Category: people

“Quite often, I’ll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I’ll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.”

“Part of my personality is sexuality, at 81, yes it is. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m not proud of it, it’s just who I am.”

The 88-year-old Broadway legend is doing one last show at the Carlyle Hotel, where she has been a longtime resident, and moving home to Michigan. “I’m just sick of the competition in New York, the feeling that I always have to rehearse to keep up my performance. I don’t feel like rehearsing, even though it should be my favorite thing in the world to do.”

“Clubs from Santa Cruz, CA to Evanston, IL have pulled Shocked from their schedules.”

“You didn’t make that much money on Laugh-In. What were you going to do the other half of the year? By the time I got well-known, I had an act, I would go up at the Improv or wherever I could get a spot. I could create specials for myself. I was lucky I recognized what it was that was possible: With not a lot of forethought I found a way to work all the time.”

“In 1919, he and his immediate family fled revolutionary Russia on the last ship out of Sevastopol, a vessel aptly named Nadezhda(‘Hope’). In 1937 he escaped Hitler’s Germany by fleeing to France, and in 1940, just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis, he boarded a French ocean liner’s last voyage to New York with his Jewish wife and son.”

“There was no doubt that Bill de Kooning loved Lisa very much. But there was also no doubt he was never cut out to be a father in a stable domestic environment.”

“Ito’s architecture creates fluidity between nature and humanity. When people enter his completely solar-powered stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for example, he wants them to be able to feel the wind and feel the air. Too often, he believes, urban environments feel intended to keep us apart. He wants to redesign them to bring us together.”

“Peter Heuken sees a hillside and thinks of a slide. He spots a stand of trees and envisions a climbing forest. A bridge, to him, looks like a perfect place to hang a swing.” But, says the architect, it’s not all child’s play: “Creativity is hard work.”

“The 45-acre Peacock Farm, built from 1952 to 1958, shared the subdivision tradition of taking its name from the previous identity of the site; peacocks really had been raised there. But it was far from traditional. Floor plans were open, wide expanses of glass substituted for walls, roofs were asymmetrical and only slightly sloped, and basements were raised higher than in most houses, allowing in more light and elevating their role.”