Goodbye to Holly Woodlawn, the star of Andy Warhol's "Trash," "Heat," and "Women in Revolt"...

... the Holly in Lou Reed's "Holly came from Miami, FLA/Hitchhiked her way across the USA/Plucked her eyebrows on the way/Shaved her legs and then he was a she...."

The early New York years were rough. “At the age of 16, when most kids were cramming for trigonometry exams, I was turning tricks, living off the streets and wondering when my next meal was coming,” Ms. Woodlawn recalled in her 1991 memoir, “A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story,” written with Jeff Copeland....

“They wanted me for one or two scenes [in 'Trash'] at first,” she said in her 1970 interview in The Village Voice. “Paul Morrissey said, ‘Do this, do that, fabulous,’ and so they kept adding to my part. I worked six days at $25 a day. Except for the last scene, everything was done in one take. The clothes, the dialogue, like, everything was mine because the character I play is me. I’ve been in those situations.”...

“I felt like Elizabeth Taylor,” Ms. Woodlawn told The Guardian in 2007, recalling her heyday. “Little did I realize that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties; it was fabulous.”

Here's a taste of that last scene in "Trash" (NSFW):



Here's that Lou Reed song.

Here's the theatrical trailer for the movie "Women in Revolt" (NSFW):



"I don't suppose you've heard about Women's Liberation?"/"Women's Liberation has shown me just who I am and just what I can be." (You can find that whole movie on YouTube, but it's challenging just to get through the trailer, even though it will probably make you laugh a few times.)

I saw all those movies — "Trash," "Heat," and "Women in Revolt" — back when they came out in the 1970s. They were considered important at the time in a way that's hard to understand now.

Recycling in Madison.

Regular readers know of my tribulations trying to throw out the trash properly in Madison. A reader sends this link to an article about the new recycling program in Seattle, because it's got this about Madison:

In Madison, Wis., a liberal college town that embraced recycling enthusiastically when it began in 1991, a fine has never been imposed.

"Seventy percent of the population is going to walk across a bed of hot coals to recycle a bottle. They just do that. They believe in it," said George Dreckmann, Madison's recycling coordinator. More than 90 percent follow the law, and Dreckmann said it doesn't make sense economically or practically to go after the few violators.

Useful information!

You know, we're required to use special clear plastic bags that are emblazoned with the words "Madison Pride." It's not bad enough that you have to put your bottles on display to your neighbors. Good thing we drank a lot of milk this week so there are plenty of bulky milk containers to cover up all the wine and beer bottles that conveniently sink to the bottom -- otherwise the locals might think ill of us -- but then they'd probably think ill of us if we had a lot of diet soda cans -- or even soda cans, period. But we've got to buy special bags that compel us to manifest a prideful attitude about the low-level virtue of recycling. Arrgh.... Time to uncork a bottle of wine and drink a toast to the cloying self-love that swirls through my lovely little city.

But regular readers want to know: How did the test chair work? Well, the chair was gone, but I've got to allow for the possibility that some ordinary citizen came by and decided to pick up the chairs, a la Holly Woodlawn in "Trash." (Note: any esoteric allusion to beer bottles is quite unintended.)