News these days being as dire as it comes, with the rise of fascism in my native Germany and my former second home, the US, foremost on my mind—with the related ascendance of AI and its foretold extermination of humanity thrown into the bargain—I am, as if clinging to bygone fictions to which I can yet subscribe in a willing suspension of disbelief, flicking through digitized copies of decades-old periodicals, as I have long been wont to do.
Mindful though I am that fascism dawned as well on the Depression-stricken world in the 1930s—I am not as escapist as all that—I was arrested nonetheless by an article titled “I’d Give Up Movies for Radio!” as published in the September 1936 issue of Radio Stars.
Now, I asked myself, what freewheeling cog in the dream factory of Hollywood would publicly be so refractory, so royally disloyal, so spectacularly disobliging qua spectacle as to sound downright subversive?
The exit-eyeing “I”? None other than Ginger Rogers.