Because it's Tuesday, September 11, and we could all use some cheering up. Here, billion-eyed audience, is a big, beautiful, beaming Brooksie...via this amazing trove, brooksie.vintage.

And, further, I don't even know how I happened upoin this image, but it's from later in her short career -- God's Gift To Women, of 1931, memorable if only because it's a sound picture, and we get to hear Louise speak in that splendid, "Mid-Atlantic" stage-style that she possessed all her life--her enunication precise enough that, even in the silents, you can read her lips. [Thus solving the question if silent film actors knew what the interstitial cards said. Well, there were scripts; and Louise read hers].

There are some funny lines in this Frank Fay vehicle, and a multi-woman cat fight on a bed that includes a young Joan Blondell. The caption here could be: "Ms. Brooks, are you trying to seduce me?" As they said in that time, she's got gams. But of course, she had ample qualities beyond her stems, behind that smile, and within those big dark eyes.



By the by, here's an image of Joan Blondell, a publicity shot taken in the 1930s. Because of its color, and the discrete position of the chair, it all seems so contemporary. The pose has been copied and copied again, the most memorable one is the image of the notorious Christine Keeler, who brought down the Profumo government, immortalized in this 1963 Lewis Morley image. That particular photograph was appropriated in advertising for the 1989 film, Scandal.