Although this copy was found in a portfolio filled with some de-magazined pages in a shop in Streetcar Village, I do also have a second one in an original, intact copy of the April 1920 volume of the Ladies’ Home Journal. That date was 40+ years before LHJ adopted the motto, “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” There are several ads in LHJ and other places featuring the same model.

Yesterday, I just happened to look over my right shoulder and wondered what her name was; by coincidence, later that evening I watched Good Omens 3, in which a prominent theme is “find the lady.” One of those thematic elements is three-card monte, in which the lady is cleverly hidden but Fate-wise findable. In these lyrics, the lady is hidden in time, and when she is found, she is the one who wins the game.

While I thought that finding her name might be slim odds (i.e., more like the monte), I approached the game with my typical possibilistic demeanor… and found out that she (or her hair at the very least) is Margaret Moore, wife of the artist Will Grefé and mother of both Mary Elizabeth Fox (whom I think is still alive, and who wrote this biography of her father) and the director William Grefé III.

The impulse to refer to Will Grefé II as “good Will” was both Shakespearean and Hunting-esque. And when the outro made itself evident as, “Fair Margaret Moore, the Wife of good Will,” I was sorely tempted to set this to the kind of music that would have been around in Shakespeare’s time, like a pavane, but I shook it off (like a shampooed dog) and decided that I could always write a separate song of that sort using that portion of the lyrics.

Because I was working with ad copy that couldn’t be changed (without losing the original context), and because I also wanted the descriptions of the visual image to be accurate (i.e., not influenced by the vocab having to rhyme), I gave myself a break on the rhyming.

I wanted the music to reflect the original period, namely pre-jazz (late 1910s), so I went for a smoky Parisian cabaret, plus a hint of a tango kinda vibe (which became popular internationally around then, and whose lyrics are often longingly nostalgic)… along with some of the sorts of novelty sounds that were characteristic of some vaudeville and ragtime songs of that era. And to add an air of mystery (albeit not contemporary), I added a subtle dash of Mancini. I think that worked out very well.

[2026-05]