Speaking of the Borderline Hat and Lollipops

...and tube skirts and the Healthy shirt. Madonna and Rosanna Arquette on February 17, 1985 at the Forum in LA for the Prince concert.

Madonna + Prince = Love Song.

My two favorite voices. Love everything about it.

Madonna - Like a Prayer 12" Single

Madonna 12" single of Like a Prayer. Artwork by brother Christopher Ciccone.

This version was always one of my favorites. All about that beginning and Prince's guitar outro.

Well, What is it?

Early 1985 and Madonna was hot, hot, hot. January 28, 1985 to be exact. Like a Virgin was Number One on both the Billboard album and singles chart. Gearing up for Japan and Hawaii, wearing a Jean-Paul Gaultier dress and that fabulous chunky hair piece that was about fall apart - she was Sex, Fuck and Rock 'n Roll. Material Girl had yet to be released which would catapult her star to the heavens. This was the first time she had presented at an award show and in America, her first live appearance on TV since the 1984 MTV Music Video Awards.

Madonna, Clara Bow, Elinor Glyn, Gloria Swanson, Marilyn Monroe, and 'It'.

Being obsessed with the 1920's, 50's and the 80's with the spillover into each new decade...usually the first 2 to 3 years, as a teenager, I thoroughly investigated the first two decades of the aforementioned. Around 1986, I discovered Clara Bow and 'It' - I've been enamored ever since. As I was writing this post, I was listening to my 1920's Radio Network. Coincidentally, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians Memory Lane (1924) played.

Novelist and scriptwriter Elinor Glyn, who was born and died while the sun was in Libra, wrote a novel called "It" in 1927.  She coined the term It and gave many confusing and sometimes contradictory explanations for what "It" meant, but she always said that "It" did not mean "sex appeal" and anyone who said it did was vulgarizing her concept. Nonetheless, it was as a euphemism for "sex appeal" that "It" entered the language in the 1920s.  From this we get the concept of Clara Bow's film It.

Screen Cap from the film It:

In David Stenn's Clara Bow biography Running Wild (1988), he spoke of Madonna's continuing interest in playing silent film star Clara Bow on the big screen. Unfortunately, this never happened.

Smoldering Clara circa 1928:

Madonna by Steven Meisel in Bow-esque pose in 1991:

Monroe as Clara Bow photographed by Richard Avedon in 1958: