Category: people

Eileen Myles: “In 1977, I probably would have been out getting trashed the night before and so the wake-up would be filled with so much dread. I wake up and I don’t feel in a state of existential dread. I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don’t dread the future. I like it. Because this is it. But I still hit the coffee hard.”

“A child prodigy as a dancer — she liked to joke that if one reversed the syllables in her surname, ‘Chou-teau’ became ‘Toe-shoe’ — Ms. Chouteau started dancing when she was 2 1/2 years old. She received early training in Oklahoma and then in New York City, where she attended the School of American Ballet. She was accepted into the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at 14.”

At Chez Panisse, no less. They talk about where in their lives their novels The Color Purple and Brooklyn came from and what it was like to see them made into movies.

He was in the first class of American art students to study glassblowing, and he went on to start programs at U.Cal. Berkeley and the California College of Arts. “In his own practice, he worked glass into small-scale biomorphic shapes with a dazzling array of surface textures produced by cutting, grinding, sandblasting, acid-washing or flocking.”

Well, except for the spouse part. “Trusted lieutenant, enforcer, co-writer, co-creator: however Marie-Hélène Estienne is described, she has been at Brook’s side for the last 40 years. For the past 20, he has barely made work without her. … Calling her unsung doesn’t quite do it: she might be the most famous theatremaker no one has ever heard of.”

“Police officers were surprised early Tuesday morning when they kicked in the door of an Amsterdam man they thought was in trouble and shouting, only to discover he was actually trying to sing along with an opera recording.”

“There’s still that double standard. I look at all the things I’ve done in movies: I’ve drugged a guy, tortured someone, become a roller-derby star overnight. But now I’m gay, I can’t play a straight person?”

“A sharecropper’s son who for decades spent his spare time soldering scrap metal, animal bones and other found objects into representations of black life in America, … Mr. Dial was untrained as an artist but by the end of his life saw his sculptures and paintings housed at … the most prestigious museums of the United States.”

In his 34 years in the position, he oversaw the creation of an exhaustive database of the opera house’s entire performance history, “replacing record books and rows of index cards in a windowless subbasement office of the opera house adjoining a storeroom that houses rare documents and costumes. Mr. Tuggle persuaded the Met to make this encyclopedic database available free of charge.”

“Denise Duval didn’t set out to be a muse. In 1947, … she was rehearsing Madama Butterfly at Paris’s Opéra Comique when a voice bellowed from the darkened auditorium, ‘That’s the soprano I need!’ It was Francis … For the next sixteen years – until the end of his life – Denise Duval was his colleague, his friend, his inspiration.”