Happy Feast of St. Pauline

January 26 celebrates the operatic soprano, biographer and Cyprian Saint Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who passed beyond the Diamond Gate on this day in 1860. It is called the Feast of St. Pauline because of the title of her erotic memoirs, Pauline the Prima Donna, a sacred text of Cyprianism.

John Collier’s Venusberg

She was a favorite of Richard Wagner who cast Her in several roles, including having Her be the first to play Venus in his Tannhäuser. Cyprian tradition speaks of an erotic photograph of Her which might have been the inspiration for John Collier’s Venusberg. The original Daguerreotype was much more explicit than Collier’s masterpiece. Incidentally, Collier claimed that the necklace on the Venus in his painting was a “lily among flowers”, which Cyprians know to be a reference to the Seal of Paphia.

Celebrate today by lying naked and listening to opera, specifically Tannhäuser, reading from St. Pauline’s memoirs, or better yet – having sex with your Italian voice instructor.

About FV Everleigh

FV Everleigh is a queer preacher’s kid in Los Angeles. After years as an award winning Christian rock star, FV toured the globe producing acclaimed burlesque shows for world famous stripper Michelle L’amour. They eventually moved into John Wayne’s favorite New Orleans brothel and adopted the last name of the Everleigh Sisters who ran an opulent Chicago bordello in 1900. In addition to training at UCLA, Roadmap Writers and the Writing Pad Television Certificate Program, his scripts have placed in the ScreenCraft, Roadmap and Inroads Fellowship competitions. Twenty years surrounded by sex-positive women, outré artists and circus misfits has informed FV’s sexually subversive, morally murky, visually yummy stories where the marginalized always win...eventually.

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