If Taki were a singer, he would be George Melly. Alas, if Taki were George Melly, he would be dead. George Melly was a “fat and fairly famous” (his second wife’s words) British entertainer. He died in London on July 5, a month before his 81st birthday. The Melly resume defied a one-line apophthegm—blues singer, jazz singer, journalist, screenwriter, historian of surrealist painting, all were equally accurate descriptions and all were incomplete—but if a single word could suffice to sum him up, that word would be the cobweb-laden “vaudevillian.” Seeing him in concert, a phrase he detested (“a transvestite flogging herself …
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