Sunday, March 29, 2015

Chocolate roses: the Gershwin legend




















Welcome to the latest chapter in my exploration of Gershatology, a. k. a. Gershitudinousness. I don't know why it is, but I keep turning to the ever-changing, eclectic and dynamic medium of the Blingee for my pictorial analyses of George. Here are ten takes on a single picture. The most meaningful is perhaps the last one. One of the saddest and strangest stories in the Gershwin canon (not the boom-boom kind) is the squishy chocolates incident. In the ravages of a brain tumour that nobody seemed to want to acknowledge, Gershwin's behaviour became very strange indeed. He had been hallucinating smells for years, experiencing screamingly horrendous headaches, falling down, drooling, etc., all symptoms of, according to his psychiatrist, "hysteria". Nothing neurological going on at all. No sir. Gershwin was so hysterical that one day, when a box of chocolates arrived, a gift from the Gorgon Lee Gershwin, he smashed them all up into a goo and began rubbing them all over his body. I think such an act should be commemorated somehow, if only because it's the strangest thing I've ever heard a sane person do.

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