[UA] Yucky Lucky Charms

[Chad Underkoffler]

Check this:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.asp?story_id=16808

It is not unknown for artists to secrete lucky charms about
their person before braving the public. But in the unrecorded
history of these inspirational talismans there are unlikely to
be discovered any as unsavoury as the handkerchief spotted with
menstrual blood that was tucked into Toscanini’s pocket as he
took the podium on November 14, 1936, to conduct the Vienna
Philharmonic in a programme that included Cherubini’s Symphony
in D Major and the Second Suite from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé .
The object in question had been solicited by the
sixty-nine-year-old Toscanini from Ada, thirty-nine-year-old
wife of Enrico Mainardi, most prominent Italian cellist of his
generation. It was Ada who, of Toscanini’s many lovers, was the
one who appears to have excited him most and to have lasted
longest in his transient and stormy affections. “I received our
Holy Shroud”, he told her, *just as I was going up the stairs in
the Musikverein. I conducted the concert with it jealously
hidden in my pocket, and it was a real inspiration . . . . For
the love of God, Ada, it’s you who bring me to such excess. Only
you could exalt me to the point of dreaming up such fantasies.
If only you had seen me at the moment when my eyes gazed upon
that diaphanous veil, sprinkled with your blood!*



=====
Chad Underkoffler [chadu at yahoo.com]
http://www.geocities.com/chadu/index.html
"When I became a man I put away childish things. Like the 
fear of being childish, and the desire to be a grownup." 
  -- C. S. Lewis

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