TIDDLYWINKYDINKS: MARIE OF ROMANIA

Russell:

“Tell me what you are.”
Sookie:

“I’m a waitress.”
Russell:

“Yes, and I am Marie of Romania.”

'TRUE BLOOD'

I haven't done an official "Tiddlywinkydink" in a while....

Marie of Romania

Marie of Romania (Marie Alexandra Victoria, previously Princess Marie of Edinburgh; 29 October 1875–18 July 1938) was a British Princess by birth and Romanian Queen by marriage.

In 1918, writing for The Century, William T. Ellis profiled this "Soldier Queen", as her nation prepared for war east and west.

In all the terrible days of last winter, when plague and death ravaged the remnant of Rumania, she visited the hospitals, going among the smitten ones, indifferent to infection. Always she rides about without an armed escort. Her laughing disdain of the anti­aircraft shrapnel which rained about us from the skies on the motor ride is of a piece with her complete disregard of all considerations of her personal safety.

Two days after my visit with the queen at the Regina Maria Hospital I went to the front-line trenches, though with endless difficulty, because the commanders did not want an American killed while their guest. It chanced that I saw the very trenches where a few days earlier her Majesty had approached to within fifteen yards of the Prussians, so that her companions conversed with them, without betraying, of course, the presence of visitors.

For a journalist the venture was right and proper, for it is in his day's work; but for the queen it was too grave a risk. The road by which she approached was under fire and torn by big shells. I found that she had gone not only into the first-line trench, but also out into the observation-posts. How constant is the peril was illustrated by the fact that when the Germans heard an officer and me talking, they exploded a hand-grenade to try to catch us. Yet on speaking to me of her visit to the front, the queen had mentioned only its interest, never its danger.

She was also referred to in a number of contemporaneous literary sources, including Dorothy Parker's poem "Comment":

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong,

And I am Marie of Roumania.

Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi, must have known Marie during her lifetime. (Being over 3,000 years old, he probably knew the televersions of a lot of famous people.) Perhaps it was her transformation of Castle Bran, an ancestral home of Vlad Tepes, that drew his attention to her.....

BCnU!