I should be asleep right now, but my annoying redneck neighbors are having a party. I guess all of my neighbors are sort of rednecks. The one to the left of us like to practice shooting his crossbow into the side of his barn, and the one behind us has a confederate battle flag flying in front of his house and a neon Lite Beer on the back deck.
But the ones to the right of us are the ones who like noisy parties, so they are the annoying redneck neighbors. Tonight's party doesn't feature the usual loud country rock. Which ought to be a blessing, but instead of "Sweet Home Alabama" tonight we are treated to some woman screaming her head off. The screaming has been going on for over half an hour. It sounds like drunken revelry screaming, not fighting or angry screaming, but it's still pretty annoying.
I got a nice email from someone who was researching the Duchess of Argyll and stumbled onto my site. (She's the Princess of Wands in VRT.) Anyway, this person said the figure in the Empress looks like she's in her underwear. She suggested the figure might have been a prostitute. I was a little dubious that the London Illustrated News would have run an image of a prostitute, but Georg said that he recalled the article making some allusions to ladies of dubious reputation or somesuch. So it's possible that the VRT Empress is a prostitute. Which puts an interesting spin on the card don't you think?
(On a vaguely related note, I recently learned that Jane Austen alludes to prostitution in Pride and Prejudice -- she comments that it would have been better for the neighbors if Lydia had "come upon the town" rather than marrying the evil Mr. Wickham. Apparently "come upon the town" was a euphamism for prostitution. So Austen was saying that the local gossips would have had more to talk about if Lydia had been abandoned by Mr. Wickham, cast out by her family and forced to become a London streetwalker to survive. Such a dark undertone in such a charming book!)
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