Category: people

“Ashbery’s early work was mostly known in avant-garde circles, but his arrival as a major figure in American literature was signaled in 1976, when he became the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year, for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The title poem of the volume is a 15-page meditation on the painting of the same name by Parmigianino, the Italian Renaissance artist.”

One day in the winter of 1910, Woolf, her brother, and a few others put on fake beards, makeup (blackface, unfortunately), and elaborate robes and turbans (which didn’t look particularly Ethiopian), taught themselves some pidgin Swahili (which they don’t speak in Ethiopia), and talked their way onto the Royal Navy’s newest, highest-tech warship, where they got the proverbial royal treatment.

A curious group of six people lives above the theater. They are not ordinary tenants, but something like the cast of an eccentric, bohemian sitcom family. They are actors, authors and playwrights whom Ms. O’Hara offered lodging to years ago, and they never left. Mostly in their 60s and 70s now, they include a German man who smokes on the theater’s steps, a woman who wrote a memoir 20 years ago that inspired a television movie, and a man who was homeless before Ms. O’Hara offered him a crawl space above the lighting booth.

“[He] splashed through crocodile-infested rivers, piloted hot-air balloons over stampeding wildebeests and lost a ‘Coke bottle’-size chunk of his calf to an angry hippopotamus, all while producing nearly two dozen acclaimed nature documentaries.”

“The descendant of a celebrated musical dynasty” – two of his grandparents were Leonid Kogan and Elizabeth Gilels, Emil’s sister – “he was known for curating and supporting innovative music projects in his native country and abroad.”

“Brash and witty, Mr. Kaminsky developed his reputation at Warner with best sellers like Never-Say-Diet (1980), by Richard Simmons; Megatrends (1982), by John Naisbitt; sequels to The Happy Hooker, by the former madam Xaviera Hollander; potboiler fiction by Andrew Greeley, a Roman Catholic priest; the paperback edition of Judith Krantz’s Scruples; and novels by Nelson DeMille. But his best-known deal was certainly the one that Warner made with a recently disgraced former president: Barely six weeks after [Richard] Nixon resigned in 1974, Mr. Kaminsky signed him to an estimated $2.5 million deal to write his memoirs.”

“Degas, as seen by the model Pauline, is no stoic devotee of the Muses but a curmudgeon subject to sudden bouts of theatrical self-pity, always on the verge of collapsing into melancholy ruminations over his failing sight, his oncoming death. The artist famous for his deft public quips becomes, in private, a mealymouthed, repetitious prattler, retailing twenty-year-old anecdotes for the two-hundredth time.”

“Pomerance wrote The Elephant Man for his theater company, Foco Novo, and it became one of the most successful plays to ever come out of London. Set in the Victorian era, it opened in April 1979 on Broadway at the Booth Theatre and went on to play 916 performances and capture the Tony Award for best play.”

“[Royals] are not people like us, but with better hats. They exist apart from utility, and by virtue of our unexamined and irrational needs. … She could not have imagined how insatiable the public would be, once demand for her had been ramped up by the media and her own tactics.”

“Over the … four decades of his career, Dara became one of the most famous Italian basses on the opera stage by portraying a small cluster of touchstone roles that highlighted his natural gifts for comedy, rapid-fire patter and innate bel canto technique.”