Download ~ Love in Cyberspace and Beyond by Sandra Devlin ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Love in Cyberspace and Beyond
Author : Sandra Devlin
Release Date : January 20, 2016
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs,Books,
Pages : * pages
Size : 938551 KB

Description

We hear a lot about the “self-made man,” but somehow the words “self-made woman” do not roll off our tongues with the same ease. Not because there are no such women, but because of obsolete, ridiculous notions about femininity and drive, originality and grit.

Meet Sandra Devlin, self-made dancer, showgirl, impresario, choreographer, designer, producer, videographer, entrepreneur, and business woman extraordinaire. She was also a self-made lover and bold sensualist in an era when young single women were supposed to keep it all buttoned up. Twenty years ahead of the sexual revolution of the sixties, she came by it through her own inclinations, instincts and admirable innate lack of any notion of sexual “sin”—and not because she belonged to any “movement” or had read any feminist literature. In fact, she tells us early on in her story that she had an odd resistance to reading, and that she never got the formal education she keenly wanted. This makes her accomplishments all the more compelling—she is one of those rare “innocents” who, lacking book-learning and/or early training, provided her own rocket fuel, brains and unerring instincts, verging on the visionary, at every critical serendipitous juncture of her life and career.

In her eighties today, she continues to defy, without apology, popular notions of “proper” ladylike comportment: she’s fit and sexy, works at it daily like an athlete in training, tells age to go jump in the lake, still radiates sass and glamor, and has a lover easily young enough to be her son. It’s this daring, eyebrow-raising, frowned-upon-by-many and sometimes rocky love affair—which started in the most ephemeral way possible, with a few cross-continental e-mails exchanged in the middle of the night on a cyber dating site—that’s the launching pad and leitmotif for this nothing-like-it-before autobiography.

She was no silver-spoon baby, nor was her childhood hardscrabble poverty. Her parents were middle-class, but we get disturbing glimpses of peculiar intermittent streaks of cruelty, neglect and eccentricity on the part of her mother, Paula, that cause Sandra to legitimately refer to her childhood as “Dickensian.” Her parents separated early, and she and her father loved each other, but he was no match for the formidable Paula, who was also capable of occasional—and therefore highly confusing—kindness and nurturing. As we know too well, some who have erratic childhoods grow up to replicate the harshness; others look at what was inflicted on them and vow to do the opposite. Some are crushed for life, others are like the proverbial rose pushing up through concrete.

We see where Sandra falls on this spectrum: when Paula comes down with Alzheimer’s, Sandra travels the high, high road of compassion, taking exquisite care of the woman who was known to beat Sandra and her younger sister with a switch and who once put them on a bus from Florida to New York in the middle of winter, ages eight and seven, without coats or sufficient food or money. Farmed out to various other families by her mother often enough to know the loneliness of the orphan, and sometimes subjected to the forced labor of an indentured servant, Sandra was formed at the beginning of her life by self-sufficiency plus hard, hard work, an ethic she took into her very molecules. And though she eventually made her fortune, she’s never forgotten being a young, broke artist in New York, and in another crucial place in life where two roads diverge, she proudly takes the leftward fork, where too many march to the right: politically progressive to her marrow, she’s staunchly on the side of “the people.”

Physically gifted, Sandra tells us that she “came out of the womb dancing.” She got no formal training at all until the ripe old age of sixteen, generally considered too late for dancers hoping to go professional. That ability to work, to concentrate with near-inhuman persistence, plus her singular strength, grace, rhythm and coordination, were the keys to the unfolding of her extraordinary life. She landed in New York City as a teenager in the 1940s, and sweet fortuity led to her becoming a student of modern dance under the great Martha Graham, who saw the potential in this untrained dynamo.

Then came the big break: Agnes De Mille cast her in a traveling production of a musical whose name we all know (let’s keep it a surprise for now!) when Sandra was still a teenager. And it was on into showbiz for the next twenty-odd years: dancing, leaping, high-kicking, derby-twirling and vamping in everything from burlesque to understudying in Bob Fosse’s celebrated number “Steam Heat,” clad in everything from naughty scanties to shimmering gowns to feathers, in venues ranging from dim dives in Jersey City to Broadway to the Copacabana. The great and iconic, from John Steinbeck to Salvador Dali to Chubby Checker to Hugh Hefner to Laura Nyro, populate Sandra’s tale, especially as she moves into choreography and producing, but throughout, her authentic wide-eyed modesty precludes any hint of noxious name-dropping. In this milieu, there were, naturally, romances galore. Passion runs in her veins: For Sandra, love, love and always love is the show upon which the curtain never goes down, even as her leading men are recast. There are hearts-and-flowers aplenty, but they’re balanced by searing candor as Sandra unflinchingly bares the flip side of love: despair, heartbreak, failed suicide. Never embittered, though, she goes on to love again, and again, incapable of being put off. And that is the soul of this book.

It’s been said that “luck” is when preparation and opportunity meet. Picture this: Sandra holding in her hands, in the late 1960s, the first consumer videocam, made by Sony. She’d known zilch about video or cameras or technology of any kind, but a little inner voice whispered, against all good sense: buy that camera! She did. And she learned, on her own, savant-like, how to use it. And she did what no one had done before: she trained her dancer’s body to be a human tripod of infinite flexibility, mobility and steadiness, getting shots no one else could. Fate put her in front of the Plaza Hotel one beautiful day, filming a fashion show, when she was spotted by a Sony executive in the crowd. This was the beginning of a twenty-year venture into a right-place, right-time business destined to become famous all over the world, and which bears her name to this day. Not bad for a lonely kid with a scanty education and a sense of displacement in a big world…

With her antennae ever tuned to the zeitgeist, to the next leading social-artistic-technological wave, Sandra’s autobiography is more than a mere e-book. It’s another Devlin show, a production, a visual and audible feast, lush with classy photos both historical and current, links to videos and exciting original music. You get the feeling you’re holding in your hands a living thing, the book of the future.

This story is personal, sexy, passionate, frank, risqué, a paean to New York, showbiz, art, powerful personalities, failure and success, but mostly, it’s a love letter to love, a reminder to us all to seize not just the day, but life itself.