‘It’s all about showing another side of me,’ said American singer Ciara about the music video for her 2009 song ‘Love Sex Magic’, in which she performs a sexy dance routine modeled on a Las Vegas burlesque show. And one especially attractive side of herself that she shows to her costar Justin Timberlake is…
Timberlake is systematically teased, and so are we, most appealingly when she lays herself face downward across his knee:
You might think that OTK is the most efficient of spanking positions, because there’s no escape. Think again! Ciara expertly slithers her way off his lap and out of danger before his hand falls even once:
No spanking, then. But mitigate your disappointment a little, because he does smack her bottom later on (just before the 2.30 mark). Here’s the video:
The song has been much performed and much covered, and it’s often used for dance routines. And in 2017, the Czech version of Stars in Their Eyes featured a performance by actress Tatiana Vilhelmova (who is, incidentally, white), including a reenactment of certain key moments of the video.
The whole performance is well worth watching even though it must be said that Tatiana seems even less in danger of a spanking than Ciara was in the original:
Never mind, give her some applause – along with Ciara too!
Resuming our trip through the Kiss Me Kate productions of 2010, we begin on May Day, when the musical opened at a high school in California, and played for a full week. Lilli’s inevitable fate was:
Afterwards, it seems she found it necessary to rub the affected area a little more directly than most Lillis do:
Of course, that picture was taken at the last performance, on May 7, so her daily spankings may have had a cumulative effect!
Still in California, and still on May 7, Christian Pursell and Brenna Sammon opened at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz, for a ten-day run:
Meanwhile, in Bracknell, England, the East Berkshire Operatic Society production ran May 11-15:
On to June, and in the production by Iowa’s Judge Story Theatrical Troupe Lilli was spanked on her bloomers:
And what’s more, she was spanked hard, as the video soundtrack makes clear! (Luckily for the actress, it’s really offstage sound effects…)
(In case you’re wondering, the production was assigned to the wrong year by the person who uploaded the video.)
It seems the summer brought a flurry of skirt-raising, because look what happened at Thief River Falls Area Community Theater, for eleven days from June 16:
And in Tulsa, at the Oklahoma Light Opera, Christina Hager found herself in an exposed position over Ron Loyd’s knee:
That takes us into July, a month which saw a major production by the National Theater of Korea, seen here in rehearsal:
Unusually, the star casting was deployed for the role of Lois/Bianca rather than the two leading characters, and much of the media interest followed. And it’s true that the pop star Ivy is not devoid of charms:
But there was also some effort to push another aspect of the show for publicity purposes.
Here’s a promo video showing Nam Kyung-joo (Fred) and Choi Jung-won (Lilli), which reveals that, unusually for a photocall, they did more than just pose for the spanking shot:
She needed to get used to it: the production opened on July 9 and ran for five weeks, closing on August 14.
July also saw a youth production at North Fork Community Theatre, New York.
And on the other side of the USA, Kiss Me Kate opened at the Inland Valley Repertory Theatre, Claremont, California, on July 28, and ran till August 11. For Dirk Rogers and Ali England, that meant quite a lot of this:
No sooner had the musical closed in California than it opened again in Michigan, where the troupe Teenage Musicals produced it in the town of Midland, August 12-14, starring two young but not teenage performers as Fred and Lilli.
And down under in Queensland, Australia, the Bundaberg Players production ran from August 27 to September 11:
Next stop Spain, where the Filagarsa Theater Group premiered a touring production on September 18, starring Montse Lopez and Roma Ferruz:
This was an especially long-running show, continuing till the following spring, so let’s hope Roma’s pink bloomers were built to last!
The production at Güssing, Austria, was more of a mayfly.
Ramona Tomisser got her first public spanking from Florian Resetarits on September 24, and three days later it was all over. One thing the video helps to make clear is that it was a bloomers spanking:
The production also featured a specially shot photo of the spanking scene, differently posed and with Lilli’s skirt down:
Whereas in Canada, Lethbridge Musical Theatre chose something a lot less novel to advertise their November production:
Back to Australia now for a production by the Port Macquarie Players that ran November 5-28. They shot their own spanking publicity photos, and in the first, blurry one Amanda Warren looks uncertain whether will enjoy what she’s about to get from Cameron Marshall.
And now she knows she won’t:
Next up is an amateur production from Germany which featured a nice bloomers spanking:
But the Fred probably had an even better time in rehearsal!
The Lilli has taken the precaution of wearing thick black pantyhose, but even so…
More publicity now from the Conejo Players of Thousand Oaks, California, whose production ran from November 11 to December 12. And for the photocall, Rachael Pugh’s place was across Darrin Ingram’s lap:
December brought us this unidentified production:
And there’s one last bloomers spanking to be glimpsed, in a production that opened in Bottighofen, Switzerland, on December 20, and starred Robbie Vondeling as Fred and Christine Böhni as an uncommonly aggressive Lilli who, we are told, thoroughly deserved all she got.
And with that, we draw the final curtain on the year 2010, and look forward to many more years of Kiss Me Kate spankings yet to come.
Andrzej Brzezinski of AB Studios comes from Gdynia in Poland, and has been taking photos for more than a decade. He specializes in glamor, lingerie and nude shots, and has achieved some measure of distinction in the field, as you can see:
Here’s a model he often works with, Miss Agavi:
She’s also a model who is often spanked: this won’t be our last encounter with her. Here she is getting it in a Bettie Page themed shot for Andrzej:
If you are interested in Andrzej Brzezinski’s work, please visit his online portfolio.
The 2017 Bard in the Botanics festival production of The Taming of the Shrew, which closed last week in Glasgow, added a question mark to the title and a lot of extra scenes to the script, in a bid to detoxify the play’s emphasis on wife-taming and male supremacy. According to the Glasgow Herald, it also added ‘plenty of gallus Scots phrases and camp physical humour too, to keep it light and bright with plenty of spanking’.
I don’t know how much actual spanking took place, but here’s James Boal’s Petruchio smacking Stephanie McGregor’s Kate:
But spanking must always have been in the front of the audience’s mind, thanks to designer Gillian Argo’s pop art set, which emphasized the sexual politics of the production’s 1950s setting:
Let’s take a closer look:
The panel on the left, of course, reproduces the famous (or, depending on your point of view, notorious) 1952 advertisement for Chase and Sanborn coffee:
We’ve seen before that this is a much imitated image, often in connection with productions of Shrew set in the middle of the last century.
But the 2017 Gillian Argo version isn’t a mere photographic reproduction of the original: it is a painting, a close imitation but different in its fine detail. Many of those differences will be just a matter of economy, or the change of medium. But one of them is intriguing, and subtly changes how the image works.
1952
2017
(Please make allowances for the fact that a stage set painting isn’t meant to be seen this close up.)
The difference I’m referring to is in the wife’s eyes. In the painting, you can see more of the whites, giving her a wider-eyed and more panicked look. And that’s because she’s looking backward and upward towards her husband. It’s presented to us as an everyday scene of domestic behavior that we happen to be witnessing, and that seems understandably distressing for one participant.
In the advertisement, in contrast, she looks out of the picture, directly at us. With his back to the camera and his face seen only in partial rear profile, the husband barely registers as a character; even in this extreme situation, his wife is ignoring him! The relationship that matters is with the reader, the young housewife who is presumably considering the question of whether or not to buy some Chase and Sanborn coffee. The caption threatens her: ‘Woe be unto you!’ And the spanked wife reinforces it by engaging her in eye-contact. ‘I was foolish, and look what’s happening to me,’ she seems to be saying. ‘It could happen to you too! SO BUY THE COFFEE!’
This is the start of a large project intended to continue, on a roughly monthly basis, for most of the likely remaining lifespan of this site: a year by year account of the spanking stage history of Kiss Me Kate that will build, like a partwork, into a comprehensive survey of theater’s most prominent and most often performed spanking scene, from the original production in 1948 right up to the present. For variety’s sake it will dot around the decades, sometimes finding rich pickings and sometimes lean, and we begin at the richer end of the spectrum in the year 2010.
January takes us to Massachusetts, where we find Lilli showing off her laundry:
Now Fred gives her some assistance, apparently unwanted:
But strangely, he’s less ‘helpful’ when it comes to the spanking:
Ah well, high schools will be high schools, I guess!
On February 12, Kiss Me Kate opened at the Rodgers Memorial Theatre in Centerville, Utah, in a production that ran until March 13 and was double cast. First up were Jonathan Rash and Jessica Lesser, whose feisty stubbornness impressed the reviewers:
Their alternates were Todd Wente and Michelle Blake:
February also saw a production in New Hampshire, for which, sadly, we have no photograph of the spanking scene, though we can see that it resulted in a very tender bottom:
But the treat of the month was at the Little Theatre of Gastonia in North Carolina:
March saw high school productions busting out all over, leaving many a teen actress with the kind of difficulties that afflicted this young lady from Florida:
And this one in Spotswood, New Jersey:
Here’s some action in Charlotte, North Carolina:
And here’s another splendid high school offering, with an energetic Lilli and an obviously appreciative audience:
From a Connecticut high school, where the production played March 11-13, we only have the aftermath:
In Massachusetts, Lilli got the paddling of her life, and onstage – but upstage. In the performances on March 12-13, Fred took her to the back of the set, went down on one knee with his back to the audience and turned Lilli over the other, Lois Lane style:
(And no, I don’t mean the Lois Lane who plays Bianca!)
The following week, in the east of England, the Bourn Players opened their production on March 18 for a three-day run.
And in Ohio, Lilli, in yellow bloomers, was getting the same treatment in a production that ran March 19-21:
And if you’re disappointed that the bloomers don’t feature more prominently (for once again, high schools are high schools), come with me to Glasgow, where Theatre South Productions staged Kiss Me Kate at the Eastwood Theatre for four days, March 23-27. Here’s the dress rehearsal:
And now some shots from the performance itself:
Still in the month of March, we have a few remaining calls to pay. In Michigan:
In Columbus, Ohio:
And, right at the end of the month, to Glendale, California, where Dink O’Neal is dishing it out to Donna Cherry in a production that closed on April 3:
Also cusping March and April was this production, details of which are too sketchy to be useful:
Meanwhile, in Russia, Evgeny Skirikov had a spanking to give Anna Chernyavskaya:
The production’s alternate casting was Alexander Osinin and Anastasia Yakovenko:
For this Illinois Lilli, April was the cruellest month:
It wasn’t all that good in Scotland, either, where the Duns and District Amateur Operatic Society production ran four days, April 13-16:
And April 16 saw the first performance at Bergen Community College, New Jersey, when Lilli faced a series of spankings that lasted until April 25.
We’ve only covered the first four months of the year, but, surprising as it may seem, we’ve already reached the intermission. Come back next week for the rest of the year!
‘Every photo assignment is a quest,’ says Joshuva, a photographer based in Washington, DC. ‘Pick a mission you care about, pack the right gear, assemble a killer team, and bring the “A” game. Plan well. Experiment. Debrief. Never repeat.’
For an outdoor mission undertaken on October 12, 2008, Joshuva’s killer team consisted of the models Beatrix King
and Juicy Carolina:
As you can see, Juicy’s a photographer herself (you’ll find some of her work here). To be precise, she’s a self-styled ‘modelographer’, with a strong line in self-portraits, and a definite appreciation of the sensual appeal of the female bottom:
On the day of the shoot, Juicy was in trouble:
And when Beatrix caught up with her…
If you are interested in Joshuva’s work, there’s more of it to be seen here.
In 1963, the great Hollywood director Frank Capra stepped down from an assignment to make a John Wayne movie, Circus World, after a serious disagreement about the script. Wayne had demanded that his personal screenwriter, James Edward Grant (1905-66), should be brought in to do a rewrite. Grant told Capra that nothing very sophisticated was required:
‘All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smash in the face every five minutes. In between, you fill in with gags, flags and chases. That’s all you need.’
The studio backed Wayne and Grant, so Capra left the production.
The movie’s story concerns circus star Matt Masters (Wayne), who’s trying to find the long-lost love of his life, Lili, and hopes that the presence of her daughter in his circus tour of Europe will bring her out of hiding. Grant’s remark to Capra raises the intriguing possibility that there may have been an interim version of the script featuring a spanking for the ‘hoity-toity’ Lili, played by Rita Hayworth.
But this is something we’re unlikely ever to know for sure, and it’s not my main point. We’ll get closer to that point if I observe that some of the broad patterns of the story aren’t entirely unreminiscent of those in McLintock!, which only happened to be the project that both James Edward Grant and John Wayne worked on immediately before Circus World.
And the one before that was…
Donovan’s Reef!
And that means Grant may have had some justification for the simplistic formula for success that he presented so vulgarly to Frank Capra. Though perhaps it would be pushing things too far to draw any definite connection between the facts that the final version of Circus World (a) doesn’t have a spanking scene, and (b) was a major box office flop.
Now, Grant wrote a lot of Wayne movies before Donovan’s Reef, none of them with spanking scenes. In fact, there aren’t any other Wayne movies with spanking scenes, scripted by James Edward Grant or anyone else (unless you count 1969’s True Grit, in which, ironically, Wayne’s character intervenes to put a stop to the spanking of the annoying teenage heroine). So you might think it surprising that, for many years, John Wayne had the reputation of being a prolific movie spanker. When he died in 1979, the French journal Paris-Match illustrated his obituary with a full-page spanking photo from McLintock! Such scenes were exactly what people expected to find in his 162 movies, even though there was nothing of the sort to be found in any but two of them.
No doubt the reason for this was, in part, that Donovan’s Reef and McLintock!, released respectively in June and December 1963, were the end of an era: the last of the prominent mainstream movie spankings, before public taste turned and cinema spanking moved underground into kink and exploitation. So these two spanking scenes had an afterlife, as the movies were periodically rerun on screens both big and small, but they had no major successors: they were therefore the scenes many people were likely to think of first when they looked back on the age just passed. The fact that they were both Wayne movies set up the memory to play tricks – abetted by Frank Capra’s recollection of Grant’s crass remark, which he recounted in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title. The standard content of a Wayne movie was now reputed to be fighting and spanking.
The most concrete illustration of that legend in practise comes in the 1980 series of the long-running British sketch show, The Two Ronnies. The series was built around comedians Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, the latter of whom also wrote, under a pseudonym, many of the sketches; his contributions included a regular spoof adventure serial, which for 1980 was entitled The Worm That Turned.
Although well remembered, this is not one of the best of the Ronnies’ serials. It’s set in a dystopian future where traditional gender roles are reversed, and the theme is handled with a mean-spiritedness that some, like me, will find off-putting. Others may enjoy the simple pleasure of the leggy totalitarian police force in their PVC hotpants.
They weren’t always shown as entirely efficient…
And getting closer to the point, few people reading this are likely to object to one particular scene in the second episode, first broadcast on November 8, 1980…
In the course of the story, the Ronnies become radicalized counter-revolutionaries trying to escape across the border to the masculine paradise of Wales, but it all starts in a very small way: they run a chauvinist film club where downtrodden men gather for secret showings of the manly movies of yesteryear. At the screening featured in the story, the offering is a John Wayne film.
Ronnie Barker’s script says nothing at all about what’s shown in the John Wayne film and how the audience reacts, no doubt because he knew that could only be decided once they’d sourced the appropriate footage. Much black-and-white material showing cowboys, horses, gunplay and the big country duly appears in the extracts shown. But it proved harder to facilitate another bright idea. Since it’s a Wayne movie, thought somebody, wouldn’t it be fun to show the men cheering with delight as the Duke gives some ornery femme a spanking? It surely would. Could they find a clearable Wayne movie where he does that? They surely couldn’t!
But bright ideas, once thought of, are hard to let go. If they couldn’t find a suitable spanking scene, they’d just have to make their own, when The Worm That Turned was filmed on location in Gloucestershire during the summer of 1980. And so it was that one of the dreaded secret police, the hatless blonde third from the left here…
… volunteered to change out of her tiny shorts, into vaguely ‘Western’ attire, and be put across a big man’s knee. It did get her a close-up:
And the price of that close-up was paid by her other end, now encased in tight denim: eight onscreen slaps in the footage used in the final edit, which happens to be more than are seen to land in either McLintock! or Donovan’s Reef. Plus, of course, the usual rehearsals, offcuts and possible retakes!
She’s squirming a lot, isn’t she? There’s a reason for that…
The soundtrack includes twelve clear smacks (covering both the main shot and the close-up) but no dialog at all: nothing like ‘How dare you?’ or ‘Stop!’ or even ‘Ouch!’ All the girl’s reactions are conveyed by the squirm, the way she moves her body as she is spanked. There’s a reason for that…
And the reason is that, if she had to say any lines, she’d also have to be paid more! And with no dialog, the BBC was able to save money another way, too, by shooting the sequence without sound. The slapping noises were dubbed on afterwards by a foley artist, which is why they go slightly out of synch at one point. Not that this in any way undermines the enjoyable evidence of our eyes: this is a pretty girl being spanked!
And so: notch another one up to John Wayne – posthumously!
