Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade

Life is a banquet and most poor s.o.b.'s are starving to death." Auntie Mame

Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death!

Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation.

Why darling, I'm your Auntie Mame!

Within the last two years it had been called Tony's, Belle's Bar Sinister, The Ole Plantation, Tony's, Alt Wien, Paris Soir--or Sewer--Victor's Vesuvius, Chez Cocotte, York House, Gay Madrid, and Tony's.

I wish you wouldn’t use the term Christian where it is so obviously misapplied,” Auntie Mame said steadily.

My dear, a rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person. Here now”—she burrowed into the mess on her bedside table and brought forth another pad and pencil—“every time I say a word, or you hear a word, that you don’t understand, you write it down and I’ll tell you what it means. Then you memorize it and soon you’ll have a decent vocabulary. Oh, the adventure,” she cried ecstatically, “of molding a little new life!” She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget about.

She was built along the lines of a General Electric refrigerator and looked like a cross between Caligula and a cockatoo. Mother Burnside had beady little eyes, an imperious beak of a nose, sallow skin, and bad breath. She wore a stiff black wig and a stiff black dress and she sat all day long in a darkened drawing room, her pudgy hands - encrusted with dirty diamond rings - folded over her pudgy belly.

To Mame, conventional thinking and Early American décor are a prison; she advocates total sexual freedom, world travel, and “the feverish excitement of the creative career!” Mame believes that life must be art,

I giochi che si svolgono in silenzio sono quelli più pericolosi

and they don’t have to know about a lot of things that ordinary mortals just don’t have to know about!

Auntie Mame sat decoratively on a Louis XIV love seat and discussed the heat, the humidity, how the climate was changing from year to year in New York,