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Trixie Friganza - Restored at Long Last!

Yes, yes, I know I just made my comment about curbing my YouTube postings, but I still have a couple more to go before topping this month's quota, and this one is just to glorious to wait on.

While weaving through incredible third disc of The Jazz Singer, I just about fell off my chair, when to my delight, I saw the charming face and full figure of Trixie Friganza. Trixie Friganza! I first discovered her a few years back in an American Masters episode on Vaudeville. Trixie appeared in the 1937 A Star Is Born, some Chaplin films and others. She was also a suffragette at the turn of the century.

This is a brief clip from a six minute clip in The Jazz Singer reissue, one of nearly three and a half hours of Vitaphone Varieties, a series of weird and wonderful shorts from the late 1920s and early 1930s. In a jazz age rap, Trixie gives tips on how married gals who like a nip at the speakeasy when the husband isn’t watching can cover her tracks.

Each minute is superb, but this half minute clip is arguably the pinnacle in which she chronicles the fate of Lulu who ventures off to the Aloha state. Though comic, what's amazing about Trixie, is that she's a pretty strident feminist even by today's terms. This 33-second interlude comes out of nowhere in the middle of a technically comic tune in which she tells the fate of her two husbands. They're both losers, but when one decides to hit her, she does him in.

Enjoy!

Trixie the suffragette.