pictures of the series of shelves—were just raw planks of hardwood. From floor to ceiling
were hundreds upon hundreds of men and very few boys who were strewn over scraggly
straw sacks looking down at me, looking down at me out of dazed eyes. Last night Elie
Wiesel so graphically and movingly described how he perceived our eyes. I remember
their eyes, looking down, looking out of big, big eyes—that's all I saw were eyes—
haunted, crippled, paralyzed with fear. They were emaciated skin and bones, half-crazed,
more dead than alive.
And there I stood and shouted in Yiddish, "Sholem Aleychem, Yiden, yir zent frey!"
"You are free." The more brave among them slowly began to approach me, as was just
described, to touch my Army uniform, to examine the Jewish chaplain's insignia,
incredulously asking me again and again, "Is it true? Is it over?"
Indeed, as Elie Wiesel said, I felt that love, that gratitude, that admiration. I ran from
barracks to barracks throughout the whole area, repeating again and again the declaration,
the scene, the experience. As I moved about, bands of Jews were now following me,
pouring out tales of woe, asking me over and over, "Does the world know what happened
to us? What will now happen? Where will we go from here?"
I stood among them. As I saw these men—brothers, flesh of my flesh, and blood of my
blood—I could not help but think of the old cliché, "There but for the grace of God go I."
Alan [Rose] was so right. If my own father had not caught the boat on time, I would have
been there.
Thus started a period of about two months during which I spent every day in
Buchenwald. I must confess that I paid little attention to the needs of American
servicemen who really, at that time, did not need many of my services. I devoted
myself—what little energies, what little ingenuity, what bit of initiative a young man
could muster—to my new-found flock.
While I could never develop any accurate statistics, my estimate was that there were
approximately 20,000 inmates, from every country in Europe, in Buchenwald at the time
of the liberation, of whom only about 5,000 were Jews.
We know that Buchenwald was primarily built and maintained for the incarceration of
political prisoners and was, therefore, less, less savagely brutal and torturous than the
extermination camps in Poland. There were no gas chambers in Buchenwald, only
crematoria. And the inmates who were then becoming my friends related to me in
harrowing detail how every morning dead bodies were collected in the barracks and in
the work stations and were carried off on wheelbarrows to the crematoria. And this was
the less brutal? How much more gruesome could the other death camps have been?


pbs.org

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Here's Dean Stockwell in a clip from 1948's "The Boy with Green Hair."



for Kevin D. and Janet C.

Kim Kardashian: Visit Your Future

No, that's not an age progression of Kim Kardashian, that's singer Ivete Sangalo performing Sunday at carnival in Salvador Brazil. I'm just keeping up with the Kardashian lookalikes. Below is the demure Kim.


Lunae Parracho/LatinContent/Getty Images

Carnival in Brazil

No, that's not your Chexy in Recife, Brazil at the Papangus party celebrating Carnival.


But if I did go, I'd wear something like this.


Marcio Lima/LatinContent/Getty Images and Gabriel Affonso Morales/LatinContent/Getty Images

Happy Valentine's Day

Here's Nat King Cole with Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust," lyrics by Mitchell Parish. With love from your Chexy.

Chexy's Saturday Matinee

Here's some folks dancing in skimpy clothing in an Italian ballet tribute to Eleanora Duse.



And now, Tony Bennett and his hairpiece sing "My Funny Valentine."


Here's Gotan Project, live, with La Revancha Del Tango.



And to take us out, here's Herman's Hermits from 1967 in a really wrecked vid, with "There's a Kind of Hush."

Happy New Year, 2010!

Thanks for making 2009 Chexy's best year ever... here's to a great 2010! Ahoy!

Love,

Your Chexy (and Amy)

Betty Deuce Does Santa

Betty Deuce donned her festive holiday look for the royals' annual trek to Sandringham Church for Christmas services. While Her Majesty opted for this homage to St. Nick, Camilla went with the more traditional Cossack look.


The Duchess burned no villages.

Getty

HO HO HOllywood

The "HO" in the rooftop neon of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Christmas Eve, 2009.

Photo by Chexy
TY Brad and Eden

Christmas Realness, 1954

Sarah Hall and her daughter Barbara at home in Miami Shores, Christmas 1954. (click pic for enlargement)

Courtesy of Shorpy.com

Three Bad Christmas Sweaters

Amy and Cinnabons for Jesus

My imaginary daughter Amy, 6, had a few erudite questions about the Christmas holiday, which I attempted to answer with the aplomb befitting a father who is also a daydreamer and pantheist.

"What's the deal with Christ?" Amy asked aggressively, "I don't get his whole thing," she mooed in the Boston drawl of her mother's side. "If he was so great, why'd they hang him up?"


"Well, dear," I hesitated, "Some people don't like it when you tell it like it is."

"If it's Jesus' birthday, how come we don't get him a present?" she asked.

"I think that's a splendid idea," waiting to suggest some charitable endeavor. Amy had other ideas.

"Let's go to the mall and get Jesus a Cinnabon."


"But Jesus died on the cross, Amy, and that has a way of killing one's appetite," I said, with the pithiness of a lifelong wisecracking mercenary. Amy laughed, "Okay, if he doesn't want it, I'll eat it."

At times, I wonder if Amy's past life was lived in Vaudeville.

"You can try your theory with some celery sticks and almonds," I trumped.

"What if he prefers candy?" she retorted. You know Christ has to be into dark chocolate." She had a point, and knew that I would accept nearly any excuse to get some See's candy to test her theosophical presumptions.


On the way back from the mall, with a mouthful of raspberry truffle, Amy bleated, "Chocolate is definitely Jewish." Her complex labeling was again not only food related but ethnically titillating. "How do you figure?" I honked.

"I'm going to have to work on my theory," she said, reaching for the box with a grin.

Amy was careful not to get chocolate on the new coat I bought her for Hanukkah. Yes, I know, she's big for six.

Chexy's Saturday Matinee

Grace Jones does Pee-wee Herman, Christmas, 1988.



The Three Tenors singing Jingle Bells. Yup.



Someone recently asked for some Doris Day... here she is with a pine cone hairdo, shot through linoleum for her 60's TV show, singing Silver Bells. Cameo by Billy De Wolfe.




Here's Nat King Cole in 1961 with The Christmas Song.