And I am the queen of Roumania

The folks at Gawker are aping a Dorothy Parker poem today (how long before this becomes a regular segment? "Gawker Parker?"). Alas, copyright probably forbids me from reproducing my three favorites here, but I can tell you that:

* Though she'll forever be associated with Manhattan, Parker was a bridge-and-tunneler by birth. Her mom went into labor while on vacation in New Jersey.

* She was obsessed with death, but she had good reason: Both her mother and her stepmother died while she was a child, and her uncle was an ill-fated passenger on the Titanic.

* One of few people who stayed financially afloat during the Depression, she wrote the screenplay for A Star is Born with her then-husband Alan Campbell. Her marriage wasn't as healthy as her checkbook; she regularly described Campbell as being "queer as a billy goat."

* She bequeathed her entire estate to Martin Luther King, whom she had never met.