Category: people

“I’m not the girl who gets to make out with Ryan Gosling in a scene. I’m the housekeeper who comes in on Ryan Gosling and then I do a spit take and then trip over his underwear and knock my head as I walk out on all fours. That’s my part. So I think there’s longevity … I really think, if you are funny, I don’t think age has anything to do with it, honestly.” (audio)

“I think he also realizes he can’t beat female intuition; he can’t. So to embroil himself where he might be enslaved through adoration or sexual desire or any kind of power or chemistry to do with love is too big a risk for him. That doesn’t make him gay, and it doesn’t make him asexual. It means he’s purposely abstaining for the sake of his craft. Not something I do.”

“Captivated by the complex, challenging new sounds and increasingly aware that the music market was evolving, Mr. DeFranco moved quickly to carve out a fresh career in bebop, a perilous undertaking on an instrument that requires nearly superhuman skill and dexterity to keep up with bebop’s sometimes freakishly fast tempos.”

“From the early 1970s on she became identified with Wagnerian soprano parts like Isolde, Brünnhilde and Kundry in ‘Parsifal,’ as well as the title role in Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ and Strauss roles like Elektra and the Dyer’s Wife in ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ (‘The Woman Without a Shadow’).”

“The secretary said that his quest would have been easier had the Smithsonian finished digitizing its vast collection, but added, ‘I wish I started it earlier because it’s made me appreciate these collections in a way I didn’t when I took on the job’ six years ago.”

“Buddy DeFranco almost single-handedly was the clarinetist who moved the harmonic and rhythmic language forward from where Benny Goodman left off into the much more adventurous territory of bebop and beyond, while never forgetting his roots in swing music. He was also unfailingly kind and supportive to every other clarinetist who came after him,” said leading jazz clarinetist Ken Peplowski.

“Semkow’s idiosyncratic and somewhat imperial personality didn’t always mesh well with American orchestras; this was a man sometimes seen strutting around backstage at Orchestra Hall wearing a cape. Semkow favored broad tempos, fleshy textures and flowing phrases that sighed with lyricism. He knew what he wanted, and it was usually a kind of clarified spiritualism, beauty and understanding.”

“There have been countless Armstrong biographies based on exhaustive research. More than 40 years after his death, you might think there would be nothing left to learn about the man. And yet there is.”

He and colleague David Croft co-created the series ‘Allo ‘Allo! and Are You Being Served?.

In 19th-century Europe, the heyday of Romanticism, consumption was the glamorous, poetic way for the beautiful and gifted to die, and Chopin fit the bill perfectly. But there have been questions ever since the composer’s death about whether TB really was what killed him. The exhumation and (visual-only) examination of his heart this fall didn’t necessarily settle the question – and actually testing the heart would be even more contentious than you’d think.