Doris vs Biggie

BBC4 Legends: Doris Day was on the cusp of the adult watershed because she was so risqué that she sometimes cussed and wore men’s trouser most notably in Calamity Jane (1953) her best remembered movie, because I can remember it. To be fair, which I never am, it is shown somewhere on Earth every other day. Two weeks ago it was shown here and I started watching bits and pieces.

Doris was born to an immigrant farming family. She learned to shoot a gun before she could talk and hunted possums for sport, but always threw them back. At the age of 13 she won a dancing competition with her skunk-baiting partner, Buddy Goodfellow, whom she was secretly in love with and they decided to go to Hollywood with the prize money of 50 cents. Before they could get there she was hit by a train. Trains were notoriously slow in them days. So, in a quaint old fashioned way, it was the equivalent of getting eaten by a donkey. We can laugh, but her dreams were in traction for a year. Her mother, used up two tins of home grown peaches,and hired the next door neighbour as a voice coach to nurture her daughter’s God given, innate talent, as she sang along to the radiogram. For there was more than one way to skin a possum fish. Doris Day aka Doris Day was on her way to Hollywood, by hook or by crooks.

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Film 4 Notorious (2009) directed by George Thuman Junior and starring Jamal Woolard as Brooklyn gangster and rapper Biggie Smalls aka The Notorious Big aka B.I.G aka Christopher Gary Latore Wallace.

At first sight, Doris Day that could only be painted by Colgate colours, and Latore Wallace, who happens to be black, don’t seem to have much in common. But if you look beneath the surface of the American dream the truth will emerge. Christopher Gary died of a gunshot wound to the head at the age of 24 and Doris Day died of Methusialism at the age of 114, but they died in the same year and had the same bible thumping mamma, the ageless Angela Basset. It’s all one big Calamity. A tragedy even.

Doris Day was a slice of America. They loved her that much they hated her and then loved her again.

Biggie Smalls they hated. Then hated some more. Then he died and they made some serious money so they loved him.

Both were singers. Doris Day could hold her musical notes so long one fan was said to have went into a screening fell asleep for an hour and Doris still held the same note when she woke up.

Notorious was a Brooklyn rapper made good. Rap is street anthems without the music, without the words, just in your face attitude.

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I put both singers to the small children’s test devised by Quantam Labs.

Doris Day has Disney eyes and her voice was so wholesome and covered in enough sugar to coat Alaska, the kid’s gobbled it up.

B.I.G has an acronymous advantage. He’s so big he sits on a throne. Kids like that. They like the noise, the jumping about, the crotch grabbing the bitches and the swearing. They, however looked to their mummy for guidance because they don’t yet know it’s good to be bad.

The boys, of course, want to grow up and marry Doris Day. They could kiss her on the cheek at the end of a long day at work and take her home to bake an apple pie and meet their mum and dad. She’s the good girl.

The alternative is the crack whores of Biggy Small. The boys don’t want to take them home to mum because every time they do there is a different dad and they haven’t got a home anyway, only a rented bit of the street corner.

The girls, of course, want to be Doris Day. She beautiful in a que sara sara, by the light of a silvery moon, Virgin Mary, kind of way. One commentator was heard to quip that he knew Doris Day before she was a Virgin, but he died such a prolonged and terrible death that he is still dying.

The alternative shown was to grow up with an Amazonian propensity to grind and gyrate their pert butts in such a way that their hips don’t even look attached, probably because they are not. They are walking about somewhere else, joining the Gospel choir and learning to sing about Jesus so they have something to fall back on when the crack runs out.

B.I.G., of course is Biggy, because he is big. Americans are the biggest of the big. The earth tilts and swivel and tilt and hiccups past them. African Americans are the biggest of the big. Whales swim upstream in order to avoid being trampled. They have evolved that much that Jonah would have ate the whale. Notorious, of course, ends up being notoriously good. He makes amends with the bitches he’s wronged in the past. He spends some quality time with some of the kids he’s spawned. He phones his mamma. It was as if, like the Messiah, he knew he was going to die. Doris Day, who is still alive somewhere, in this world, would have been proud of her brother.