I’d Rather Be Red...

Oh, how I’d love to be a redhead in a Toulouse Lautrec painting.

Flame-hair igniting the dance halls and brothels of Montmartre.

A can-can dancer,

a launderess,

a prostitute.

Working-class girls.

Reclining, crouching, bathing.

I imagine myself on stage, high-kicking the top hat off the gentleman in the front row.

Or a sad chanteuse clad in long black gloves crooning a soft song.

Perhaps adjusting my peek-a-boo fishnet stockings...

or washing my copper tresses in la toilette.

Toulouse pushed his redheads toward fiery tones in greenish gaslit rooms of the magical Montmartre during the glittering times of The Belle Epoch (The Beautiful Era). His copper-tousled damsels were desired, defiant, and dismissed all at the same time.

If I were a redhead in a Toulouse Lautrec painting during the extraordinary Fin de Siècle in Paris, I would gather us all—Misia, Marcelle, May, Yvette, Jane, and the anonymous ones in their boudoirs—together in one uproarious ruffled can-can performance, thrust one last sky-high kick, take our final bow, exit stage right off the canvas and out of the painting and onto our own Girl’s Night Out!

But not before a quick stop at the salon to transform me into a redhead too!

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Cafés and Cabarets - The Spectacular Art of Toulouse-Lautrec

now through September 20

at The San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park

Don't miss this exciting exhibition!