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Play It as It Lays: A Life in Pictures

So long as machines puzzle—and men can be,

So long lives that; which that makes sense to me.

—"The Fourth Bridge, or, AI" (2021)*


Her name's not really “Diana Lynn.”

Born Dolores Eartha Loehr on July 5, 1926,

Paramount sensibly rechristened her.

Seen first in immortal Billy Wilder’s

The Major and the Minor—it's fluff—

by me, and then as "Emmy Kockenlocker"

In Preston Sturges’ Miracle of Morgan’s Creek—comic genius—

She gets to be female lead in Bedtime for Bonzo. Finally, in 1971, before filming of Didion's Play It as It Lays starts,

She has a stroke, hangs up her hat, and dies.

I seek here but to memorialize

this heavenly creature

Who passed before my eyes,

and then was by me seen no more.

These few reports of her life in pictures

Make about as much sense in poetry

as my own being in cockamamie history.

It’s far too late at night, I fear.



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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

Copyright © 2023 - by Peter Dreyer

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