My wife found Maggie broken, emaciated and shivering in the gutter a block from our apartment at at 5:30 in the morning a few weeks before the World Trade Towers fell. Maggie, upon our first meeting, bit my nose. She would continue to bark at, shy away from, and generally dog-harumpf me for a full year before she would be coaxed into accepting my presence as a poor substitute for my wife's. Even then, she would stare longingly at the door, waiting for the obviously better half to return from whatever trivial errand she might dare to run.
Magdalena Ya-Ya Entonces Stewart de Trejo passed with quiet grace on a warm Autumn morning late last year in the loving arms of her best friend Tina, tucked away in a corner of Carlsbad, California, the fitting place she would decide to make her pied-รก-terre during her golden years, surrounded by her varied adopted homo-sapien, feline and canine minions of many stripes and sizes.
Magda, as some would call her, was an excellent dancer, a professional comidienne (of the driest variety) and perhaps this century's greatest lover of chicken (or as she would say, "Amorador de Pollo.") She was given to, among other vices, smoking menthol Capri cigarette's, fantastic bouts of disgusted shivering and an acute halitosis so remarkable as to be intoxicating. She counted among her friends and confidantes many who regularly grace the pages of Vanity Fair and Women's Wear Daily and to her last breath would regale with tales of her mercurial romances with the most handsome men and women found in our culture's spotlight. Her on-again, off-again romance with John Stamos is the stuff of a tabloidist's heaven and her long creative collaboration with Cher is the stuff of song-writing and self-styling legend. Maggie's well-timed appearance onto the early-ots Williamsburg hipster art gallery scene spawned a thousand knock-offs and vehement envy, all of which she took in stride, often quoting by way of retort the film Highlander, "there can be only one."
This small, quaint obituary is far from sufficient to paint the picture of a life so vital, so conspicuous and so entrancing. She touched simply far too many with her acerbic wit, impulsive vivacity and unrivaled sense of taste and timing.
May the roses that blush of the bush beneath which she now rests smell of her ambrosial chickenbone-marrow inspired tooth decay ever more.
4 comments:
I once heard it rumored that Magda, during the filming of her first oscar winning role on the silver screen at the old MGM studios (ya know, when cinema was really cinema), was questioned about her on-going tit-for-tat with Elizabeth Taylor, that she responded in a brazen tone "why that old wagon wheel, she don't know noth'n".
Classic.
My own words fail me when trying to describe my feelings for Maggie. So I'm going to leave it to W.H. Auden to help me express my sadness:
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
sorry to hear that T-bone, she was a special lady and she'll be remembered as such-
I loved how Maggie would find the tiniest patch of sunlight cast in through the window, encircle the light as if herding it tighter, and gently lay upon it, a fluffed pillow of sunshine, warming her birdbone superstructure and her elegant eyelids.
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