Category: people

She could mimic Jeanette Macdonald at age 3, was groomed for child stardom at MGM alongside Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, turned down the role in National Velvet that went to Elizabeth Taylor, played the prima donna in the first talkie version of Phantom, and did musicals and operetta with her husband, baritone Wilbur Evans.

“Moments of historical symbolism do not rate higher than Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington today. Yet on Sunday, with Obama listening, Washington witnessed another small sign of the mood of change and hope that will swathe the US Capitol today. More than 50 years ago, the leftwing folk-singer Pete Seeger was – a bit like many African-Americans – a second-class citizen in his own land.”

“Shigeo Fukuda, an influential Japanese graphic designer who was known for acerbic antiwar and environmental advocacy posters that distilled complex concepts into compelling images of logo-simplicity, died in Tokyo on Jan. 11.”

The literary love-story, which continued despite long periods of absence and his two marriages, began when Rackstraw attended a writers’ workshop at Iowa University led by Vonnegut in 1965, four years before Slaughterhouse-Five was published.

“Andrew Wyeth disappeared behind his reputation many years ago, and since then it has been all but impossible to sweep away the haze of words that hides his paintings from view.”

Charles Dickens was hounded by gossip that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, who lived with him and his wife. He called the rumors “abominably false,” of course. “But next month a diamond ring goes up for auction that, together with documentation about its provenance, could prove he had a child with Georgina.”

Edmund White: “His first night in Banville’s maid’s room, he stood in the illuminated window stark naked and threw down his lice-laden clothes into the street. Within a week Banville had asked the miscreant to leave, but only after Rimbaud had smashed the china in his room, soiled the bed sheets with his muddy boots and sold some of the furniture.”

“Throughout five decades, the writer and editor, to a breathtaking degree, enacted his daydreams and fantasies and fashioned them into a glittering persona. He was ‘George Plimpton’ – editor, host, naturalist, toastmaster, celebrity escort, fireworks specialist, athlete, gossip and playboy… [Yet] underneath Plimpton’s deeply amiable exterior was a person who sometimes came across as a Man Without Qualities.”

“Dudarova became a conductor at the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 1947 and in 1960 was named chief conductor and artistic director. She left the orchestra in 1989. From 1991 until the end of her life she headed the Symphony Orchestra of Russia, which she had founded.”

In reports of Andrew Wyeth’s death, there’s plenty of critical derision of his work. But Jim Duff, director of the Brandywine River Museum in Wyeth’s hometown, Chadds Ford, Pa., speaks from a heartfelt personal perspective on the man and his art.