Coop

On the beach ~ 1920

Baby Doe in her winter finery

Women's Sufferage


Women granted the right to vote ~ 1920

Nana
~ Lovis Corinth, 1911


Woman Writing by the Window
~ Lovis Corinth, 1908

Vintage Chicago, the vacation city


Autumn in the Dunes, Vintage Chicago

She Done Him Wrong
Mae West and Cary Grant

Although not made until 1933, was based on a play West wrote much earlier. She started out in the burlesque houses of New York after the turn of the century. West was born in 1893, same year Silver Dollar was born. They were both writers. West wrote three plays and had them produced, went to jail on obscenity charges and donates 1000 bucks to start a library at the jail when she left.

"Desire Me"
The daring, sensitive story of an unusual triangle.
~ Leonhard Frank

"Never close your lips to those whom you have opened your heart."
~ Charles Dickens

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it rekindles the great."
-- Comte DeBussy-Rabutin

"Anatomy is destiny."
"Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy."
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. "
"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."
~ Sigmund Freud

Do you dream? Tell me your dreams.

... and everybody smoked

Chicago, 1920

There is every indication that Silver was continually provided drugs by her doctor. It was her doctor who told police investigating her death that she was weak enough to die from scalding. By the way, her third scalding in six months.

Silver's Dreams

What did Silver dream about?
It's clear that animals were important to her. She took every chance she could get to ride the white horse in the livery in Leadville. Did she dream of riding away forever? In Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899), he suggests that dreams can be unresolved issues from childhood, or the mind mulling over a day's events, or any number of interpretations. Did Silver's dreams scare her or soothe her? What did she see when she closed her eyes? In her dreams did she become the successful writer, the well loved matriarch with several children and a farm full of animals to care for? Or did her dreams scare her? Did she self-medicate because her dreams, like her reality, were too harsh, too difficult to handle?