From convent to boudoirs to hat-making, French designer Coco Chanel at one time befriended Igor Stravinsky. Today’s poem by a humorous birthday poet.
The date is August 19th, Monday, and today I’m coming to you from Portland, OR.
Today is the birthday of Ogden Nash, American humorist and poet.
Born in 1902, Ogden Nash reports having always enjoyed rhyming. He was known for unconventional rhymes such as rhymes that relied on the mispronunciation of words or rhymes that used two words.
Nash moved to New York City a few years after dropping out of Harvard and worked writing car ads for a time. While in New York City, Nash felt gutsy enough to submit some of his rhymes to The New Yorker. The editor of The New Yorker was so pleased with Nash’s rhyming submissions he wrote to him and asked for more. Nash then worked for The New Yorker for a short while before publishing his first collection of poems.
Ogden Nash went on to have a career as a guest on radio and comedy shows and also toured the nation giving lectures and speeches at colleges. He wrote light verse all his career, publishing a number of collections and continuing to appear in the leading periodicals of the day like Life magazine.
Despite many silly and clever verses, Nash did happen to get serious for a brief interview in the Prescott Evening Courier in 1958. He said, “This is our world and we are locked in it. And we have to learn to survive together, whether we love or admire each other or not. We must adjust to each other.”
At heart, Nash may have hoped that even if we don’t all agree with each other, at least, perhaps, we could all share a laugh. Ogden Nash passed away in 1971 at the age of 68.
Today is the birthday of Coco Chanel, French designer.
Chanel was born into the opposite of wealth in 1883. Her father was a peddler which meant the young family was constantly on the move from town to town. Their lodgings were generally subpar. It’s doubtful Chanel attended school as a child.
When Chanel was 11, her mother died of tuberculosis and her father sent her and her sisters to live at a convent. Perhaps embarrassed that her father essentially abandoned her, Chanel would later claim that she was raised by two spinster aunts. The convent was Chanel’s first chance to receive a formal education and where she learned to sew.
After trying and failing to become a singer at clubs, Chanel survived and indeed thrived at being the mistress to several wealthy men. While entangled in one affair she began designing hats – the start of her career as a designer.
From hats she would move on to open her own boutique in a fashionable and moneyed Street, selling clothing, accessories, and perfume.
A chance encounter in 1920, saw Chanel and Igor Stravinsky as friends. Stravinsky and his family had fled Russia during the revolution and Chanel graciously offered them rooms at one of her residences until they could find a place of their own. Chanel would go on to make a generous donation that led to a performance of one of Stravinsky’s ballets at a popular opera house in Paris. She also became passionate about design costumes for the Ballets Russes and maintained a working relationship with ballet choreographer Sergei Diaghilev for nearly 15 years.
We don’t enough time to cover Coco’s whole life – so here are a few recent-ish biographies on the fashion designer and icon:
- Chanel: An Intimate Life – Lisa Chaney
- Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life – Justine Picardie
- The Secret of Chanel No. 5 – Tilar J. Mazzeo
More About People
Ogden Nash
When people aren’t asking questions
They’re making suggestions
And when they’re not doing one of those
They’re either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes
And then as if that weren’t enough to annoy you
They employ you.
Anybody at leisure
Incurs everybody’s displeasure.
It seems to be very irking
To people at work to see other people not working,
So they tell you that work is wonderful medicine,
Just look at Firestone and Ford and Edison,
And they lecture you till they’re out of breath or something
And then if you don’t succumb they starve you to death or something.
All of which results in a nasty quirk:
That if you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.