Programming note: Tomorrow, Sunday, I'll be hosting another audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week on Serenade Radio in the UK at 5.30pm British Summer Time (that's 12.30pm North American Eastern/9.30am Pacific). You can listen from anywhere on the planet by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner here.
~Meanwhile, welcome to Part Twenty-Two of our weekly serialization of a favorite book among Steyn readers, Mark Steyn's Passing Parade. In today's episode, we memorialize the Swedes' swingingest swinger, and his legendary South Carolina counterpart. First up is film director Vilgot Sjöman, who, with a bit of help from various US government agencies, wound up with the highest-grossing foreign picture for a quarter-century:
I Am Curious (Yellow) was an adult film. I don't mean in the debased contemporary sense of industrially depilated porn starlets with unfeasible implants engaging in joyless mechanical thrashing. I mean in the sense that, aside from the sex scenes, it included an interview with the Swedish minister of trade. If that's not "adult", what is? It was certainly more adult than many of us new members of the Film Society were in the mood for. There were interviews with Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Martin Luther King, and Miss Nyman also questioned passing Swedes in the street about the Vietnam War and demilitarizing the Swedish armed forces. But in between these longeurs the leading lady was certainly a game gal, and in a remarkable range of locations, including in a pond, up a tree and outside the Royal Palace in Stockholm.
After Mr Sjöman, we turn to Strom Thurmond, centenarian senator and squire of several generations of Miss South Carolina. I can't claim ever to have personally had an erotic encounter with Vilgot Sjöman and Lena Nyman, but I did with Strom and fellow senator Barbara Boxer.
To listen to the twenty-second episode of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, please click here and log-in. If you're late getting started on this weekly series, you'll find the story so far here.
From the leafy English Home Counties, John Lewis, a First Month Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes of last week's episode on Boris Yeltsin and Idi Amin:
Another entertaining listen.
Those with a taste for the bizarre should watch the you tube video 'Idi Amin plays Accordion' (I kid you not).
I also recall hearing him play the banjo (again I kid you not) on an ancient BBC World Service programme but alas cannot find a recording.
Thank you, John. We'll put him down as accordionist on "The Intro and the Outro".
If your tastes in entertainment favor more conventional narratives than I Am Curious (Yellow), do check out our convenient tile-format Tales for Our Time home page, with Conan Doyle, Kafka, P G Wodehouse and many more. Our audio adventures began as an experimental feature we introduced as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, and, as you know, I said if it was a total stinkeroo, we'd eighty-six the thing and speak no more of it. But I'm thrilled to say it's proved very popular, and is now in its fifth season. If you're a Club member and you incline more to the stinkeroo side of things, give it your best in the comments section below. But, either way, do join me next weekend for Part Twenty-Three of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade.