Last week I posted about the incredibly strange early silent sex symbol Theda Bara. Since her films are more or less all lost, and her vampiric personality exceptionally strange from the photographs we have of her, it might be something of a surprise to hear that she was, in fact, a cultivated lady with a mid-Atlantic accent and a pleasant sense of comic timing. Here she is on a Texico Star Theater radio show from 1939 featuring Ken Murray. The excerpt cuts off in mid-routine, unfortunately, but its enough to give you the idea of how strange it must have been for listeners to hear Theda–aka Theodosia Goodman–who had long been thought to be an exotic, dangerous arabic sexual siren as she really was, a forgotten but legendary silent star with a good sense of humor about herself, She’s twenty years past her prime yet still out there, gamely trying to cook up a little interest in whatever she had left to give.