Affectations Can be Dangerous (WARNING! not Panda related!)

"Affectations can be dangerous." -- Gertrude Stein

A coworker poked his head in my office and asked "Do you know who Isadora Duncan is?" in response to the long pink scarf that I wrapped around myself in today (in preperation for the pending cherry blossom blizzard). Of course, me the cultural cretin, I had not. Thus Wikipedia to the rescue!!

First, I came across the name "Isadora Duncan" on Wiki's List of Unusual Deaths:

"1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer (born in San Francisco and considered the Mother of Modern Dance), died of accidental strangulation and broken neck when her scarf caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger. Her last words before the car drove off were -- Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire. (Farewell, my friends! I go to glory!)"

WOAH! That piqued my interest but the List was lacking in a lot of important details, so I clicked the full Wikipedia entry for "Isadora Duncan":

"Duncan often wore scarves which trailed behind her, and this caused her death in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was killed at the age of 49 when her scarf caught in the open-spoked wheel of her friend Ivan Falchetto's Amilcar automobile, in which she was a passenger. As the driver sped off, the long cloth wrapped around the vehicle's axle. Duncan was yanked violently from the car and dragged for several yards before the driver realized what had happened. She died almost instantly from a broken neck. The tragedy gave rise to Gertrude Stein's mordant remark that "affectations can be dangerous."

Success, which came easily to Duncan early in life, escaped her in later years:

"By the end of her life, Duncan's performing career had dwindled, and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life, and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts. She spent her final years moving between Paris and the Mediterranean, running up debts at hotels or spending short periods in apartments rented on her behalf by an ever-decreasing number of friends and supporters, many of whom attempted to assist her in writing an autobiography, in the hope that it would be sufficiently successful to support her.

"The memoir, given the title Ma Vie, that was meant to have been her financial savior, was published posthumously. Its fervor, if not its prose or its accuracy, won the book critical success; Dorothy Parker, reviewing the book (published in English as My Life), called it "an enormously interesting and a profoundly moving book. Here was a great woman: a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman...She ran ahead, where there were no paths."

The List
Among the dead on this fascinating list are: 3 conductors who died during a performance, 2 on-air personalities who committed suicide (you guessed it) ON-AIR, and a smattering of inexplicably gross and ridiculous ways to die that make you glad the Darwin Award exists. My favorite: 207 BC: Chrysippus, Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after seeing a donkey eating figs.