On June 1, Brooklyn Reading Works presents MARILYN MONROE 80th BIRTHDAY BASH. June 1 is her actual birthday and Yona Zeldis McDonough, Albert Mobilio, Lisa Shea and Melissa Pierson will read their essays from ALL THE AVAILABLE LIGHT: a Marilyn Monroe Reader. Actress Charlotte Maier will read from  IN HER OWN WORDS. Poet Michele Madigan Somerville will also be on hand.

SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Movie clips and birthday cake. The Old Stone House on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope.

    From All the Available Light: I was too young to have known or appreciated the phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe first hand: I was five years old when she died on that August morning , 1962.  But I can remember quite vividly the first televised image I saw of her: a  clip of the now famous  rendition of Happy Birthday she sang for President John F. Kennedy.  She wore some sparkling, beaded gown that seemed quite transparent, and beneath it, little or perhaps even nothing else.  The spot light quivered and dipped but was essentially confined to her radiant face; it never moved below, so that her nearly naked breasts and body remained in a kind of tantalizing shadow.   Who would not be tantalized by her performance, this beautiful woman with the little girl voice, who embodied so many different kinds of resonant and unsettling paradoxes? 
    The facts of her life are, at this point, familiar sign posts in the well-rehearsed legend. Born to Gladys Pearl Baker  in Los Angeles  on June 1, 1926, the name on her birth certificate is Norma Jean. Her father is  no where in sight and her mother  is soon diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.    After a brief  stint in an orphanage,  little Norma Jean is  bounced around from foster home to foster home.  She marries a local neighbor boy at sixteen, embarks on a modeling career and is soon discovered by a Hollywood movie executive.  The husband is soon discarded, like so much else in her earlier life.  In 1947, at the age of 21, she appeared in her first motion picture; by 1950, her roles in such films as Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve begin to command attention.  There are more films of course, and eventually she achieves starring roles in them:  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot.  There are well-publicized marriages, to ball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, and equally well-publicized divorces.  And there are affairs, lots of them, with other movie stars, like Yves Montand, or with politicians, like the Kennedys.  There are nervous breakdowns, bouts of depression, miscarriages  and suicide attempts.  Finally, there is the drug overdose–intentional? accidental?  and on August  5, 1962, Marilyn’’s lovely light went out forever.

–Yona Zeldis McDonough

COLLAGE BY ART JUNK GIRL