Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Ready for Your Dosing?

Elsa Maxwell doing what she did best, with William Rhinelander Stewart and Cole Porter (right)

Think it's time for a dose of levity and it seems to me that Elsa Maxwell (1883-1963), American gossip columnist, author, songwriter, and international high society party giver and hostess, can supply us a few reasonably solid one-liners.

Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.

I make enemies deliberately. They are the sauce piquante to my dish of life

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing.

Someone said that life is a party. You join in after it's started and leave before it's finished.

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Not exactly roaring thigh slappers, but Maxwell's quips make me smile gently and contentedly! It's the 'Oh yes!' factor.

Elsa Maxwell Learns to Bull-Fight

A fun light read when I was a kid was her autobiography, 'I Married the World', which gives a pithy and witty insider's view of the jet set before there were jets.