Pretty Dapper

My computer and I are having some communication problems. I don't know who started it, but I can say we might need counseling. Maybe. I don't know if our current insurance covers that.

However, as I peruse my files and protect my data (you just never know when technology will pull the "it's over" card), I realize there are things I'd like to commemorate.

This is one of those things.

I have had the pleasure of meeting and knowing a lot of people with fantastic stories-- most people have interesting stories, but some really knock your socks off. When I met the woman pictured above I think my socks landed on the other side of the country.

Her name is Sethma and she's got to be around 98 years old right now, if she's still alive. This image is from January 22, 2011. I am center (hopefully you picked up on that), with Sethma on one side and my best friend on the other. It's a long story how we ended up on that sofa, but through friends of friends (through my friend Ian there, in fact) it was determined that I must meet Sethma. And quick (at that age you never know, even more than you never know anyway).

Sethma had been a dancer and performer in her youth. Eventually, she married well-- very well (her house was on the sand by the sea, nestled between John McCain's house and Kevin Costner's, if you really need to know). But that's not really what interests me. Her joie de vivre, and the opportunities it had manifested for her, especially in her youth, were of the utmost fascination to me.

A family friend of Sethma's wrote down her story, because it is one of those stories that needs to be written down. It was published in a small batch by some local publisher. Sethma promised to send me a signed copy-- it still hasn't arrived, but as her memory came and went lots of things fell through the cracks. That said, in flashes of luminous articulation, she shared some truly amazing stories.

I was writing a paper at the time on Josephine Baker, a famous dancer and performer in the interwar period in France (look her up, she's great). Josephine Baker, from the dust-ridden tomes and online newspaper archives I shuffled through for hours and hours, seemed as far away as we generally think Lincoln or Thoreau would be. However, on a whim, I mentioned Ms. Baker to Sethma-- they had both danced in Europe during the same period in the early 1930's. Sethma's face lit up-- "Josephine Baker! Of course, yes, I danced on the same bill with her. She was the headliner."

The world is small, I know, but it is always smaller than I think no matter how far down I shrink it. I was elated, as a historian and otherwise. Sethma also spoke to us of a covert operation she and her dancing partner had been offered to take part in-- a plot to assassinate Hitler, if I remember correctly. That (obviously) did not transpire, but Sethma did dance for Benito Mussolini and (as I learned from her book) King Farouk of Egypt.

She also had a romance with Howard Hughes, which led to a series of stories I especially enjoyed. "He was an odd one," she told us. I nodded knowingly, as I had seen The Aviator and knew all about this (of course). Actually, I was reading Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers at the time, which was vaguely based on Howard Hughes. I was an expert.

"We were close, friends. He would come over, to dinner, with my family," Sethma explained. "He loved my mother's chicken casserole. She would make it just for him."

Sethma's memory came and went. "Whatever happened to him?" she asked, turning to me. This felt a bit like a senile Ronald Reagan asking me how the Cold War panned out, but I smiled. "I think he ended up in Vegas and passed away years ago. He dated Katharine Hepburn for a while."

Sethma nodded knowingly. "Ah, that makes sense. She was his type."

Katharine Hepburn is one of my favorite actresses, no, my very favorite actress, of all time. I do not get star struck (ever), but there was something nonetheless magical about having a personal connection to a period, and to people, who seem to far removed from today they are legends in our own time. This woman, like Forrest Gump, but real, had been there and known them, and she was sitting there with us looking out at the sea. I love history, and all things with stories-- people are the best, and she was a piece of living history (not to objectify her!) in the very best way one may dream of.

We took her out to dinner, to a family steakhouse where you pick out and cook your own steak, then eat it with the fixings provided at your table. We sat down, and the waiter asked us what we wanted to drink. Sethma responded, quick as a flash, "Vodka martini. Strong."

It took them a while to get it to our table (honestly I think someone might have requested a non-alcoholic placebo for her, though it didn't matter either way, really), and Sethma drummed her wrinkled fingers on the table and loudly bemoaned their sloth. She had been a customer at this establishment for half a century-- and she wanted that vodka martini promptly. She ordered two.

There was something precious about that afternoon. I felt grateful for the opportunity, and of all things cognizant of the fleetingness and magic of life. Sethma was feisty-- maybe that's what carried her so far. She was a fighter. She was also an eccentric-- a quality I prize more highly than most others. She had an enourmous fish tank against one wall in the living room. There was one fish in it. I walked closer. It looked like a piranha-- but that seemed improbable. Yet it did look like one...

"Sethma," I asked, "What kind of fish do you have in here?"

She turned. "Oh," she smiled vacantly, "I don't know. Little guy. I used to have more fish in there, all kinds..." she paused, "but he ate them all." She had a piranha. Like Marchesa Luisa Casati, one of my favorite people in history, who'd entered parties with a cheetah tied to each wrist with a diamond-studded leash, Sethma was unconventional in just the death-and-status-quo-defying way that appeals most to my very core. I was enamoured.

As we sat chatting, she saw I had a bolero tie necklace on, a bronze horse's head carved into the round face. It had belonged to my grandmother, a talented equestrienne, and it reminded me of her. "Do you like horses?" Sethma asked. 

"Yes, I do. I ride them sometimes, but not often enough lately."

"Oh, I see..." Sethma stared at me critically. "I am getting old and I have too many things. I am trying to get rid of my things. Would you like my horse?"

I paused. Was she offering to give me a horse? How would I get that to my parents house, the only place I would possibly have room? Could I convince them to take it? Would he get along with the other horses? But how could I say no? She was a bit senile, but this couldn't be right.... "Yes, I would."

Sethma rose from the sofa, "Follow me." We followed her down the hall and into her bedroom, a little cluttered with all manner of timeless treasures and the dated trappings of the elderly, and a huge bed from which you could hear the sound of the sea just a few feet away. She stopped in front of her desk, and pointed to the floor beneath it. "There's my horse. I want you to have him."

I looked down, and there it was. A buckskin, about 18 inches high, with real mane and tail. Made of plastic, her horse was a large child's toy. She wanted me to have it. "His name is Seth," she told me. "Because my that's my grandson's name, and my name is Sethma," she explained, delighted at her own cleverness.

Before we left she asked me Seth's name a few more times, and each time when I reminded her, "I think I'll call him Seth," she smiled wide and nodded, "That's an excellent name." Seth now sits in my bedroom back home, an oddity in a space otherwise overrun by antiques, art, music, and literary curios. All my other toys are long stashed elsewhere-- but this is not a toy from my childhood, this awkward plastic quadruped is a reminder of a magical and rare connection with a person and an era that all too soon will entirely lost to the world, the active connection sundered by the heartless plodding of time. I have met (bear with me) all manner of celebrities, movie stars, rock stars, Oscar winners, world record holders, some of the most powerful moguls in the world, and a broad variety of less famous but ridiculously fascinating and accomplished individuals, but meeting a woman of grace and fierce vitality who had traversed the planet for nearly a century and managed to have a series of truly world-class adventures, enjoying every moment up to the last-- that's the kind of person that truly inspires awe, if any human does, and that horse is a reminder of a great life and, in turn (it's about to get tacky), just how great life truly is.