"Personalities Frozen in Amber" - A Review of the Jayne Mansfield Story

Cover of The Jayne Mansfield Story

Icons fascinate me. There is little getting away from this fact. I grew up in showbusiness and I have experienced it in most of its forms. However, I think it is probably my very early interest in Greek and Norse mythology coupled with comic books that led me to my interest in the cult of personality. In both instances we have fictional figures that have become representative of what we love and fear, blown up to magical proportions. The way the Romans would also seek to deify their recently deceased emperors presents a very literal way of how humans have always needed immortal heroes. I have little time for current celebrity gossip and I do not elevate those society chooses to celebrate above anyone else. What interests me is the way a certain image is formed and how they go beyond what they ever were as a mortal figure. The icon is its own entity, merely being played by a flesh and blood human being for a relatively short time.

Remembering the Salem Executions on 19th July

Image via Wikipedia

318 years today five women were hung as witches as the infamous Salem Witch Trials. The official memorial page for the victims of this glaring example of religious extremism and mass hysteria in the western world, lists those who were hung as Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good and Rebecca Nurse. Their gravestones are preserved and the page even reproduces their please of innocence against this capital crime.