Monthly Archives: September 2019

I’ve been back to doing some research for an upcoming project and some new things have crossed my screen lately that I hadn’t seen before. As a little kid, I was always a super fan of watching the Tournament of Roses Parade on tv–all the floats decorated with hundreds of thousands of flowers made my imagination explode. So I can’t resist sharing this 1956 float with so very many layers of roses, the bottommost of which is Tennessee Williams’s character Alvaro Mangiacavallo (HorseEater???), an impulsive truck driver who courts the protagonist of the story after a chance meeting. (Although with a 21st-century eye, the plot line of the “romance” is really messed up.) The play debuted in 1951 with the film release shortly after in 1955. I presume this float was advertising for the film as the tattooed man looks a lot like Burt Lancaster.