Lizzie B: FACTOID 3

SNAPSHOTS of LIZZIE  ( truths ? rumors?  interpretations after the fact? )

"She was a very solid lady, short, heavily built...You wouldn't have thought twice about her except for her jaw. Enormous. The largest jaw I ever saw in a woman"

"Her expression was not a pleasant one. Not a face you would voluntarily address."

"She was always neat and plainly , but smartly dressed.  She favored blue. During the grand jury hearings she wore a tip-tilted hat with cherry- colored ribbons and when traveling a blue veil to conceal her face.. Her shoes were shined each morning"

"Her laugh (although rarely produced) was memorable - unexpected, mirthless and very loud"  

"It was only after the crimes that people began remarking on her oddities. At school she was a fair but not exceptional student, her chief interest, it was later recalled, in vivisection, preferably on live frogs."

" Ex-Governor Robinson of Massachusetts and one of her defense lawyers summed it up. ' Gentlemen to find Lizzie Borden guilty you must believe that she is a fiend. Does she look it? The prisoner at the bar is a woman, and a Christian woman, the equal of your wife and mine'  And  indeed there she sat in her neat blue dress, a little brooch in the shape of a pansy, Sunday School teacher, devoted worker for Temperance, Christian Aid and Foreign Missions, a small bouquet on the table befoire her brought by her minister." 

"Her eyes were huge and protruding, the irises an almost colorless ice-blue. They were strangely expressionless. I have heard many speak of them as dead eyes, but the eyes of the dead are dull; Lizzie's had the shine of beach pebbles newly bared by the outgoing tide" 

Lizzie B: Factoid 2

   

  Fine Dining  with the Bordens (decline at your peril)

   For breakfast that fatal August morning  , the family had the remains of their  last night's dinner  mutton, hot mutton broth, bananas, johnnycake, bread, coffee, and cookies. The temperature outside was already 80 degrees by 7:30. All the windows were (as usual) tightly shut and locked. An  incipient taint  of corruption  (both metaphorical and literal) seems to  hangs heavy in the humid air . At the turn of the century  such a meal was considered  perhaps  "ample" but not particularly  unusual. To our sensibilities (and stomachs) it seems remarkable enough in itself but has been made immortal by the events of The Day - a kind of "gastronomical catalyst for whatever strange passionate killings were soon to take place."  

Lizzie B: Factoid #1

We'll be running a series of "Lizzie Bordon Factoids" over the next weeks as we get ready for her scary and eagerly awaited  in-person  arrival at the Castle on November 20th .  

Here's # 1  "The Elegance and Mystery  of Chronological Congruence "  

Is it just coincidence or some greater cosmic manifestation  that James M Barrie, Anton Chekov, Gustav Mahler , Grandma Moses and Lizzie Borden were all born in 1860. 

To say nothing of the possibly more apt Annie Oakley (both she and Lizzie were, after all , good with weapons) and the decisively less apt Juliette Low (founder of the Girl Scouts - although  in some ways  Lizzie appeared  as a   kind of  ideal Girl Scout type - kind to animals, charity work, churchgoer  etc ) 

Low also died the same year as Lizzie ...and Annie the year before  And what of the fact that Isadora Duncan died in year of Lizzie"s death - 1927 

And who was born that year? Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt , Gina Lollobrigida, Patty Page and Caesar Chavez