Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
Links in this post are affiliate links and if you make a purchase after following one of these links, I may earn a small commission. Very small. I've earned about $10 since I started posting Amazon affiliate links last year. These are only some of the categories of deals you can shop on Prime Day, July 16-17, 2024: Reading, Groceries, Movies, Music.
July 3, 1999: Musician/artist Mark Sandman, perhaps best known as a member of the band Morphine, collapses while playing a Morphine show in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. He is pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The 46-year-old’s fatal heart attack is thought to have been triggered, in part, by the extreme heat of the day.
July 5, 1932: Z. Smith Reynolds, an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, dies of a gunshot wound. Three other people are inside the house with Reynolds at the time: Reynolds’s wife Libby Holman (a noted Broadway singer/actor), Holman’s personal assistant Ab Walker, and friend Blanche Yurka. A party has taken place at the home earlier and all of the witnesses are drunk when the shooting occurs. It’s unclear if Reynolds died by suicide, accident, or murder. Holman maintains she was too drunk to remember what happened that night. She and Walker are indicted on murder charges, but the Reynolds family insists that the charges be dropped.
July 12, 1979: Singer Minnie Riperton dies of breast cancer. She’s 31 years old.
July 12, 1996: Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Melvoin, at the time touring with the Smashing Pumpkins as a keyboardist, dies of a heroin overdose. He’s 34 years old.
July 12, 1997: The bodies of Lela and Raymond Howard, a couple from Texas who’ve been missing for over two weeks, are found in their Oldsmobile about 350 miles away from their home. The couple had been making their annual visit to the Pioneer Days fiddle festival on June 28th when they apparently become disoriented and lose their way, ending up near Hot Springs, Arkansas. No foul play is suspected; their deaths are apparently accidental. The Oldsmobile is found at the bottom of a ravine with Lela at the wheel.
Raymond was 88; Lela was 83. They’d married 11 years earlier after each had lost their previous spouse. The incident inspired the Fastball song “The Way.”
July 14, 2015: Arthur Cave, the 15-year-old son of Australian musician Nick Cave and English fashion model and designer Susie Bick, dies after sustaining a brain injury in an accidental fall from a cliff in the family’s home of Brighton, U.K. Arthur has used LSD before the accident. He’s survived by his twin brother Earl.
July 15, 1958: John Lennon’s mother Julia Lennon is struck and killed by a car while walking home.
July 17, 1959: At 3:10 a.m., Billie Holiday passes away under arrest in her hospital bed. Her death comes from heart failure and fluid in her lungs brought about by a failing liver. She’s 44 years old.
July 17, 1967: 40-year-old jazz saxophonist John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Although he has been sober for the last 10 years of his life, earlier struggles with heroin and alcohol use may have contributed to his cancer.
July 25, 1984: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the first artist to record “Hound Dog,” dies of a heart attack and liver disease at age 57 in Los Angeles.
July 26, 2015: Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, dies in a hospice care facility at the age of 22. She had been in a coma for the previous six months after being found unresponsive in her Georgia home by her fiancé, Nick Gordon. Brown was discovered face-down in her bathtub less than three years after her mother died in a bathtub at a hotel in Los Angeles. Eerily similar to her mother’s passing, Brown was found to have been intoxicated with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, and other substances when she apparently drowned in her bathtub.
July 29, 1974: Cass Elliot dies of a heart attack. Years of heroin abuse and cycles of rapidly gaining and losing weight have weakened her body. Cruelly, urban legend will afterwards contend that she died by choking to death on a ham sandwich.
"The poem I just wrote is not real. And neither is the black horse who is grazing on my belly. And neither are the ghosts of old lovers who smile at me from the jukebox." - Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo. Library of Congress Life, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
I walk into the little Historic Downtown Irvington shop on Washington Street that used to be the ice cream shop that sold bubble tea. I see the new owner has rebranded it as a 1950s-themed nostalgia diner. The bubble tea options and anime keepsakes are gone, but the ice cream counter remains, as do about a dozen shiny, chrome milkshake blenders.
The brightly lit Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner has a hastily printed-off sign that reads, in Comic Sans font, "Do Not Play the Jukebox."
I glance around the diner. The only occupied booth is in the corner, where a snappily-dressed 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe can't take his pale blue eyes off his broad-shouldered, 49-year-old date. Augustus Landor is dressed somewhat more shabbily than the young dandy he's courting but appears to be no less enthralled by his partner's company. Their table is littered with empty beer bottles, in the midst of which sits a single milkshake with two straws.
I sit at the counter and order a vanilla Coke and a veggie burger with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. As the server delivers my Coke, I ask her, "What's up with that jukebox? Is it broken?"
"Not broken, exactly," she says. She has a working class London accent, tall black hair, and an abundance of retro tattoos.
"Nah, I don't think so," the server says, snapping her gum. "That's not it. It's just been acting weird ever since that writer Joy Harjo came in and played it."
I pause to think. Is she being subtly racist, maybe unintentionally, attributing some kind of magic to Harjo because the poet is an indigenous woman? Maybe she attributes magic to all poets. Isn't what they do with words a sort of magic, after all?
"Weird how?" I ask at last.
She reaches into her apron, produces a shiny quarter, and tosses it to me. "See for yourself."
I take her quarter to the jukebox and drop it in the glowing slot. I don't select a song from the touchscreen; I don't get the chance to touch the screen before the first notes of "Come On Eileen" play.
I shrug. "So it doesn't let you choose the song," I say, turning to the server. "That's not so unusual."
"Look again," she says, pointing to the jukebox. I turn back to its brightly-lit display and notice, for the first time, the faint outline of a face. Is it my reflection in the glass? But no, the faint outline becomes clearer, as if I'm looking into a crystal ball and an image appears from the clouded interior.
I know this face. He's Robert Sheehan. This time, he doesn't call me Eileen. He doesn't say a thing. He only smiles.
Well, not ONLY smiles; his eyes follow me as I shake my head. I move to the left and his eyes track me. I sense awareness, maybe even intelligence. I know the image I see isn't the real Robert, but it isn't exactly a mere image either.
"See what I mean now?" the server asks me. "The fuckin' thing's haunted. It shows you exes, old boyfriends and like that."
"It showed me my Annabel Lee," says Poe from the corner. "It played Gus a waltz and showed him his late wife."
Augustus groans. "Could I get another beer?" he asks the server.
"Eerie," I say, rummaging in my jeggings pocket for another quarter. I find one and feed it into the jukebox. Apparently its powers included showing me the faces of the dead as if they were alive and well; I wanted to test this property. "Play some Johnny Cash."
But it doesn't. As Robert Sheehan's smiling face fades away, the opening incidental music of "One Night in Bangkok" fades in and I glimpse the smiling face of Murray Head.
I smile back, remembering some of the sweetest hours of my life spent with the singer in the luxury of the Somerset Maugham suite.
The illusion is broken as the black-haired server sets my veggie burger on the counter. I sit and eat in happy reminiscence as the song plays out, my eyes darting between the jukebox and my burger.
The song cross-fades into "Are You Jimmy Ray?" and I wonder whose smiling face I'll see. Will it be my old friend Uma, whose first child Maya is now a grown woman, actor, and singer herself? Will it be my ex-flame Tim, complicated and morally gray, sometimes a peaceful Buddhist and at other times capable of great inner darkness?
The mysterious jukebox surprises me by showing me the face of my dear, departed friend James Dean. His smile is radiant. He looks so happy it gives me a little pang in my chest.
"You see?" says the server as she takes away my empty plate. "That's a dead boy, innit? It's right spooky. That Joy Harjo did something to it. She didn't have a quarter, she said, so she tried to pay for a song with a poem instead. Ever since she put her poetry into the, the bloody thing's been going off like a fortune teller's crystal ball."
"Amy!" pipes up Poe, addressing the server. "You didn't tell me you accepted poetry as payment!"
"Now don't you start, Eddie," says the server, whose name tag I can now clearly see says Amy. I think she might be less spooked by dead boys than she's been letting on. "You be a good boy and pay for your food and beers with your American dollars."
"You know he doesn't have any money," says Landor, with a slight slur to his voice after he's finished his last beer. He reaches across the table and takes Poe's hand. "Not that you need worry about paying the tab when you're with me. Old Augustus will keep body and soul together for you, Eddie."
Poe smiles and for a moment I think they're going to kiss. Maybe they do. I'm looking at the jukebox and the radiantly happily, eerily glowing face of James Dean, his eyes following my every move.
As he fades away, the notes of "Helter Skelter" fade in. Will I see a Beatle? Could John or George pay me a visit? And does the diner seem suddenly warmer?
I soon realize the reason for the extremely localized heat wave. I see the face of Steve McQueen, whom I first encountered steaming hot and soaking wet when I stumbled into the room as he took a bath.
As if reading my mind, Amy sets another icy vanilla Coke on the counter. I grip the straw and sip eagerly, thirsty in more ways than one. Steve's smile makes me feel like I'm evaporating into steam.
***
The vignette I just wrote is not real. But it does contain affiliate links.
June 1, 1981: A mob of Sinhalese people in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, burns the Jaffna Public Library. The mob formed in protest of the killing of three Sinhalese police officers the night before, at a rally held by a Tamil pro-democracy political party. The burning of the library, which destroyed an estimated 97,000 books and manuscripts, came as part of clashes between the Sinhalese, who make up about three quarters of the population of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil minority.
June 2, 2013: Grizelda Kristiņa dies at the age of 103. She was the last fluent native speaker of Livonian, a Uralic language closely related to Estonian.
June 8, 1971: J.I. Rodale, an early advocate of sustainable and organic farming and founder of Rodale Press, appears as a guest on a pre-taped episode of The Dick Cavett Show. In his interview for the show, Rodale states that he’s never felt better and intends to live to be 100 years old. Unfortunately, he suffers a fatal heart attack at the age of 72 that evening, as he’s sitting in a chair on the Cavett Show set listening to another guest being interviewed. Rodale is pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital; the episode is never aired.
June 10, 1898: The last-known native speaker of the Dalmatian language, Tuone Udaina, dies. Udaina is killed in an explosion caused by road work.
June 12, 2015: Musician Dave Grohl falls from the stage, breaking his leg, while performing with the Foo Fighters in Gothenburg, Sweden.
June 14, 1949: 19-year-old typist Ruth Ann Steinhagen shoots and almost kills Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in one of the earliest recorded cases of what comes to be known as stalking. Steinhagen, a resident of Cicero, Illinois, has been obsessed with Waitkus since she sees him playing for the Chicago Cubs in 1946. She even leaves an empty plate at the dinner table for him when eating with her family. Steinhagen was seeing a psychiatrist, but this didn’t stop her from traveling to Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, leaving a note with Waitkus’s roommate asking to meet, then shooting the baseball player with a .22 caliber rifle when he came to see her. She shot him in the chest, puncturing one of his lungs.
After shooting Waitkus, Steinhagen allegedly looked for a second bullet with which to shoot herself, but was unable to find one. Instead she called the police and told them, “I just shot a man,” allowing Waitkus to reach medical care before his injury killed him. He had to sit out the rest of the ‘49 baseball season, but returned in 1950. Eddie Waitkus developed a drinking problem and died in 1972 of esophageal cancer.
June 18, 1984: Jewish talk show host Alan Berg is gunned down by two members of a white supremacist terror group in Denver. He is 50 years old.
June 24, 2023: Hikers in the San Gabriel Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, discover human remains. These turn out to be the remains of actor Julian Sands, age 65, who had been reported missing after failing to return from a hike on January 13, 2023. Winter storms, avalanches, and record snowfall in the area had hindered the search for him, although eight official searches were conducted during the five months he was missing.
June 28, 2018: A gunman attacks the offices of Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper The Capital. The assailant became enraged at the newspaper after it published a story about his arrest for harassing an acquaintance through social media. Reporter Wendi Winters, sports reporter John McNamara, columnist Gerald Fischman, editor Rob Hiaasen, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith are killed.
June 30, 1995: 45-year-old jazz singer and Broadway actress Phyllis Hyman dies in the hospital after having been found unresponsive in her home. She has overdosed on prescription barbiturate medication and alcohol.
In my 2010 post, I linked to the pages of some ladies I was digging at the time: Josephine Baker, Rihanna, Scarlett Johannson, Queen Latifah, Eva Mendes, Shakira, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon, and Uma Thurman. Since then, the blogger known as Dorothy has lent her spotlight to so many more amazing women.
My previous post was all about the fictional men. Dorothy is all about the ladies. This time, only Harley Quinn is a fictional character.
It's so hard to choose from all the amazing and talented women who've been featured on Dorothy Surrenders over the years, but I'll try. These are some of the women relevant to my interests (they'll take you to the tag on Dorothy Surrenders):
It's been 13 years, but I have thoughts. I'll skip the characters I don't know from books I haven't read.
111. Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). Fair, judging solely by the book. But in Maggie Gyllenhaal's forthcoming The Bride of Frankenstein retelling The Bride (2025), the Monster will be played by Christian Bale. Which bumps him up to #1. I apologize in advance for the feelings I will feel about that movie.
110. Uriah Heep (David Copperfield)
109. Casaubon (Middlemarch). If I remember Middlemarch, the main character's elderly husband looked like the philosopher John Locke, but I pictured him as Lost!John Locke. Not unhot.
108. Bradley Headstone (Our Mutual Friend)
107. Samuel Pickwick (Pickwick Papers)
106. Gussie Fink-Nottle (Right Ho, Jeeves)
105. Keith Talent (London Fields)
104. Jerry Cruncher (Tale of Two Cities). Domestic violence perpetrator; deserves to be at the bottom.
103. Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles). What's wrong with Poirot? He's smart, he's Belgian, he keeps his moustache neat. In the movies he's Kenneth Branagh. What have we got against Poirot?
102. Ham Peggotty (David Copperfield)
101. Thorin Oakenshield (The Hobbit). This is just anti-dwarfish. In the movies he's Richard Armitage. That gay Brit is pretty hot. Adaptational attractiveness? Sure, but still, I think a lot of Tolkien men are ranked too low on this list.
100. Tracy Tupman (Pickwick Papers)
99. Julian Malory (Excellent Women)
98. C.J. Stryver (A Tale of Two Cities). This one is correct. Sydney Carton is the hot one at this law firm.
97. Charles Arrowby (The Sea, the Sea)
96. Dr. Watson (“A Study In Scarlet”). Wrong. Watson is a catch. He's a Victorian 10.
95. Willy Wonka (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Ma'am, he has unlimited access to chocolate. That should bump him into the Top 50, at least.
94. Jim Dixon (Lucky Jim)
93. Edward Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility). I'm sorry, but in what universe is Edward Ferrars less bangable than George Wickham? Carrie Frye, did you read these books all the way through to the end?
92. Colonel Brandon (Sense and Sensibility). EXCUSE ME?!?
68. Peter Pan (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up). MA'AM HE IS A LITERAL CHILD. HE SHOULD NOT BE ON THIS LIST.
67. Long John Silver (Treasure Island)
66. King Lear (King Lear)
65. Reginald Jeeves (“Extricating Young Gussie”)
64. Henry Pulling (Travels with My Aunt)
63. Romeo (Romeo and Juliet). Another literal child from the reader's pov, but pretty bangable to his age-appropriate partner, I guess?
62. Tristram Shandy (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman)
61. Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
60. Roland Michell (Possession)
59. Crow (Crow)
58. Brigadier Etienne Gerard (The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard)
57. Tertius Lydgate (Middlemarch). I don't remember who this is.
56. Lord Sebastian Flyte (Brideshead Revisited)
55. Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park)
54. Frederick Wentworth (Persuasion)
53. Edward Murdstone (David Copperfield)
52. Desmond Ragwort (Thus Was Adonis Murdered)
51. Captain Hook (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up). I feel like he should be closer to 111. Unless we're talking about that one adaptation with Jason Isaacs. I like Jason Isaacs.
50. Charles Darnay (A Tale of Two Cities). That's pretty fair. Sure, he looks exactly, weirdly like Sydney Carton, but Charles Darnay has another golden retriever personality. Pleasant, I suppose, but not sexy. Plus he's probably sad about his dead son.
45. Legolas (The Lord of the Rings). Tolkien elves are hot.
44. Robin Hood (Piers Plowman)
43. Inspector Alan Grant (The Man in the Queue)
42. George Emerson (A Room with a View)
41. Alan Breck Stewart (Kidnapped)
40. Rockingham Napier (Excellent Women)
39. Mr. Neville (Hotel du Lac)
38. St. John Rivers (Jane Eyre). Colonialist. Not sexy.
37. Remus Lupin (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)
36. Lancelot (The Once and Future King)
35. Othello (Othello, The Moor of Venice). He definitely killed his wife. We saw him do it. Therefore, unbangable.
34. Tarzan/Lord Greystoke (Tarzan of the Apes). I know he was on my Disney "would" list, but let's be honest: The real sexiness is Tony Goldwyn's.
33. Severus Snape (Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone)
32. Aslan (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe). Ma'am, he is a literal lion. He shouldn't be on this list. I'm pretty sure he's an asexual untame talking lion.
31. Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities). Should be closer to #1 OBVIOUSLY.
30. John Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility). This much higher than Edward Ferrars? Really?
29. Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall)
28. Maxim de Winter (Rebecca). Um, didn't he kill his wife?
27. Simon Bakerloo (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase)
26. Sirius Black (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Yeah. Or maybe a little higher, even. This is not an endorsement of J.K. Rowling, whose attempt to gaslight the Internet into ignoring Nazi anti-lgbtq+ violence makes me ill. If I were a billionaire writer with a huge platform, I simply would not use my huge platform to target a vulnerable minority.
25. Brian de Bois-Guilbert (Ivanhoe)
24. Adam Dalgliesh (Cover Her Face)
23. James Bond (Casino Royale). James Bond's behavior and personality are offputting. The only thing that ever makes James Bond sexy is when he's played by Daniel Craig.
22. James Steerforth (David Copperfield)
21. Tom Bombadil (The Lord of the Rings). Accurate. Tom Bombadil might not be a permanent keeper, but he does sound fun.
20. Edward Driffield (Cakes And Ale)
19. Sherlock Holmes (“A Study In Scarlet”). I never get very strong sexy vibes from book!Sherlock. Watson does more for me. But the sound of Benedict Cumberbatch's voice is an entirely different story. (Hours spent reading Johnlock fanfic? Who, me?)
18. Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon (These Old Shades)
17. Robert Frobisher (Cloud Atlas). That's about right. Sexy, but sad. Depraved bisexual trope, but sexy.
14. Algernon Moncrieff (The Importance of Being Earnest)
13. Randolph Henry Ash (Possession)
12. Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights). I have normal, proportional feelings about Heathcliff and about Ralph Fiennes playing him. I'm normal about Byronic antiheroes.
11. Maurice Bendrix (The End of the Affair)
10. Beorn (The Hobbit)
9. Orlando (Orlando: A Biography). Strongly agree. Ms. Carrie Frye and I are on the same page here.
8. Oliver Mellors (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). I get it.
7. Lord Peter Wimsey (Strong Poison)
6. Don Juan (Don Juan)
5. The Beast (“The Tiger’s Bride”)
4. Eugene Wrayburn (Our Mutual Friend)
The top three are fine. I feel like there should me more Shakespeare in here somewhere, though. I feel like the unsexy Shakespeare characters are covered better than the actually hot ones. Benedick, anyone? Dom Demetrius, afraid of yet intrigued by Helena's sub tendencies?
May 4, 1897: On the second day of a charity bazaar set up by Catholic charitable organizations in Paris, aristocratic women shop in a wooden warehouse set up to look like a Medieval market. Decorations of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache, and wood help achieve this effect. As an extra attraction, an early movie projector called a cinematograph is set up with ether lamps as a light source.
The projection equipment catches fire. With flammable materials all around and little to no signage marking the exits, the largely female crowd is trapped inside. 126 people die; 200 more are injured. Many of the dead were so badly burned that they could only be identified by their clothing, jewelry, or expensive dental work.
May 9, 1914: Cereal manufacturer Charles William (C.W.) Post, recovering from emergency surgery for what was believed to be appendicitis, dies by self-inflicted gunshot wound when he can longer stand his severe abdominal pain.
His death leaves the Post cereal fortune to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who uses some of it to build her mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.
May 16, 1955: Writer/activist James Agee has a heart attack and dies in the back of a taxi cab in New York City. He’s 45 years old.
May 29, 1997: 30-year-old musician Jeff Buckley drowns in the Wolf River in Tennessee.
