the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 68
music. (They also were invited by the convivial diva to stay for a glass of
sherry.)
Quite a few people went to the trouble to obtain tickets, because a
Lady Florence concert was a spectacle not to be missed. The curtain rose
on a stage piled high with flowers, whose fragrance, Jenkins believed,
would enhance her voice. The diva herself was equally florid visually, clad
in one of the numerous outlandish costumes she would don during the
course of the show. (Her trademark accessory: a pair of golden wings and
a tiara.) At her side was longtime accompanist Cosme McMoon. Lady
Florence opened by shrieking through the “Queen of the Night” aria
from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. “In the back of the hall men and women
in full eve ning dress made no attempt to control their laughter,” a Time
magazine critic wrote after attending her 1934 performance. “Dignifi ed
gentlemen sat with handkerchiefs stuffed in their mouths and tears of
mirth streaming down their cheeks.”
After her rendition of Brahms’s song “The May Night,” Jenkins
would take a short intermission. Then she would return dressed in a lace
shawl, carry ing castanets and a wicker basket of rosebuds, and perform a
screechy version of her favorite song, Spanish composer Joaquín “Quinito”
Valverde’s lively “Clavelitos.” At the conclusion, she tossed handfuls of
rosebuds into the crowd. On one occasion, she was so carried away with
excitement that she tossed the basket as well, striking a man in the audience
on the head. “When her delighted listeners roared for an encore, she
had an assistant hurry out front and gather up the blossoms,” Dixon recalled.
“Then she repeated the whole routine.”
After a second intermission, the elderly diva would return, dressed
as the chambermaid Adele from Strauss’s light opera Die Fledermaus, and
sing “The Laughing Song” as her fi nal number. The audience’s uproarious
applause, as critic MacIntyre has observed, was “possibly accompanied
by the rattles of dead composers turning over in their graves.”