WA2K Radio is now on the air

What? You didn't hear me? A CERTAIN SOMEONE BOTH IN FLORIDA AND PENNSYLVANIA ARE VERY SPECIAL TO ME AND THEY KNOW IT. There! Howzat?

Bellowing Bob

eh? Did I hear someone say something. ?

Well, hawkman, I see that you haven't lost your sense of the ridiculous

Ok, Boston, this is for you.

Living Out Loud

I'm tired of living in this bubble
So today I'm changing everything
Well, my dream's been buried in the rubble
It's time to set it free
No more keeping quiet this life inside of me

I'm gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound when each moment counts
Starting right now, I'm gonna start living out loud

Oh, yeah

Well, I'm not breaking any new ground
And I didn't reinvent the wheel
I'm just a man who finally figured out
What he really needs
So I'm turning up the volume of this song inside of me

Gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound when each moment counts
Right here, right now
I'm gonna start living out loud

All my demons, I have fought 'em
Inhibitions, I have lost 'em
It wasn't easy, but I taught 'em
To just get out of my way
And now, every breath I'm breathing,
The air is so much sweeter
Now that my heart has finally found a way

To start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound, when each moment counts
Right here, right now
I'm gonna start living out loud
My soul's been dying
To scream and shout
And shatter the silence
It's a beautiful sound, when each moment counts
Right here and now
I'm gonna start living out loud
Living out loud
Living out loud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pwsugji7Vo

good evening , listeners !
here is the SAILOR'S ALPHABET
they should have taught it in grade one - seems much easier this way .
hbg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1oOnpIUnkM

John Ireland in one of his better roles.

Good evening, hbg. What a cute kid, and the alphabet sailor song was delightful.

Speaking of kids, I think one of my favorite books was Arabian Nights. Anyone remember this young man? Bet our Raggedy does.



I remember this song as well.

I want to be a sailor
Sailing to the sea,
No plough-boy, tinker, tailor's
Any fun to be.
Aunts and cousins,
By the bakers dozens,
Drives a man to sea
Or highway robbery.
I want to be a bandit
Can't you understand it?
Sailing to the sea, A pirate free,
What joy for me.

and here is the song to go with the ARABIAN NIGHTS :

THE SHEIK OF ARABY

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gbbacDkpQ4c

I enjoyed that, Letty! Thanks!

and now let's have an ARABIAN NIGHT !

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XtEASyUDk0E

Wow! What fabulous contributions, folks.

edgar, I did not see The Fast and the Furious, but I do hope it had a happy ending, Texas. I'll check back later to watch the rest of the show, and thanks.

Sharon, Alice Walker was a talented writer. I am glad that you enjoyed that contribution.

hbg, I had to smile at that version of The Sheik of Araby. (without pants on. ) That is nothing to what we see and hear today, right?

The Sarah Brightman song was truly captivating. I keep forgetting if she played Christine in the movie, Phantom of the Opera, or the stage production. Whichever, she has a great voice.

Well, listeners, we have it all here on WA2K radio.

She is AWESOME! She was introduced on CBS2NY, yesterday, as "The Real Soprano" and Real, she is! What a performer, she is! Voice as clear as a bell! Wonderful! :wink:

Well, folks. It may seem early to some of you, but it is bedtime for me, I'm afraid.

Here is my goodnight song. So lovely. I would like to have done it by a young man named Sean Harkness, but the room was so noisy that it actually angered me. He was fabulous on his acoustic guitar. Instead, you can listen to a great piano version. This is for you, Bill.

When Sunny Gets Blue

When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gray and cloudy,
Then the rain begins to fall, pitter-patter, pitter-patter,
Love is gone, what can matter,
No sweet lover man comes to call.

When Sunny gets blue, she breaths a sigh of sadness,
Like the wind that stirs the trees,
Wind that sets the leaves to swaying
Like some violin is playing strange and haunting melodies.

Bridge:

People used to love to hear her laugh, see her smile,
That's how she got her name.
Since that sad affair, she lost her smile, changed her style,
Somehow she's not the same.

But memories will fade, and pretty dreams will rise up
Where her other dreams fell through,
Hurry new love, hurry here, to kiss away each lonely tear,
And hold her near when Sunny gets blue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjtVDM-14GA&feature=related

Goodnight, all.
From Letty with love

Sure looks like Sabu to me but my eyes aren't as good as they useta be.

Good morning, WA2K radio audience.

You're correct, Bob. It is Sabu. The Jungle Books were enchanting to me as a child, and speaking of "..chanting...", how about an early morning meditation by Ravi Shankar. We'll dedicate this to my friend G.J.Patel, Prince Gautam, JLNobody and all the other Zen folks out there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih17Yb_9gmk

Eddie Cantor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Israel Iskowitz
Born January 31, 1892
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died October 10, 1964 (age 72)
Beverly Hills, California, U.S.A.
Spouse(s) Ida Cantor
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Academy Honorary Award
1957 Lifetime Archievement

For distinguished service to the film industry.

Screen Actors Guild Awards
Life Achievement Award
1962 Lifetime Archievement

Eddie Cantor (January 31, 1892 - October 10, 1964) was an American comedian, singer, actor, songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio and early television audiences, this "Apostle of Pep" was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing antics about his wife Ida and five children. His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, Banjo Eyes, and in 1933, the artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round and white eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor's eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).




Early life

Cantor was born Israel Iskowitz[1] in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Meta and Mechel Iskowitz. His mother died of lung cancer two years after his birth, and he was abandoned by his father, left to be raised by his grandmother, Esther Kantrowitz. A misunderstanding when signing her grandson for school gave him her last name of Kantrowitz (later Americanized to "Cantor") instead of Iskowitz. As a child, he attended Surprise Lake Camp.

By his early teens. Cantor began winning talent contests at local theaters and started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Carey Walsh's Coney Island saloon where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano. He adopted the first name Eddie when he met his future wife, Ida Tobias, in 1903, because she liked the idea of having a boyfriend named Eddie. The two married in 1914 and remained together until Ida died in 1962.

In 1907, Cantor became a billed name in vaudeville. In 1912 he was the only performer over the age of 20 to appear in Gus Edwards' Kid Kabaret, where he created his first blackface character, Jefferson. Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway's top producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, Midnight Frolic (1916).


Broadway and recordings

A year later, Cantor made his Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. He continued in the Ziegfeld Follies until 1927, a period considered the best years of the long-running revue. For several years Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer African-American comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Cantor played Williams's fresh-talking son. Other co-stars with Cantor during his time in the Follies included Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller, and W.C. Fields. He moved on to stardom in book musicals, starting with Kid Boots (1923), Whoopee! (1928) and Banjo Eyes (1940).

Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathé and Emerson. From 1921 through 1925 he had an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, returning to Victor for the remainder of the decade.

Cantor was one of the era's most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multi-millionaire status and left him deeply in debt. However, Cantor's relentless attention to his own earnings in order to avoid the poverty he knew growing up caused him to search quickly for more work, quickly building a new bank account with his highly popular, bestselling book of humor and cartoons about his experience, Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street in "1929 A.C. (After Crash)".


Films

Cantor also bounced back in movies and on radio. Cantor had previously appeared in a number of short films (recording him performing his Follies songs and comedy routines) and two features (Special Delivery and Kid Boots) in the 1920s, and was offered the lead in The Jazz Singer when that was turned down by George Jessel (Cantor also turned it down, so it went to Al Jolson), but he became a leading Hollywood star in 1930 with the film version of Whoopee! in two-strip Technicolor. Over the next two decades, he continued making films until 1948, including Roman Scandals (1933), Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937) and If You Knew Susie (1948).


Radio

Cantor's initial radio appearance was with Rudy Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour on February 5, 1931, and it led to a four-week tryout with NBC's The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Replacing Maurice Chevalier, who was returning to Paris, Cantor joined The Chase and Sanborn Hour on September 13, 1931. This hour-long Sunday evening variety series teamed Cantor with announcer Jimmy Wallington and violinist Dave Rubinoff. The show established Cantor as a leading comedian, and his scriptwriter, David Freedman, as "the Captain of Comedy." Soon, Cantor became the world's highest-paid radio star. His shows began with a crowd chanting, "We want Can-tor, We want Can-tor," a phrase said to have originated when a vaudeville audience chanted to chase off an opening act on the bill before Cantor. Cantor's theme song was the 1903 pop tune "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," dedicated to his wife.

Indicative of his effect on the mass audience, he agreed in November 1934 to introduce a new song by the songwriters J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie that other well-known artists had rejected as being "silly" and "childish." The song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", immediately had orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music the next day. It sold 400,000 copies by Christmas of that year.

His NBC radio show, Time to Smile, was broadcast from 1940 to 1946. In addition to film and radio, Cantor recorded for Hit of the Week Records, then again for Columbia, for Banner and Decca and various small labels.

He was a founder of the March of Dimes, and did much to publicize the battle against polio. Cantor also served as first president of the Screen Actors Guild. His heavy political involvement began early in his career, including his quick rush to strike with Actors Equity in 1919, against the advice of father figure and producer, Florenz Ziegfeld.

Cantor's career declined somewhat in the late 1930s due to his public denunciations of Adolf Hitler and Fascism. Wishing to distance themselves from any political controversy, many sponsors dropped Cantor's shows. However, it soon bounced back with the United States' entry into World War II.


Television

In the 1950s, he was one of the alternating hosts of the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which he would introduce variety acts and play comic characters like "Maxie the Taxi." However, the show landed Cantor in an unlikely controversy when a young Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared as a guest performer. Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis's brow with his handkerchief after his performance. Worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show; other sources claim that NBC threatened to cancel the show when Davis was booked for two weeks straight. Cantor's response to the controversy was to book Davis for the rest of the season.


Books and merchandising

In addition to Caught Short!, Cantor wrote or co-wrote at least seven other books, including booklets released by the then-fledgling firm of Simon & Schuster, with Cantor's name on the cover. Some were "as told to" or written with David Freedman). Customers paid a dollar and received the booklet with a penny embedded in the hardcover. They sold well, and H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) asserted that these books did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined.

Cantor's popularity led to merchandising of such products as Eddie Cantor's Tell It to the Judge game from Parker Brothers. In 1933, a set of 12 Eddie Cantor caricatures by Frederick J. Garner were published by Brown & Bigelow. These advertising cards were purchased in bulk as a direct-mail item by such businesses as auto body shops, funeral directors, dental laboratories and vegetable wholesale dealers. With the full set, companies could mail a single Cantor card each month for a year to their selected special customers as an ongoing promotion.


Tributes

Cantor was profiled on the popular program This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting person (usually a celebrity) would be surprised on live television with a half-hour tribute. Cantor was the only subject who was told of the surprise in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

In 1953 Warner Brothers, in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of The Jolson Story, filmed a big-budget Technicolor feature film, The Eddie Cantor Story. The film found an audience, but might have done better with someone else in the leading role. Actor Keefe Brasselle played Cantor as a caricature, with high-pressure dialogue and bulging eyes wide open at all times; the fact that Brasselle was considerably taller than Cantor didn't lend realism, either. Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film Eddie tells Ida, "I never looked better in my life" ... and gives the audience a knowing, incredulous look!

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced 1944 feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks that was RKO's top-grossing film that year. Probably the best summary of Cantor's career is in one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows. The Colgate hour was a virtual video autobiography, with Cantor recounting his career, singing his familiar hits, and re-creating his singing-waiter days with his old pal Jimmy Durante (Jimmy's wearing a lavish toupee!). This show has been issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person.


Family

Eddie and Ida Cantor had five children: Marilyn, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna and Janet. Cantor's daughter, Janet Gari, is a songwriter who has collaborated with Toby Garson, the daughter of composer Harry Ruby, on children's shows and off-Broadway revues. Cantor's autobiographies, My Life is in Your Hands (with David Freedman) and Take My Life (with Jane Kesner Ardmore) were republished in 2000, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Cantor's grandson, musician Brian Gari.

On October 10, 1964 in Beverly Hills, California, Eddie Cantor suffered another heart attack and died. He is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery. Cantor was awarded an honorary Academy Award the year of his death.

John Agar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born January 31, 1921
Chicago, Illinois USA
Died April 7, 2002 (aged 81)
Burbank, California USA
Spouse(s) Shirley Temple (1945-1950)
Loretta Combs (1951-2000)

John G. Agar (January 31, 1921 - April 7, 2002) was an American actor. He starred alongside John Wayne in the films Sands of Iwo Jima and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, but was later relegated to B Movies, such as Tarantula, The Mole People, The Brain from Planet Arous and Hand of Death. He is also mentioned in the Frank Zappa Song, The Radio is Broken from the album The Man From Utopia (1983) and the Young Fresh Fellows have written songs about him, including "The New John Agar" and "Agar's Revenge," found on the album Topsy Turvy.

Agar was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Lillian (née Rogers) and John Agar, Sr., a meat packer.[1] He was educated at Harvard School for Boys and Lake Forest Academy in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Pawling Preparatory School in Pawling, New York, but did not attend college. He and his family moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1942 following his father's death. During World War II he served in the Army Air Corps, and he was a sergeant at the time he left the army in 1946.

He was Shirley Temple's first husband (1945-1950), and they worked together in Fort Apache. His marriage to Temple lasted five years and they had one daughter together, Linda Susan Agar who was later known as Susan Black, taking the surname of her stepfather Charles Alden Black. Following his divorce from Temple, Agar was married in 1951 to model Loretta Barnett Combs (1922-2000). They remained married until her death in 2000. They had two sons: Martin Agar and John G. Agar III.

Agar died on April 7, 2002 at Burbank, California of complications from Emphysema. He was buried beside his wife at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.

Mario Lanza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Mario Lanza (31 January 1921 - 7 October 1959) was an American tenor and Hollywood movie star who enjoyed success in the late 1940s and 1950s. His voice was considered by some to rival that of Enrico Caruso, whom Lanza portrayed in the 1951 film The Great Caruso. Lanza was able to sing all types of music. While his highly emotional style was not always universally praised by critics, he was immensely popular and his many recordings are still prized today.




Operatic career

Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was exposed to opera and singing at a young age, and by the age of 16 his vocal talent became apparent. Starting out in local operatic productions in Philadelphia, he later came to the attention of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who provided young Cocozza with a full student scholarship to the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. Koussevitzky would later tell Lanza that, "Yours is a voice such as is heard once in a hundred years."

His operatic debut, as Fenton in Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, was at Tanglewood on August 7, 1942, after studying with conductors Boris Goldovsky and Leonard Bernstein. It was here that Cocozza adopted the stage name Mario Lanza, which is the masculine version of his mother's name. His performances at Tanglewood won him critical acclaim, with Noel Straus of The New York Times hailing the 21-year-old tenor as having "few equals among tenors of the day in terms of quality, warmth, and power."

His operatic career was interrupted by World War II, when he was assigned to Special Services in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He appeared on the wartime shows On the Beam and Winged Victory while in the Air Corps. He also appeared in the film version of the latter (albeit as an unrecognizable member of the chorus).

He resumed his singing career in October 1945 on the CBS radio program Great Moments in Music, where he made six appearances singing various operatic selections. He later studied under Enrico Rosati for fifteen months, then embarked on an 86-concert tour of the United States, Canada and Mexico between July 1947 and May 1948 with George London and Frances Yeend. In April 1948, he sang Pinkerton in the New Orleans Opera's Madama Butterfly (conducted by Walter Herbert) to great acclaim. A concert at the Hollywood Bowl brought Lanza to the attention of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who signed Lanza to a seven-year film contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. This would prove to be a turning point in the young singer's career.


Film career

MGM's contract with Lanza required him to commit to the studio for six months, and at first Lanza was able to combine his film career with his operatic one, singing two acclaimed performances as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly for the New Orleans Opera Association in April 1948. He also continued to perform in concert, both in solo appearances and as part of the Bel Canto Trio with George London and Frances Yeend. In May 1949, he made his first commercial recordings with RCA Victor. However, his first two starring films, That Midnight Kiss and The Toast of New Orleans, were very successful, as was his recording career, and Lanza's fame increased dramatically.

In 1951, Lanza portrayed Enrico Caruso in The Great Caruso, which proved to be an astonishing success. At the same time, his popularity exposed Lanza to intense criticism by some music critics, including those who had praised his work years earlier.


Mario Lanza as Lt. Pinkerton and Kathryn Grayson as Cio-Cio San of Madama Butterfly in their 1950 picture The Toast of New Orleans.In 1952, Lanza was dismissed by MGM after he had pre-recorded the songs for The Student Prince. The reason most frequently cited for his dismissal in the tabloid press at the time was that Lanza's recurring weight problem had made it impossible for him to fit into the costumes of the Prince. However, as his biographers Cesari and Mannering have established, Lanza was not overweight at the beginning of the production, and it was, in fact, a disagreement with director Curtis Bernhardt over Lanza's singing of one of the songs in the film that led to Lanza walking off the set. MGM refused to replace Bernhardt, and the film was subsequently made with actor Edmund Purdom miming to Lanza's vocals. Ironically, the eventual director of the film was Richard Thorpe, the same man whom Lanza had pleaded with MGM to replace Bernhardt, and with whom the tenor had enjoyed an excellent working relationship on "The Great Caruso".

Depressed by his dismissal, and with his self-confidence severely undermined, Lanza became a virtual recluse for more than a year, frequently seeking refuge in alcoholic binges. During this period Lanza also came very close to bankruptcy as a result of poor investment decisions made by his former manager, and his lavish spending habits left him owing about $250,000 in back taxes to the IRS.

He returned to an active film career in 1955 in Serenade. However, despite its strong musical content, it was not as successful as his previous films. Lanza then moved to Rome, Italy in May 1957, where he worked on the film Seven Hills of Rome and returned to live performing in a series of acclaimed concerts throughout Britain, Ireland and the European Continent. Despite failing health, which resulted in a number of cancellations during this period, Lanza continued to receive offers for operatic appearances, concerts, and films. In late August 1958, he made a number of operatic recordings at the Rome Opera House for the soundtrack of what would turn out to be his final film, "For the First Time". Here, he came into contact with the Artistic Director of the Rome Opera, Riccardo Vitale, who reportedly offered him the role of Canio in Pagliacci in the theater's 1960/61 season. At the same time, however, his health continued to decline, with the tenor suffering from a variety of ailments, including phlebitis and acute high blood pressure. The old habits of overeating and crash dieting, coupled with his binge drinking, compounded his problems. The following year, in April 1959, Lanza suffered a minor heart attack, followed by double pneumonia in August. He died in Rome in October of that year at the age of 38 from a pulmonary embolism. His widow, Betty, moved back to Hollywood with their four children but used barbiturates to commit suicide five months later; Marc, the younger of their two sons died in 1993 of a heart attack at the age of 37.

Lanza's short career covered opera, radio, concerts, recordings, and motion pictures. He was the first artist for RCA Victor Red Seal to receive a gold disc. He was also the first artist to sell two and half million albums. A highly influential artist, Lanza has been credited with inspiring the careers of successive generations of opera singers, including Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Leo Nucci and Jose Carreras, as well as those of singers with seemingly different backgrounds, and influences, his RCA Victor label-mate Elvis Presley being the most notable example. In 1994, tenor José Carreras paid tribute to Lanza in a worldwide concert tour, saying of him, "If I'm an opera singer, it's thanks to Mario Lanza."

Joanne Dru
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joanne Dru (January 31, 1922 - September 10, 1996) was an American film and television actress. She also was the elder sister of Peter Marshall, best known for being the host of Hollywood Squares.


Life and career

Born Joanne Letitia LaCock in Logan, West Virginia, Dru came to New York City in 1940, at age 18. After finding employment as a model, she was chosen by Al Jolson to appear in the cast of his Broadway show Hold Onto Your Hats. Dru met and married popular singer Dick Haymes. When they moved to Hollywood, she found work in the theater. Dru was spotted by a talent scout and made her first film appearance in Abie's Irish Rose (1946).

Over the next decade, Dru appeared frequently in films and on television. She was cast often in western films such as Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), and John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Wagon Master (1950). She later lamented that she had been typecast in western films, commenting that once an actress suffered that fate, that was the end, adding that she never liked horses.

She gave a well-received performance in the dramatic film All the King's Men (1949), and co-starred with Dan Dailey in The Pride of St. Louis (1952) about major-league baseball pitcher Jerome "Dizzy" Dean. She was divorced from Haymes in 1949, and married John Ireland, who was also in Red River, less than a month later. Dru and Ireland got divorced in 1957.

She also appeared in the Martin and Lewis film 3 Ring Circus (1954). Her film career began to fade by the end of the 1950s, but she continued working frequently in television, and played the female lead in the 1960 ABC sitcom Guestward, Ho!. After Guestward, Ho!, she appeared sporadically for the rest of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, with one feature film appearance, in Sylvia (1965), and eight television appearances. Although regarded as a capable and popular film actress, it was for her contributions to television that Dru was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Dru had five children, three with Haymes, and two with Ireland. She died in Los Angeles, California at the age of 74 from lymphedema.