Sex and arthritis

This incredible display is from a site (which I can't find now, sorry) called Sex and Arthritis. The drawings are so beautful on their own, I hesitate to sully them with my usual blatherings. I have no idea how these seven line-drawings of sexual postures, like some pen-and-ink Kama Sutra of the internet, are supposed to help people with arthritis. I don't even HAVE arthritis, or not much, maybe a couple of flareups a year, and I'll tell you, I could not manage many of these positions. Figures 3, 4 and 7 involve pillows, which is a nice idea when you're past a certain age, though I might do something else with them entirely. Figure 6, probably my favorite, depicts the male partner crushing  his girl friend into a footstool: she appears to have been pressed flat to about 3" thick. (Or maybe it's a stair-step, which is even kinkier.) In Figure 7, however, it's not the poor steamrollered woman but the man who is prone (prostrate, NOT prostate) with his concerned partner leaning tenderly over him, perhaps as they wait for the ambulance to arrive.

They're here: Oscar Levant coloring pages!

These are all out of my own pencil. Close enough anyway. They beg to be colored, filled in like stained glass or those Tiffany shades I love so much. Why can't adults color? Especially when the subject is someone so strange and rare, a creature from an ancient and unlikely fable.

You can go wild here, as the stark outlines beg to be splashed with peacock hues. What color is Oscar Levant? Go listen to his music, hear his suffering, and find a shade to match.

Simple black-and-white line drawings boil a person's soul down to its essence. What was Oscar Levant but a scowl and a cigarette? The wringing hands tell the whole story. Color him the deepest indigo.

A publicity shot, almost smiling, but not quite. His smile was more of a grimace. At the end, his pain was a public demonstration. But of what?

Oscar with a mermaid tail, surfing innocence and ignorance with equal genius.

Should we leave this one alone? Oscar as a study in black and white, curled around the piano like a puppy around its mother, pointy fingers like claws, his face a Buster Keaton mask of tragedy.

These begin to look like James Thurber drawings, minimalist, or old computer printouts from the 1980s. Oscar Levant is not just pixellated, he has been rendered machinelike, broken down into wires and components and transistors. How did it happen? Like a Borg, he is only semi-human.

But he's in there somewhere, just waiting for his big comeback. Connect the dots.