“Juntwait was only the third regular announcer of the Met’s broadcast series, which launched in 1931, and the first woman to hold the job.” Before joining the Met, she was for several years a host of classical broadcasts on New York publc radio station WNYC.
Category: people
Nico Castel, 83, ‘The Henry Higgins Of The Metropolitan Opera’
“A highly regarded operatic tenor, Mr. Castel was himself a mainstay of the Met’s stable, appearing in nearly 800 performances with the company from the 1970s onward. A well-traveled polyglot, he also had a parallel career as the company’s staff diction coach, a post he held for some three decades before his retirement in 2009.”
SF Chronicle Art Critic Kenneth Baker Retires (Perhaps A Few Years Too Late, He Writes)
Being a newspaper critic has changed. “When Chronicle managers began telling us critics and columnists that we had to cultivate “our brand”—our own, not just the company’s—I knew my days in the industry were numbered. The reactionary libertarianism ascendant in recent years has been driven in part by the newly minted mythology of nearby Silicon Valley, of which San Francisco has lately become a bedroom community.
Fully Dressed And Preserved 350-Year-Old Corpse Of French Noblewoman Found
“The remains are most likely those of Louise de Quengo, a widow of Breton nobility who died in 1656 when she was in her 60s. The heart of her husband, Toussaint de Perrein, was found nearby”
Jean Ritchie, Appalachian Folk Song Legend, Dead At 92
“With her clear, uninflected soprano voice, Ms. Ritchie helped spark renewed interest in traditional folk music. She became a fixture at Greenwich Village coffeehouses and often appeared on the New York radio broadcasts of folk singer Oscar Brand and occasionally on television. She played a key role in introducing younger musicians to the mountain dulcimer, an elongated stringed instrument that she strummed on her lap while singing.”
Michael King, 67, King Of The TV Syndicators
With his brother, he “transformed King World Productions, a modest company they inherited from their father, into a syndicator of television megahits like The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.”
When Tennessee Williams Took Up Painting
“On the patio of his cottage in Key West, with his most celebrated writing years behind him, playwright Tennessee Williams took refuge in painting … express[ing] his loneliness, sexuality, and loathing for Truman Capote in this personal pastime.”
An Artist, Retire? No Way
“Most of the famous painters she knew and admired as a young woman — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and others — are long gone. ‘I’m still here,’ she said wryly.”
How Do You Juggle Broadway, Hollywood, And Chemo?
“She’s so alive onstage and so thrilling to watch. That’s a direct result of her having to live in the moment in her life right now. She doesn’t say, ‘I’ll do it later.’ I’ve never once felt like she wasn’t giving 100% of herself.”
A Haitian Novelist Who Came Of Age In Canada Is The First Non-French Citizen Inducted Into Academie Française
Dany Laferrière “wore the signature costume of academicians: a black tailcoat embroidered with green olive branches that in his case a Montreal embroiderer spent 500 hours sewing, and a metal sword specially made by a Haitian sculptor with references to Legba, the Voodoo deity of crossroads.”