July 17, 2026

RIDDLE OF THE DAY

What has a head but never thinks?

The answer is revealed below

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THE LITTLE SPARROW WHO SURVIVED EVERYTHING BUT ONE PHONE CALL

Edith Piaf was abandoned at birth and raised by a woman who ran a brothel in Normandy. The prostitutes fed her, clothed her, and loved her when nobody else would.

At 7, she was singing on street corners for food and gave birth to a daughter. Two years later, her daughter died of meningitis.

But she kept singing…

By the 1940s, she was France's most celebrated voice. Paris called her La Môme Piaf, the Little Sparrow. She had survived poverty, abandonment, and grief that would have destroyed anyone else.

Then she met Marcel Cerdan, France's greatest boxer. They fell in love and married

In 1949, she was in New York and couldn't bear the distance. She picked up the phone and begged him to fly to her, and Cerdan was terrified of flying. But he loved Edith Piaf so much that he got on the plane.

It crashed into a mountain in the Azores, and all 48 people on board died.

That night, Piaf went on stage and collapsed mid-performance. She tried to contact him through seances for three years.

But what she did to herself after that call destroyed everything she had survived.

RIDDLE HINT: IT'S STRUCK FAR MORE OFTEN THAN IT'S USED.

THE WOMAN WHO REFUSED TO HIDE UNTIL SHE HAD NO CHOICE

Gladys Bentley was everything America said a woman shouldn't be. Black, openly gay, dressed in men's clothes, singing raunchy songs about loving women.

And she was the biggest star in Harlem.

She performed in a white tuxedo and top hat at Harry Hansberry's Clam House (the most notorious gay speakeasy in New York). She flirted with women in the audience and sang dirty lyrics about loving them.

In 1931, she publicly married a white woman in New Jersey.

Then the McCarthy Era arrived.

Police raided her clubs. Laws forced her to get special permits just to wear men's clothing. She was ordered to perform in dresses. The world she had built (the one she had fought for, the one that made her famous) collapsed around her.

In 1952, she published an essay in Ebony magazine titled "I Am A Woman Again." She claimed hormone treatments had cured her homosexuality and that she had found God. She also claimed she had married a man named Charles Roberts and finally become the woman society always wanted her to be.

But Charles Roberts, her so-called "husband," told a completely different story.