British freelance violinist Bethan Doci (aka Bethan Morgan) conned several men out of more than £350,000 total by posting online classified ads claiming she needed money for cancer treatment. (Would patients even need to do that in the land of the NHS?)
Author: Matthew Westphal
What Was Your Worst Onstage Mishap? 60 Broadway Actors Confess
Cherry Jones went onstage with a banana peel stuck to her dress. A sick Jefferson Mays threw up onstage and the director asked him to keep it in. John Leguizamo had to improvise after a propmaster forgot a key prop, only to have Ben Brantley scolded him in print for not knowing his lines.
I Had Repeated Psychotic Breaks Onstage At The Royal Shakespeare Co.
Mark Lockyer writes about the horrific experience of developing bipolar disorder (and self-medicating with alcohol) while playing Mercutio in a run of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford in 1995.
Harper Lee’s Lawyer Has Plan To Turn Her Hometown Into ‘Mockingbirdland’
Tonja Carter – who found Lee’s earliest draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and turned it into a bestselling but controversial “sequel,” sued the local museum for selling things like a Mockingbird cookbook and got its director fired, and muscled the local community out of the annual Mockingbird play – is creating a “Harper Lee Trail” to attract tourists to Monroeville, Alabama. (No word if she’s planning to charge admission.)
Oops! One Of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dogs Got Smashed To Pieces At Art Basel Miami
“‘It just fell out of the display,’ said Ally Shapiro, one of the few collectors who witnessed the incident and snapped the above iPhone photo. ‘The girl standing next to it had it cleaned up in five seconds.'”
Arena Stage Launches Program To Develop 25 New Shows About Politics And Power (Oddly, That’s A Rarity In D.C.)
“Although the notion may sound like a no-brainer – presenting plays in Washington about the effect of decisions reached in the White House or on Capitol Hill – in actuality, there has long been a reluctance on the parts of many theaters here to concentrate too much on political topics.” Now the District’s leading resident theater is aiming to change that.
He Couldn’t Believe He Ate The Whooooole Thing: Comedian Milt Moss Dead At 93
The man in that immortal Alka-Seltzer commercial was, in fact, a stand-up comic and MC who specialized in one-liners and Candid Camera-style fool-the-audience gags.
Ousmane Sow, 81, ‘The Rodin Of Africa’
He worked for decades as a physical therapist, giving him such a thorough knowledge of anatomy that he famously worked without models. He once said, “I could be blindfolded and still make a human body from head to toe.”
How Parchment Supplanted Papyrus (It Was An Ugly Business)
“[It] papyrus was rough, brittle, and prone to fraying. Its rise at papyrus’s expense, however, had little to do with the ergonomics of its use or the economics of its manufacture and everything to do with ambitious pharaohs who ignored the cardinal rule of military leadership: never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.01.16
Other Matters: Journalism, Jefferson And Rivera
Charges about biased reporting are as old as journalism itself. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-12-01