Not the reason for Mimi Rogers' stage name, and other Gay Divorcee coincidences

I might not have watched The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday night had I known it was a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical. Not that I have anything against those. Just that they tend to blend together in my mind, which isn't such a problem on random reflection, but becomes more so if I am dueling them on Flickchart. "Did such and such happen in Top Hat or was it Swing Time?" So goes this hypothetical conversation.

But I plucked the title off Kanopy because a) it's a title I'd heard, and the potential controversy of its subject matter in the early 1930s interested me, and b) while I've been rewatching old films for Audient Classics in 2023, I don't want to drop the impulse to watch old movies I've never seen.

At least The Gay Divorcee (1934) will distinguish itself from other Astaire-Rogers films by virtue of having a title that will easily remind me what it's about -- something that neither Top Hat nor Swing Time can claim.

I'm not going to go into details about the movie itself. It's interesting for being only the second pairing of the legendary hoofers, but otherwise, the movie itself is pretty much the formula we would come to know: a romantic story in which Astaire plays a likeable cad, fairly minimal in its plot structure, draped atop a number of thrilling dance sequences.

One word about the potential controversy, though. Through the lens of today, the word "gay" might be the controversial word in the title, though homosexuality was so little discussed that most people assumed the primary meaning "happy" when reading it at that time. No, it was actually "divorcee," though not, I would learn, because divorce in itself was necessarily a taboo subject. (I wrote a couple months ago how it was a primary plot element in George Cukor's The Women, released only five years later.) The book on which the film is based is called The Gay Divorce, but it was changed to Divorcee for the film because the studio thought that a divorce itself could not be gay -- though a divorcee could be. (Interestingly, this is not really an accurate descriptor of Rogers' character.) (Also, I can't imagine what kind of hay today's homosexual community has made repurposing this title.)

No, today I want to focus on coincidences, as I sometimes like to do on this blog.

The first I noted is that Rogers' character is named Mimi in The Gay Divorcee. Mimi? Rogers? Hey, there's a person named Mimi Rogers!

My first thought was that Tom Cruise's first wife -- born Miriam Ann Spickler -- had chosen her stage name based on a love of The Gay Divorcee and perhaps Ginger Rogers in particular. 

As it turns out, it's not actually a stage name. "Mimi" is short for Miriam and Spickler married a man named Jim Rogers in 1976. (So while it may have been Cruise's first marriage, it was her second.)

So after doing the research, is this really a "coincidence"?

Possibly not, though I do wonder if Mimi Rogers herself has ever made the connection.

The second one definitely is.

Earlier in the day I read a Quora article on Anna Kendrick's knees. That's right, you read that correctly.

I didn't know that's what I was reading when I started. The question was "Which actresses have unique legs?" (Hey, I don't decide what gets emailed to me from Quora, but I do read a number of them -- even the ones that make me sound like a might be a perv when I write about them later on my blog.)

Apparently, Kendrick has something called "knock knees," which I guess is a term I've heard (maybe mostly as a compound adjective, "knock-kneed"). I guess the knees turn inward so when you walk, you run the risk of the knees knocking into each other.

Lo and behold, later on the same day I watch The Gay Divorcee and there's a song in it called "Knock Knees."

Are all coincidences worth telling you about? Surely not, but I thought these were.