Song sung blue

Besides the wild book on Earl Wild I am also going to be reviewing this book on Edith Piaf in The Buffalo News. It is more work than the Wild book, I will say that. But it is interesting anyway.

I like Piaf's no-good, on-again-off-again friend Momone. Wow, this is a coincidence! I am struggling and struggling here to include a picture of Momone on my Web log. But when I tried to download one it attacked my computer and my security system banned it!

Even in the afterlife Momone is causing trouble!

Therefore alas, no picture of Momone.

However I was able to nail a picture of the boxer Marcel Cerdan with whom Piaf was involved.

Piaf is a textbook case of "Smart Woman, Foolish Choices." Anyone else, if you saw this guy...

... you would run in the other direction, right?

Plus he was married!

The author, Carolyn Burke, writes something about how at last Piaf had found this perfect match. I am sitting there thinking, perfect match? On what planet? Even if he had not been wiped out in that plane crash, there would have been no happy ending to that.

Burke includes a couple of details I love.

One is when Cerdan was about to fight "the redoubtable Jake La Motta." Piaf wrote to him, "I'd like to bite La Motta's a--, that bastard."

Hahahahahaaa!

Another thing, Piaf felt blue because she did not feel that Cerdan felt as bad leaving her as she felt leaving him.

"I thought he suffered when we were apart," Piaf is quoted as saying. "But the day he was to leave, he was singing at the top of his voice in the shower!"

As I wrote the other day:

*** crying ***

That happened to me once in my bad old single days. There was this guy I was seeing and he was out of town and I called him from this pay phone in this jazz club where I was with my friends. Remember pay phones? I am ancient! Anyway, I told this gentleman how much I missed him and how unhappy I was without him.

Then, disaster! The phone did not hang up right and he could hear me laughing and carrying on with my friends, having this wonderful time.

He sat there listening and listening and he got so mad!

Me and Marcel Cerdan, I am telling you. We are trouble!

I am not yet to the end of the Piaf book.

But I can tell you one thing, I can just tell it ends badly.