Plath’s whole family figured she’d return to the U.S. after her marriage to Ted Hughes fell apart. She didn’t. Her reasons were several: not disrupting her children’s lives, getting child support out of Hughes, the work she was getting in London. Above them all: the experiences (and expense) she had had with the American medical system versus Britain’s National Health Service.
Category: people
Barbara Cook, Broadway And Cabaret Legend, Dead At 89
The classic Broadway ingenue of the 1950s and ’60s, she made her name as the original Marian the Librarian in The Music Man and Cunégonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. After a difficult period of alcoholism and weight gain, she reinvented herself as a cabaret star – one of whom no less than Stephen Sondheim said, “No one sings theater songs with more feeling for the music or more understanding of the lyrics than Barbara.”
First Actor To Play Godzilla, Haruo Nakajima, Dead At 88
“Nakajima played [the mutant dinosaur] in the 1954 original and 11 subsequent films, donning the suit that he said weighed about 220 pounds and wreaking havoc on model cities and rival monsters. But he began his career in samurai films, including a small role in Akira Kurosawa’s legendary 1954 film Seven Samurai.”
Country Music Superstar Glen Campbell, 81
“The sweet-voiced, guitar-picking son of a sharecropper … became a recording, television and movie star in the 1960s and ’70s, waged a publicized battle with alcohol and drugs and gave his last performances while in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Nothing New: Celebrity Culture Has Always Been With Us
“Antoine Lilti’s The Invention of Celebrity is a book that does just that. A chronicle of the origins and development of our modern société du spectacle, it provides a genealogy of the media-driven world of celebrities and personalities who now dominate our headlines and crowd (out) our public debates. Far from being the product solely of 20th-century developments or the perversion of a less starstruck age, argues Lilti, the culture of celebrity has in fact been with us since the 18th century. ‘Celebrity’, Lilti writes, is ‘a characteristic trait of modern societies’. It was present at their birth.”
Peter Martins’s And Darci Kistler’s Daughter Arrested For Felony Burglary
Talicia Martins, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Bard College, and a friend allegedly broke into three storefront businesses in Camden, Maine and stole more than $1,000. Both have been charged with burglary and felony theft.
Opera Director Lee Blakeley Dies Suddenly At 45
He first got himself noticed with a provocative staging of Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in London’s leading gay nightclub. He worked extensively at Covent Garden, San Francisco and Los Angeles Operas, Opera Theater of St. Louis, and especially Santa Fe Opera; his highest-profile project in Europe was directing a series of American musicals (in English) at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Veteran Arts Admin Bob Booker Has Some Words Of Advice As He Retires
“In regards to arts advocacy in general, we need to take a new approach that places the arts as a vital, engaging activity of tremendous value to Americans. Too often we approach advocacy and communication with our heads bowed and our hands out: “Please sir, can you save the arts? Can you save my organization that has been in the red for years and would you maybe consider following your state’s policy that requires arts programming in schools?” We are too timid, too afraid of offending and are perceived as impotent, ineffectual and incompetent.”
Meet Today’s Version Of The Yuppies
“On its face, this approach to conscientious living may look like a rejection of the uninhibited greed associated with the ’80s. But the new aspirational class shares more with its predecessors than it wants to admit. As populist surges in the United States and Europe make clear, rising economic inequality has made it more critical than ever to rethink and uproot the status quo. Yet, as Cowen and Currid-Halkett both find, for all the new elite’s well-intentioned consumption and subsequent self-assurance, they have no intention whatsoever of letting go of their status.”
A Violinist Has Become The Face Of Resistance In Venezuela. But He’s Gone Silent
“As the political crisis worsens day by day in Venezuela, the forces of resistance have found an unlikely symbol in a slight-framed 23-year-old violinist named Wuilly Arteaga. Dressed in the colors of his country, he plays his violin at the front lines of pro-democracy protests, often floating, with a pure tone and a classical vibrato, the notes of the Venezuelan national anthem while armored vehicles fill the streets and fires rage nearby. Yet as his public stature grew this summer, so did the danger facing him.”