Category: people

“[T]he legendary adult movie queen who was the wholesome model on Ivory Snow detergent boxes in the early 1970s when she made her adult movie debut in the X-rated classic Behind the Green Door” was found dead in her Southern California home.

“[He] brought his chiseled physique to stardom in many gay sex films (and some straight ones), then met and later married the singer Margaret Whiting, leading to a career as a writer and cabaret and theater producer.”

“Handel seems to have been among the very first modern musicians not to rely on patronage of court or cathedral for his main income. Instead, he was an entrepreneurial promoter, risking his own money on operas and oratorios. … Eventually, oratorios made him a rich man. But he also did quite a lot of investing, and some records survive of his investments in the newly emerging financial markets.”

“Just as he mastered pirouettes years ago as a young dancer, Mikhail Baryshnikov is getting the hang of asking friends and strangers to donate to his nonprofit Manhattan arts center. ‘I was better at raising money for someone else than I was for myself, but I’m getting better’ at buttonholing for the Baryshnikov Arts Center, said the 61-year-old dancer and artistic director….”

“Gogol once wrote that he could never decide whether his soul was Russian or Ukrainian. In an era when Ukrainian aspirations for nationhood were dormant, he did not see the two as contradictory; for him, Ukraine and Russia were inseparable parts of a greater whole. Unsurprisingly, many Russian politicians and pundits have seized on this theme, making the bicentennial [of Gogol’s birth] an occasion to affirm Russian-Ukrainian unity — and snipe at Ukrainians who are less than fond of the idea.”

“On one side, there is the 162-year-old Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, based in Stratford, Shakespeare’s hometown. Manning the opposite parapet is the 153-year-old National Portrait Gallery, based in London, site of Shakespeare’s greatest artistic triumphs and where, in 1603, James I granted royal patronage to the Bard’s acting troupe, the King’s Men.”

In the thriving community of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes scholars, the suicide of their 47-year-old son has been deeply felt through the prism of his parents’ writings. His birth was vividly chronicled in Ms. Plath’s journals. He was “the baby in the barn” in “Nick and the Candlestick,” from Ms. Plath’s best-known collection, “Ariel,” written in her final months.

In 1994, pianist Nic Van Bloss was playing in the international Chopin Competition when he began exhibiting the tics of his Tourette’s Syndrome mid-performance and had to leave the stage. On April 28 he performs in public for the first time since, with a concert at the Cadogan Hall in London. “It will be wonderful to say ‘yes, I can do this, finally’.”

The US Marines have presented Trey Parker and Matt Stone with an autographed photo of none other than Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the late dictator was repeatedly shown the animated film South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, which depicts Saddam as the (abusive) boyfriend of Satan.

“Dorothy Cullman, who, with her husband, Lewis B. Cullman, donated about $250 million to a host of arts, science and educational institutions in New York, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan.”