In Search of Donna Delbert
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Trannied
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http://pennandteller.com/sincity/teller/articles/donna.html
My Search for Donna Delbert
by Teller
"Have I got a woman for you!" Bob Lund announced with a procurer's wink, and heaved an apple box labeled DONNA DELBERT onto his kitchen table. His wife, Elaine, set out a pot of decaffeinated tea with some slices of poppy seed cake, and apologized that she and Bob had to go "over to the Museum to wait for the man to read the gas meter." Now, Bob and Elaine really do own a museum the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan specializing in all the magicians who were not Houdini, but I bet Elaine was lying about the meter man; Marshall is the kind of blueberry pie town where the gas company trusts you to read your own. No, they were leaving me alone with Donna Delbert's apple box because they knew I would fall for her, and l'amour is a private thing.
When they were gone, I opened the box. I like touching the personal things that belonged to the dead, things I have no right to touch. As the snow began to fall outside the Lunds' kitchen, I read Donna's letters, stroked her dainty gloves, and sniffed the torches she ate fire from. Then, in an advertising photo I saw her for the first time, peering from her own plump shadow, her vampire lips in a coy half-smirk, under plucked, painted eyebrows. She was my kind of woman, a creature of the night.
She had been notorious. Her sultry mug had graced glossy rags from Sir! to Time. Rumored to be the American widow of a British tank gunner killed in the Normandy invasion, she appeared suddenly on the English music hall circuit shortly after World War II, calling herself, "America's Outstanding Lady Magician and the Only Lady Fire Eater in the World." Agents booked her at once. A Yankee dame to the tips of her long red fingernails, she conjured, sucked the flames from torches, and snuffed candles with a crack of her whip. She was the perfect postwar woman, the Rosie the Riveter of magic.
Then one spring midnight in 1949 she was having a late supper at her boarding house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, when a policeman appeared, saying he believed she was a fugitive in disguise. Donna went silent and shook her head no. The inspector searched her purse and found an identification card for a soldier missing from the U.S. Air Force. Hours later at the city jail, in a voice an octave below her usual contralto, she confessed: she was that missing soldier, Delbert Hill, a male P.F.C. gone A.W.O.L. from the U.S.A.F. He had been living as a lady fire-eater for four years and had fooled everybody except the two women who were his lovers. Unfortunately, jealous Betty got wind of rival Edna and blew the whistle on their cheating heartthrob.
(Much more at site...)
(Thanks to JeremyT!)
My Search for Donna Delbert
by Teller
"Have I got a woman for you!" Bob Lund announced with a procurer's wink, and heaved an apple box labeled DONNA DELBERT onto his kitchen table. His wife, Elaine, set out a pot of decaffeinated tea with some slices of poppy seed cake, and apologized that she and Bob had to go "over to the Museum to wait for the man to read the gas meter." Now, Bob and Elaine really do own a museum the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan specializing in all the magicians who were not Houdini, but I bet Elaine was lying about the meter man; Marshall is the kind of blueberry pie town where the gas company trusts you to read your own. No, they were leaving me alone with Donna Delbert's apple box because they knew I would fall for her, and l'amour is a private thing.
When they were gone, I opened the box. I like touching the personal things that belonged to the dead, things I have no right to touch. As the snow began to fall outside the Lunds' kitchen, I read Donna's letters, stroked her dainty gloves, and sniffed the torches she ate fire from. Then, in an advertising photo I saw her for the first time, peering from her own plump shadow, her vampire lips in a coy half-smirk, under plucked, painted eyebrows. She was my kind of woman, a creature of the night.
She had been notorious. Her sultry mug had graced glossy rags from Sir! to Time. Rumored to be the American widow of a British tank gunner killed in the Normandy invasion, she appeared suddenly on the English music hall circuit shortly after World War II, calling herself, "America's Outstanding Lady Magician and the Only Lady Fire Eater in the World." Agents booked her at once. A Yankee dame to the tips of her long red fingernails, she conjured, sucked the flames from torches, and snuffed candles with a crack of her whip. She was the perfect postwar woman, the Rosie the Riveter of magic.
Then one spring midnight in 1949 she was having a late supper at her boarding house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, when a policeman appeared, saying he believed she was a fugitive in disguise. Donna went silent and shook her head no. The inspector searched her purse and found an identification card for a soldier missing from the U.S. Air Force. Hours later at the city jail, in a voice an octave below her usual contralto, she confessed: she was that missing soldier, Delbert Hill, a male P.F.C. gone A.W.O.L. from the U.S.A.F. He had been living as a lady fire-eater for four years and had fooled everybody except the two women who were his lovers. Unfortunately, jealous Betty got wind of rival Edna and blew the whistle on their cheating heartthrob.
(Much more at site...)
(Thanks to JeremyT!)
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