It tastes like one of those sad strange stories that one stumbles across occasionally on the web, and in real life too, by golly. Definitely the sort of thing that you’d research and write a long article about for some reputable magazine if you were so inclined, but since you’re a blogger with an attention span of approximately six seconds (and unless you’re Mike Golby and core dump tens of thousands of words a day) you don’t.
Kitten Natividad appeared in such fine films as Tittilation, Tittilation 3, Big Busty 3, Bodacious Ta-Tas, Famous Ta-Tas, Best of Big Busty, Thanks for the Mammaries, Ten Years of Big Busts 2, Big Boob Lottery, Wild Wild Chest 3, The Double-D Avenger, and Fresh Tits of Bel-Air. One gets a sense of where she (or more convincingly the eeek! evil! Hollywood Movie Machine) perceived her primary talents to lie.
I see a long wistful but critical look, the magazine equivalent of Boogie Nights meets Almost Famous (isn’t that how you’re supposed to pitch stuff : “It’s like X meets Y, with Tom Cruise as the lead! Come on, you gotta love that!”), at the titty-film industry of the Seventies. We’re not talking gun-to-Linda’s head hardcore Deep Throat nastiness, here, we’re talking the campy (but equally reprehensible (or is it? you leave that to the reader, kimosabee!)) oeuvre of Russ Meyer and his brethren. Interviews with the aging thick-eyeglassed silk-kimono-clad Hugh Hefner wannabe lotharios, and some of the now-grandmothers who shook their moneymakers in blockbusters like Thanks for The Mammaries. A portrait of Kitten growing up in the fifties. Pop-psych pointers to the so-obvious traumas that led her to a life in the softcore industry.
Then, the kicker. After decades of paying the bills with her breasts, she undergoes a double mastectomy for treatment of breast cancer in October 1999. The piece is about surviving breast cancer, you see, and now it becomes clear that we’re talking about more than just titty-films here. This is a piece about the equality of women, about empowerment, about not letting the bastards grind you down, about triumph in the face of adversity and sisterhood and all that good stuff! The crowd goes wild!
Finally, the oddball, unexpected clincher, of the sort that life provides to the observant, making truth once more (and by now it should be predictably) stranger than fiction : in 2001, two years after her double mastectomy, she reappears on the silver screen (or silver disc, probably) in The Double-D Avenger.
You close out the piece with a wry observation from Kitten herself on the curves that life throws you, and fade to textual black.
[lifted from d/blog]
I never saw the extent of the tragedy, or the comeback. Good work, stavros.
And here’s some Kitten autobio. (Doesn’t cover the high drama, however)