Lust

 Raquel Welch. That name alone brings to mind things like fur bikinis and white wet suits. I understand that this is not very woke of me, but when I became aware of Ms. Welch, she woke something in me. As I watched One Million Years B.C., I probably should have been paying attention to the dinosaurs who had no business interacting with all of those humans walking erect with tools and such. Instead, I was made fitfully aware of my own animal nature, at the age of six or seven. Then there was the showing not long after that of Fantastic Voyage, where I was being asked to consider the possibility of humans being reduced to microscopic size to be turned loose in their fancy innerspace submarine to float around inside some very important individual whom they trusted to be cured by this experiment. I wasn't thinking about anything but the rubber suit Ms. Welch was wearing as she ventured outside the ship only to be attacked by white blood cells. 

Impure thoughts. That's what they were. 

But the one that sticks with me all these years later was a film she did shortly after those, but I did not see until I was in college: Bedazzled. She played one of the seven deadly sins. I'll give you a hint: It wasn't sloth. It was this role that cemented, in my mind, all the terrible, awful, glorious imaginings I might have about the objectification of women. This one particular woman. 

Sure, you could have your Ginger Grant or your Jennifer Marlowe, but when you wanted bombshell in the sixties and seventies, you went with Raquel Welch. Which of course isn't very woke at all, but we were all pretty sure that all those demonstrations of powerful womanhood were part of this newfangled Women's Lib movement. By the time the eighties rolled around, her career had slowed down to a more leisurely pace. She showed up in an episode of Mork and Mindy in 1978, and then she was pretty much gone.

But not forgotten. 

Which is why I can quietly mourn her passing this past week at the age of eighty-two. She lit a fire in me way back when, and while I don't think I would describe her performances as those of a master thespian, she was memorable. For all the reasons I have embarrassingly enumerated above. She did stomp on the Terra, for millions of years. She will be missed.