 Something about Paris just makes you want to dance. 
This issue of Cancans de Paris, which is number 10, hit newsstands this month in 1966 featuring cover star Virginia Litz, someone we saw a while back in Folies de Paris et de Hollywood, but modeling under the pseudonym Arabelle. Turns out Litz may be a pseudonym too, as we've determined she's also known—and better known—as Christine Aarons. She pops up inside Cancans along with Gloria Paul, Dany Carrel, Sylvia Sorrente, and Uta Levka, as well as Sean Connery and Claudine Auger, who were starring together in Thunderball. We have Virginia Litz/Christine Aarons on at least one other mid-century magazine, which we'll post a bit later. In the meantime below are assorted scans from today's issue.                          
 Hand over your cash, your keys, that sack, and your Santa suit. 
Just for the fun of it we have another French magazine for you. This issue of La Vie Parisienne was published this month in 1967, which makes it a later vintage than other issues we’ve shared. Gone are the drawings of Roger Brand and Jacques Leclerc—in their place are more photographs, typically of nude women. It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated often. As the seventies neared many magazines eschewed art both on the cover and inside for photography, which was presumably easier and cheaper to produce. Such makeovers rarely helped with sinking sales, and La Vie Parisienne wasn’t one of the exceptions—it died in 1970. But of course, the seventies were the ruin of many traditional approaches to publishing. La Vie Parisienne had charted a course from its founding in 1863 through two world wars and countless shifts in consumer taste, and by any measure had to be considered a roaring success. The striking cover star of this is unidentified, in case you’re wondering, but the rest of the women are showgirls from Parisian cabarets, with the exception of actress Uta Levka. You also get classic art from Ingres, and cartoons from J.P. Monein. Fifteen scans below.                  
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1912—The Titanic Sinks
Two and a half hours after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage, the British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks, dragging 1,517 people to their deaths. The number of dead amount to more than fifty percent of the passengers, due mainly to the fact the liner was not equipped with enough lifeboats. 1947—Robinson Breaks Color Line
African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson officially breaks Major League Baseball's color line when he debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Several dark skinned men had played professional baseball around the beginning of the twentieth century, but Robinson was the first to overcome the official segregation policy called—ironically, in retrospect—the "gentleman's agreement". 1935—Dust Storm Strikes U.S.
Exacerbated by a long drought combined with poor soil conservation techniques that caused excessive soil erosion on farmlands, a huge dust storm known as Black Sunday rages across Texas, Oklahoma, and several other states, literally turning day to night and redistributing an estimated 300,000 tons of topsoil. 1953—MK-ULTRA Mind Control Program Launched
In the U.S., CIA director Allen Dulles launches a program codenamed MK-ULTRA, which involves the surreptitious use of drugs such as LSD to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. The specific goals of the program are multifold, but focus on drugging world leaders in order to discredit them, developing a truth serum, and making people highly susceptible to suggestion. All of this is top secret, and files relating to MK-ULTRA's existence are destroyed in 1973, but the truth about the program still emerges in the mid-seventies after a congressional investigation.
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