WA2K Radio is now on the air

Good afternoon.

Some of today's B.D. people:

and a good afternoon to you as well, Raggedy. Great collage/montage of the celebs. Thanks, PA. I didn't see Nancy among your notables, and since I am curious myself, folks, I think I will do her picture. Never liked how she sang "around" the melody, however.



For one of my favorite actors, Sidney Poitier, here is a song that you will recognize from his movie by the same name. This was done by Ray Charles with Glen Campbell on banjo and Billy Preston on organ.

In the heat of the night
Seems like a cold sweat
Creeping cross my brow, oh yes
In the heat of the night
I'm a feelin' motherless somehow
Stars with evil eyes stare from the sky
All mean and bright
(In the heat of the night)
Ain't a woman here before
Knows how to make the morning come
So hard to keep control
When I could sell my soul, oh, for just a little light
(In the heat of the night)
In the heat of the night
I've got trouble wall to wall
Oh yes I have
An' I repeat, oh, I repeat in the night
Must be an ending to us all
Oh Lord, it won't be long
Yes, just you be strong
And it'll be all right
(In the heat of the night)

Once again, folks, I was inspired by another forum to play this song. It's been quite a while since I have been in the mountains.

Almost heaven, west virginia
Blue ridge mountains
Shenandoah river -
Life is old there
Older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growin like a breeze

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

All my memories gathered round her
Miners lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Teardrops in my eye

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

I hear her voice
In the mornin hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
And drivin down the road I get a feelin
That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Take me home, now country roads
Take me home, now country roads

Listeners, it's time for a Happy Birthday Shout-Out to our very own Walter Hinteler!!

22 seconds of shout-out ... click

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too--yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

Yes we're going to a party party
Yes we're going to a party party
Yes we're going to a party party.

I would like you to dance--Birthday
Take a cha-cha-cha-chance-Birthday
I would like you to dance--Birthday
Dance

You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too--yeah
You say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

England Swings
Roger Miller

England swings like a pendulum do
Bobbies on bicycles, two by two
Westminster Abbey the tower of Big Ben
The rosy red cheeks of the little children

Now, if you huff and puff and you fina'lly save enough
Money up to take your family on a trip across the sea
Take a tip before you take your trip; let me tell you where to go
Go to Engeland, oh

Mama's old pajamas and your papa's mustache
Falling out the window sill, frolic in the grass
Tryin' to mock the way they talk fun but all in vain
Gaping at the dapper men with derby hats and canes

Walter is asleep, Beth, so this poem is for him in his birthday dreams:


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Prose Translation
by Hyde Flippo

Über allen Gipfeln Over all the hilltops
Ist Ruh, is calm.
In allen Wipfeln In all the treetops
Spürest du you feel
Kaum einen Hauch; hardly a breath of air.
Die Vögelein schweigen in Walde. The little birds fall silent in the woods.
Warte nur, balde Just wait... soon
Ruhest du auch. you'll also be at rest.

here's to walter

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you
If you're young at heart.
For it's hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind
If you're young at heart.

You can go to extremes with impossible schemes.
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams.
And life gets more exciting with each passing day.
And love is either in your heart, or on it's way.

Don't you know that it's worth every treasure on earth
To be young at heart.
For as rich as you are, it's much better by far
To be young at heart.

And if you should survive to 105,
Look at all you'll derive out of being alive!
And here is the best part, you have a head start
If you are among the very young at heart.

[Musical interlude]

And if you should survive to 105,
Look at all you'll derive out of being alive!
And here is the best part, you have a head start
If you are among the very young at heart.

For Walter on his birthday


Das Leben macht, wie jeder weiß,
so wie das Jahr 'nen runden Kreis.
Anfang und Ende sind bestimmt,
und keiner weiß, was es ihm bringt.

Kurz ist der Kreislauf oft bemessen,
doch sollst du nie den Tag vergessen,
der Tag, an dem die Mutter dich gebar,
von da an zählt der Mensch nach Jahr´.

Lass dir das Feiern nicht verübeln
und unterlass auch strikt das Grübeln.
Es ist kein Grund, sich aufzuhängen,
auch wenn die Jahre noch so rennen.

Du kommst dahinter ohne Neid:
Keiner wird jünger, mit der Zeit!
Wer sich daran nicht kann gewöhnen,
wird jedes Jahr auf's Neue stöhnen!

Pass auf, was ich dir jetzt noch sage:
Das Alter hat auch Sonnentage!
Und außerdem ist noch bekannt:
Mit dem Alter kriegt man erst Verstand !

Drum lass das Jammern und das Klagen,
hast nicht allein ein Kreuz zu tragen!
Könntest du die Menschen mal belauschen,
ich glaube, du würdest mit keinem tauschen.

So wünsche ich dir von Herzensgrund,
das Allerbeste, bleib gesund.
Leb' etwas Diät, doch nicht zu doll,
vielleicht machst du die Hundert voll. -

In diesem Sinne,
die allerherzlichsten Glueckwuensche, Walter.

Well, at first I had to listen to carnival songs on all stions, now birthday songs here ...

... which is much better, of course - thanks a lot!

W. H. Auden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Born 21 February 1907
York, England
Died 29 September 1973
Vienna, Austria

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 - 29 September 1973), who signed his works W. H. Auden (IPA: /ˈwɪstən hjuː ˈɔːdən/; first syllable of Auden rhymes with "law"), was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the great writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form, and content.[1]

Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") and "September 1, 1939", became widely known through films, broadcasts, and popular media.




Life



Childhood and education, 1907-1927
Childhood

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, where his father George Augustus Auden was a physician. Wystan was the third of three children, all sons; the oldest, George Bernard Auden, became a farmer; the second, John Bicknell Auden, became a geologist. His mother, Constance Rosalie Bicknell Auden, had trained as a missionary nurse. Auden's grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen; his household was Anglo-Catholic, following a "High" form of Anglicanism with doctrine and ritual resembling that of Roman Catholicism. Auden traced his love of music and language partly to the church services of his childhood.[7] He believed he was of Icelandic descent, and his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and sagas is visible throughout his work.[8]

In 1908 his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer (later Professor) of Public Health; Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, returning home for holidays.[2]

From the ages six to twelve, "I spent a great many of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world, the basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the North of England, and (b) an industry - lead mining".[9] His visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems; the remote decaying mining village of Rookhope was for him a "sacred landscape",[10] evoked in a late poem, "Amor Loci".

Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his "passion for words" had already begun. He wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do".[11]

Education

Auden's first school was St. Edmund's School (Hindhead), Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk, where, in 1922, his friend Robert Medley first suggested that he might write poetry. In the same year he "discover[ed] that he has lost his faith".[12] His first poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923.[13]

In 1925 he went to Christ Church, Oxford University, with a scholarship in biology, but he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford included Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. He left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree.

He was reintroduced to Christopher Isherwood in 1925; for the next few years Isherwood was his literary mentor to whom he sent poems for comments and criticism. Auden probably fell in love with Isherwood (who was unaware of the intensity of Auden's feelings) and in the 1930s they maintained a sexual friendship in intervals between their relations with others. In 1935-39 they collaborated on three plays and a travel book.[14]


Britain and Europe, 1928-1938

In the autumn of 1928 Auden left Britain for nine months in Weimar Berlin, partly to rebel against English repressiveness in a city where homosexuality was widely tolerated. In Berlin, he said, he first experienced the political and economic unrest that became one of his central subjects.

On returning to Britain in 1929, he worked briefly as a tutor. In 1930 his first published book, Poems, was accepted by T. S. Eliot for Faber and Faber; the firm also published all his later books. In 1930 he began five years as a schoolmaster in boys' schools: two years at the Larchfield Academy, in Helensburgh, Scotland, then three years at the The Downs School, near Malvern, Worcestershire, where he was a much-loved teacher. At the Downs, in June 1933, he experienced what he later described as a "Vision of Agape".[15]

During these years, Auden's erotic interests focused, as he later said, on an idealized "Alter Ego"[16] rather than on individual persons. His relations (and his unsuccessful courtships) tended to be unequal either in age or intelligence; his sexual relations were transient, although some evolved into long friendships. He contrasted these relations with what he regarded as the "marriage" (his word) of equals that he began with Chester Kallman in 1939 (see below), based on the unique individuality of both partners.


From the G.P.O. Film Unit's Night Mail; scene possibly directed by AudenFrom 1935 until he left the UK early in 1939, Auden worked as freelance reviewer, essayist, and lecturer, first with the G.P.O. Film Unit, a documentary film-making branch of the post office, headed by John Grierson. He collaborated there with Benjamin Britten, with whom he also worked on plays, song cycles, and a libretto. Auden's plays in the 1930s were performed by the Group Theatre, in productions that he supervised to varying degrees.

His work now reflected his belief that any good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist".[17] In 1936 he spent three months in Iceland, where he gathered material for a travel book Letters from Iceland, written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left in order to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he had imagined. Again attempting to combine reportage and art, he and Isherwood spent six months in 1938 visiting the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War. On their way back to the UK they stayed briefly in New York and decided to move to the United States. Auden spent the autumn of 1938 partly in England, partly in Brussels.


United States and Europe, 1939-1973

Auden and Isherwood sailed to New York in January 1939, entering on temporary visas. Their departure from Britain was later seen by many in the UK as a betrayal and Auden's reputation suffered. In April 1939 Isherwood moved to California, and he and Auden saw each other only intermittently in later years. Around this time, Auden met an eighteen-year old poet Chester Kallman, who became his lover for the next two years (Auden described their relation as a "marriage" that began with a cross-country "honeymoon" journey).[18] He and Kallman remained companions for the rest of Auden's life, sharing houses and apartments from 1953 until Auden's death. Auden dedicated both editions of his collected poetry (1945/50 and 1966) to Isherwood and Kallman.

In 1940-41, Auden lived in a house in Brooklyn Heights which he shared with Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and others, and which became a famous center of artistic life.[19] In 1940, he joined the Episcopal Church, returning to the Anglican Communion he had abandoned at thirteen. His reconversion was influenced partly by what he called the "sainthood" of Charles Williams,[20] whom he had met in 1937, partly by reading Søren Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr; his existential, this-worldly Christianity became a central element in his life.[21]

In 1941-42 he taught English at the University of Michigan, then in 1942-45 at Swarthmore College. In the summer of 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, he was in Germany with the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, studying the effects of Allied bombing on German morale, an experience that affected his postwar work as his visit to Spain had affected him earlier. On his return, he settled in Manhattan, working as a freelance writer and as a visiting professor at Bennington, Smith, and other American colleges. In 1946 he became a naturalized citizen of the US.

His theology in his later years evolved from a highly inward and psychologically-oriented Protestantism in the early 1940s to a more Roman Catholic-oriented interest in the significance of the body and in collective ritual in the later 1940s and 1950s, and finally to the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which rejected "childish" conceptions of God for an adult religion that focused on the significance of human suffering.[21]

Auden began summering in Europe in 1948, first in Ischia, Italy, where he rented a house, then, starting 1958, in Kirchstetten, Austria where he bought a farmhouse, and, he said, shed tears of joy at owning a home for the first time. In 1956-61, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University; this required him to give three lectures each year, so he could spend most of his time in New York and his summer home. He now earned his income mostly by readings and lecture tours, and by writing for The New Yorker and other magazines.

In 1972, he moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, but continued to summer in Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973 and was buried in Kirchstetten.


Auden's character

For most of his life, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. He was obsessively punctual in his habits while choosing to live amidst physical disorder. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome.

Many of his poems were inspired by unconsummated love, and he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me" ("The More Loving One"). He had a gift for friendship and a strong wish for the stability of marriage; in a letter to his friend James Stern he called marriage "the only subject".[22]

He performed charitable acts sometimes in public, as in his marriage of convenience to Erika Mann in 1935 that gave her a British passport with which to escape the Nazis, but usually in private, and he was embarrassed if they were publicly revealed (as when his gift to his friend Dorothy Day for the Catholic Worker movement was reported on the front page of the New York Times in 1956).[23] During his last years, his conversation became repetitive, to the disappointment of friends who had known him earlier as a witty and wide-ranging conversationalist.


Work



Overview

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged the pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had".[26]

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would rhetorically effective.[27] His rejected poems include "Spain" and "September 1, 1939". His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden's Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it.[28] (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)


Early work, 1922-1939



Auden's began writing poems at thirteen, mostly in the styles of 19th-century romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and later poets with rural interests, especially Thomas Hardy. At eighteen he discovered T. S. Eliot and adopted an extreme version of Eliot's style. He found his own voice at twenty, when he wrote the first poem later included in his collected work, "From the very first coming down". This and other poems of the late 1920s tended to be in a clipped, elusive style that alluded to, but did not directly state, their themes of loneliness and loss. Twenty of these poems appeared in his first book Poems (1928), a pamphlet hand-printed by Stephen Spender.[29]

In 1928 he wrote his first dramatic work, Paid on Both Sides, subtitled "A Charade," which combined style and content from the Icelandic sagas with jokes from English school life. This mixture of tragedy and farce, with a dream play-within-the-play, introduced the mixed styles and content of much of his later work. This drama and thirty short poems appeared in his first published book Poems (1930, 2nd edition with seven poems replaced, 1933); among the poems in the book were "It was Easter as I walked," "Doom is dark," "Sir, no man's enemy," and "This lunar beauty."

A recurrent theme in these early poems is the effect of "family ghosts", Auden's term for the powerful, unseen psychological effects of preceding generations on any individual life (and the title of a poem). A parallel theme, present throughout his work, is the contrast between biological evolution (unchosen and involuntary) and the psychological evolution of cultures and individuals (voluntary and deliberate even in its subconscious aspects).

1931 through 1935

Auden's next large-scale work was The Orators: An English Study (1932; revised editions, 1934, 1966), in verse and prose, largely about hero-worship in personal and political life. In his shorter poems, his style became more open and accessible, and the exuberant "Six Odes" in The Orators reflect his new interest in Robert Burns. During the next few years, many of his poems took their form and style from traditional ballads and popular songs, and also from expansive classical forms like the Odes of Horace, which he seems to have discovered through the German poet Hölderlin. Around this time his main influences were Dante, William Langland, and Alexander Pope.[30]


During these years, much of his work expressed left-wing views, and he became widely known as a political poet, although his work was more politically ambivalent than many reviewers recognized. He generally wrote about revolutionary change in terms of a "change of heart", a transformation of a society from a closed-off psychology of fear to an open psychology of love. His verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) was a political extravaganza in the style of a theatrical revue, which Auden later called "a nihilistic leg-pull".[31] His next play The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), written in collaboration with Isherwood, was similarly a quasi-Marxist updating of Gilbert and Sullivan in which the general idea of social transformation was more prominent than any specific political action or structure.

The Ascent of F6 (1937), another play written with Isherwood, was partly an an anti-imperialist satire, partly (in the character of the self-destroying climber Michael Ransom) an examination of Auden's own motives in taking on a public role as a political poet. This play included the first version of "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), written as a satiric eulogy for a politician; Auden later rewrote the poem as a "Cabaret Song" about lost love (written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson for whom he wrote many lyrics in the 1930s). In 1935, he worked briefly on documentary films with the G.P.O. Film Unit, writing his famous verse commentary for Night Mail and lyrics for other films that were among his attempts in the 1930s to create a widely-accessible, socially-conscious art.

1936 through 1939

These tendencies in style and content culminate in his collection Look, Stranger! (1936; his UK publisher chose the title; Auden retitled the 1937 US edition On This Island). This book included political odes, love poems, comic songs, meditative lyrics, and a variety of intellectually intense but emotionally accessible verse. Among the poems included were "Hearing of harvests", "Out on the lawn I lie in bed", "O what is that sound", "Look, stranger, on this island now", and "Our hunting fathers."


Auden was now arguing that an artist should be a kind of journalist, and he put this view into practice in Letters from Iceland (1937) a travel book in prose and verse written with Louis MacNeice, which included his long social, literary, and autobiographical commentary "Letter to Lord Byron". In 1937, after observing the Spanish Civil War he wrote a politically-engaged pamphlet poem Spain (1937); he later discarded it from his collected works. Journey to a War (1939) a travel book in prose and verse, was written with Isherwood after their visit to the Sino-Japanese War. Auden's last collaboration with Isherwood was their third play, On the Frontier, an anti-war satire written in Broadway and West End styles.

Auden's themes in his shorter poems now included the fragility and transience of personal love ("Danse Macabre", "The Dream", "Lay your sleeping head", "Funeral Blues" [the revised version]) and the corrupting effect of public and official culture on individual lives ("Casino", "School Children", "Dover"). In 1938 he wrote a series of dark, ironic ballads about individual failure ("Miss Gee", "James Honeyman", "Victor"). All these appeared in his next book of verse, Another Time (1940), together with other famous poems such as "Dover", "As He Is", and "Musée des Beaux Arts" (all written before he moved to America in 1939), and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "The Unknown Citizen", "Law Like Love", "September 1, 1939", and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (written in America). The elegies for Yeats and Freud are partly statements of Auden's anti-heroic theme, in which great deeds are performed, not by unique geniuses whom others cannot hope to imitate, but by otherwise ordinary individuals who were "silly like us" (Yeats) or of whom it could be said "he wasn't clever at all" (Freud), and who became teachers of others, not awe-inspiring heroes.


Middle period, 1940-1957

1940 through 1946

In 1940 Auden wrote a long philosophical poem "New Year Letter", which appeared with miscellaneous notes and other poems in The Double Man (1941). At the time of his return to the Anglican Communion he began writing abstract verse on theological themes, such as "Canzone" and "Kairos and Logos". Around 1942, as he became more comfortable with religious themes, his verse became more open and relaxed, and he increasingly used the syllabic verse he learned from the poetry of Marianne Moore.

His recurring themes in this period included the artist's temptation to use other persons as material for his art rather than valuing them for themselves ("Prospero to Ariel") and the corresponding moral obligation to make and keep commitments while recognizing the temptation to break them ("In Sickness and Health").


From 1942 through 1947 he worked mostly on three long poems in dramatic form, each differing from the others in form and content: "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" (both published in For the Time Being, 1944), and The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (published separately 1947). The first two, with Auden's other new poems from 1940-44, were included in his first collected edition, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), with most of his earlier poems, many in revised versions.

1947 through 1957

After completing The Age of Anxiety in 1946 he focused again on shorter poems, notably "A Walk After Dark," "The Love Feast", and "The Fall of Rome." Many of these evoked the Italian village where he summered in 1948-57, and his next book, Nones (1951), had a Mediterranean atmosphere new to his work. A new theme was the "sacred importance" of the human body [32] in its ordinary aspect (breathing, sleeping, eating) and the continuity with nature that the body made possible (in contrast to the division between humanity and nature that he had emphasized in the 1930s); his poems on these themes included "In Praise of Limestone" and "Memorial for the City".

In 1949 Auden and Kallman wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, and later collaborated on two libretti for operas by Hans Werner Henze.

Auden's first separate prose book was The Enchafèd Flood: The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1950), based on a series of lectures on the image of the sea in romantic literature.

In 1949-54 he worked on a sequence of seven Good Friday poems, "Horae Canonicae", an encyclopedic survey of geological, biological, cultural, and personal history, focused on the irreversible act of murder; the poem was also a study in cyclical and linear ideas of time. While writing this, he also wrote a sequence of seven poems about man's relation to nature, "Bucolics". Both sequences appeared in his next book, The Shield of Achilles (1955), with other short poems, including the book's title poem, "Fleet Visit", and "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier".

Extending the themes of "Horae Canonicae", in 1955-56 he wrote a group of poems about "history," a word he used to mean the set of unique events made by human choices, as opposed to "nature," the set of involuntary events created by natural processes, statistics, and anonymous forces such as crowds. These poems included "T the Great", "The Maker", and the title poem of his next collection Homage to Clio (1960).


Later work, 1958-1973

In the late 1950s Auden's style became less rhetorical while its range of styles increased. In 1958, having moved his summer home from Italy to Austria, he wrote "Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno"; other poems from this period include "Dichtung und Wahrheit: An Unwritten Poem", a prose poem about the relation between love and personal and poetic language, and the contrasting "Dame Kind", about the anonymous impersonal reproductive instinct. These and other poems, including his 1955-66 poems about history, appeared in Homage to Clio (1960).

His prose book The Dyer's Hand (1962) gathered many of the lectures he gave in Oxford as Professor of Poetry in 1956-61, together with revised versions of essays and notes written since the mid-1940s.

While translating the haiku and other verse in Dag Hammarskjöld's Markings, Auden began using haiku for many of his poems. A sequence of fifteen poems about his house in Austria, "Thanksgiving for a Habitat", appeared in About the House (1965), with other poems that included his reflections on his lecture tours, "On the Circuit". In the late 1960s he wrote some of his most vigorous poems, including "River Profile" and two poems that looked back over his life, "Prologue at Sixty" and "Forty Years On". All these appeared in City Without Walls (1969). His lifelong passion for Icelandic legend culminated in his verse translation of The Elder Edda (1969).

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970) was a kind of self-portrait made up of favorite quotations with commentary, arranged in alphabetical order by subject. His last prose book was a selection of essays and reviews, Forewords and Afterwords (1973).

His last books of verse, Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the unfinished Thank You, Fog (1974) include reflective poems about language ("Natural Linguistics") and about his own aging ("A New Year Greeting", "Talking to Myself", "A Lullaby" ["The din of work is subdued"]). His last completed poem, in haiku form, was "Archeology", about ritual and timelessness, two recurring themes in his later years.


Reputation and influence

Auden's stature in modern literature is much disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him "a complete wash-out", to the obituarist in the Times (London), who wrote: "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master".[33]

In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in opposition to his politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in the UK (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden "arches over all". His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).

In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden's regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden "was the modern poet". His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some British writers (notably Philip Larkin) lamented that Auden's work had declined from its earlier promise.[34]

By the time of Auden's death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century".[35] Auden's popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks") was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939" was widely circulated.[33] Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 will mark his centenary year.[36]

Ann Sheridan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Clara Lou Sheridan
Born February 21, 1915
Denton, Texas, USA
Died January 21, 1967
Los Angeles, California, USA

Ann Sheridan (February 21, 1915 - January 21, 1967) was an American film actress.

Born Clara Lou Sheridan in Denton, Texas, she was a college student when her sister sent a photograph of her to Paramount Studios. She subsequently entered and won a beauty contest, with part of her prize being a bit part in a Paramount film. She abandoned college to pursue a career in Hollywood.

She made her film debut in 1934, aged 19, in the film Search For Beauty, and played uncredited bit parts in Paramount films for the next two years. Paramount made little effort to develop her talent, so she left, signing a contract with Warner Bros. in 1936, and changing her name to "Ann Sheridan".

Sheridan's career prospects began to improve. The red-haired beauty would soon become Warner's top sex symbol. Tagged "The Oomph Girl", Sheridan was a popular pin-up girl by the early 1940s.

She received substantial roles and positive reaction from critics and moviegoers in such films as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), opposite James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, Torrid Zone with Cagney and They Drive by Night with George Raft and Bogart (both 1940), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) with Bette Davis, and Kings Row (1942), where she received top billing playing opposite Ronald Reagan, Robert Cummings, and Betty Field. Known for having a fine singing voice, Ann also appeared in such musicals as Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and Shine On, Harvest Moon (1944). She was also memorable in two of her biggest hits, Nora Prentiss and The Unfaithful, both in 1947.

Despite these successes, her career began to decline. Her role in I Was a Male War Bride (1949), directed by Howard Hawks and costarring Cary Grant, gave her another success, but by the 1950s, she was struggling to find work and her film roles were sporadic.

Sheridan appeared in the television soap opera Another World during the mid-1960s, then started a role in the TV series Pistols 'n' Petticoats.

She became ill during the filming of its first season, and died from esophageal and liver cancer in Los Angeles, California. She had been a chain cigarette smoker for years; Cagney remarked in his autobiography that when the cancer struck, "she didn't have a chance." [citation needed] She was cremated and her ashes were stored at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles until they were permanently interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2005.[1]

Sheridan married four times, including a marriage lasting one year to fellow Warners actor, George Brent, but had no children.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Ann Sheridan has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame at 7024 Hollywood Boulevard.





Trivia

In 1939, a fraternity bet inspired a UCLA student to handcuff himself to Ann during a movie premiere and then swallowed the key. Prompting a locksmith to be summoned to the theater.
Had a large gap between her front teeth. She always wore a porcelain cap when having her picture taken.
Was used as a body double (hands, legs, shoulders) while at Paramount.
Made a cameo in the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. She was in Mexico at the same time the film was being shot there. As a good luck gesture, Sheridan agreed to appear in the film in an unbilled, walk-on part as a passing prostitute who looked at Dobbs (Bogart) as he left the barbershop in Tampico.

Erma Bombeck
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Erma Louise Bombeck (February 21, 1927 - April 22, 1996), born Erma Fiste, was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for a newspaper column that depicted suburban home life in the second half of the 20th century.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Bombeck graduated from the University of Dayton in 1949 with a degree in English. She started her career in 1949 as a reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald, but after marrying school administrator Bill Bombeck, a college friend, she left the job and raised three children.

As the children grew she started writing At Wit's End, telling self-deprecating tales about the life of a housewife. It debuted in the Kettering-Oakwood Times in 1964. She was paid $3 per column.

Growing popularity led At Wit's End to be nationally syndicated in 1965, and eventually it ran three times a week in more than 700 newspapers. The column was collected in many best-selling books, and her fame was such that a television sitcom was based on her. The series, Maggie, ran for eight shows in 1982 before being cancelled.

In 1971, the Bombecks moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Bombeck had autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, a common genetic disorder shared by playwright Neil Simon and by fashion commentator Steven Cojescaru. In 1996 worsening health due forced her to have a kidney transplant, and she died of complications that year. She is interred in the Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.


Quotes

"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first one being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."
"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."
"If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead."
"The only reason I would take up jogging is so I could hear heavy breathing again."
"Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage."
"Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely."

Nina Simone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




Background information

Birth name Eunice Kathleen Waymon
Also known as High Priestess of Soul
Born February 21, 1933
Tryon, North Carolina, United States
Died April 21, 2003
Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
Genre(s) Jazz, Soul, Folk, R&B, Gospel
Occupation(s) Singer, songwriter, pianist
Instrument(s) Singing, Piano
Years active 1954-2003
Label(s) RCA Victor, Philips, Bethlehem, Colpix, Legacy Recordings
Website NinaSimone.com

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933-April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. Her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and even pop music. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974.




Biography

Youth (1933-1954)

Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, one of eight children. She began singing at her local church and showed prodigious talent as a pianist. Her public debut, a piano recital, was made at the age of ten. Her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. Simone refused to play until her parents were moved back.[citation needed] This incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement.

Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (who lived into her late 90s) was a strict Methodist minister; her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman and sometime barber who suffered bouts of ill-health. Mrs. Waymon worked as a maid and her employer, hearing of Nina's talent, provided funds for piano lessons.[citation needed]Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist in Eunice's continued education.

At seventeen, Simone moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she taught piano and accompanied singers to fund her own studying as a classical pianist at New York City's Juilliard School of Music. With the help of a private tutor she studied for an interview to further study piano at the Curtis Institute, but she was rejected. Simone believed that this rejection was because she was a black woman and it fueled her hatred of the racial injustice in the United States. It seemed that her dream to become the first African-American classical pianist would not be fulfilled.


Early success (1954-1959)

Simone played at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City to fund her studying. The owner said that she would have to sing as well as play the piano in order to get the job. She took on the stagename "Nina Simone" in 1954 because she didn't want her mother to know that she was playing "the devil's music". "Nina" (meaning "little girl" in Spanish) was a nickname a boyfriend had given to her and "Simone" was after the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the movie Casque d'or.[1] Simone played and sang a mixture of jazz, blues and classical music at the bar, and by doing so she created a small but loyal fan base.[2]

After playing in small clubs she recorded a rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess) in 1958. It became her only Billboard top 40 hit in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue soon followed on Bethlehem Records. Simone would never benefit financially from the album, because she sold the rights for 3000 dollars. It meant that she missed out on more than 1 million dollars of royalties (mainly because of the successful re-release of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" in the 1980s). After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with the bigger label Colpix Records, followed by a string of studio and live albums (Simone, 1992; Brun-Lambert, 2006).


Performing live

Simone's regal bearing and commanding stage presence earned her the title the "High Priestess of Soul". Her live performances were regarded not as mere concerts, but as happenings. In a single concert she could be a singer, pianist, dancer, actress and activist all simultaneously. On stage Simone's versatility became truly evident, as she moved from gospel to blues, jazz and folk, to numbers infused with European classical stylings, and counterpoint fugues. She incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. About this, Simone herself said:

"It's like mass hypnosis. I use it all the time" [3]

Many recordings exist of her concerts, expressing fragments of her on-stage power, wit, sensuality and occasional menace. Throughout most of her live and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Flemming and guitarist and musical director Al Shackman.

Civil rights era (1964-1974)

Simone was made aware of the severity of racial prejudice in America by her friends Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (author of the play Raisin in the Sun). In 1964, she changed record labels, from the American Colpix to the Dutch Philips, which also meant a change in the contents of her recordings. Simone had always included songs in her repertoire that hinted to her African-American origins (such as "Brown Baby" and "Zungo" on Nina at the Village Gate in 1962). But on her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone In Concert (live recording, 1964), Simone for the first time openly addresses the racial inequality that was prevalent in the United States with the song "Mississippi Goddam". It was her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. The song was released as a single, being boycotted in certain southern states.[4] With "Old Jim Crow" on the same album she reacts to the Jim Crow Laws.

From then onwards, the civil rights message was standard in Simone's recording repertoire, where it had already become a part of her live performances. She covered Billie Holiday's ("Strange Fruit") on Pastel Blues (1965), which is a statement on the lynching of black men in the South, and sang the W.Cuney poem "Images" on Let It All Out (1966), talking about the absence of pride in the African-American woman. Simone wrote the song "Four Women" and sings it on Wild Is the Wind (1966). It is about four different stereotypes of African-American women.

Simone again moved from Philips to RCAvictor in 1967. She sang "Backlash Blues", written by her friend Langston Hughes on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings The Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967) she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The last song illustrates how white children would get indoctrinated with racism at an early age. The album Nuff Said (1968) contains live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair, April 7th 1968, three days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. She dedicated the whole performance to him and sang "Why? (The King Of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player directly after the news of Dr. King's death had reached them.

Together with Langston Hughes, Simone turned the late Lorraine Hansberrys unfinished play "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" into a civil rights song. She performed it live on Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and the song became the official "National Anthem of Black America" and has been covered by Aretha Franklin (on 1972s Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway.[5]


Being 'difficult'

Simone had a reputation in the music industry for being volatile and sometimes difficult to deal with, a characterization with which she strenuously took issue. In 1995, she reportedly shot and wounded her neighbour's son with a pneumatic pistol after his laughing disturbed her concentration.[6] She also fired at a record company executive whom she accused of stealing royalties.[7]

It is now recognised that this 'difficulty' was not just the result of an over-exacting artistic rigour, but her raging outbursts and diva-like extremes were actually the result of a medical condition, possibly clinical depression or borderline personality disorder, for which Simone had to take medication.[8] All this was only known to a small group of people around the singer for many years. The biography Break Down And Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this secret in 2004.


Later life (1978-2003)

Simone impulsively left the United States in September 1970. The continuous performances and decline of the Civil Rights movement had exhausted her. She flew to Barbados, expecting her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud, to contact her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance (and the fact that she left behind her wedding ring) as a cue for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was also in charge of Simone's income. This meant that after their separation Simone had no knowledge about how her business was run, and what she was actually worth. Upon returning to the United States she also learned that there were serious problems with the tax authorities, causing her to go back to Barbados again.[9] Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow.[10][11] Her friend, singer Miriam Makeba convinced her to come to Liberia. After that she lived in Switzerland and the Netherlands, before settling in France in 1992. Simone's divorce from her husband and manager can be seen as the end of her most successful years in the American music business, and the beginning of her (partially self-imposed) exile and estrangement from the world for the next two decades (Simone & Cleary, 1992; Brun-Lambert, 2006).

After her last album for RCA Records, It Is Finished (1974), it was not until 1978 that Simone was convinced by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor to record another album, Baltimore. While not a commercial succes, the album did get good reviews and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her voice had not lost its power over the years, but developed an additional warmth and a vivacious maturity. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later Simone recorded Fodder On My Wings on a french label. It is one of her most personal albums, with nearly all of the (autobiographical) songs written by herself. In the 1980s Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London. The album Live At Ronnie Scott's was recorded there in 1984. Though her onstage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging her audiences by recounting sometimes humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and soliciting requests. Her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, was published in 1992 She recorded her last album A Single Woman in 1993.

In 1993 Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. She had been ill with cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet on April 21, 2003, aged 70. She left behind a daughter Lisa Celeste, now an actress/singer who took on the stagename Simone and has appeared on Broadway in Aida.


Honors

On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington DC more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone for her music and commitment to humanity.[12][13] Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities from the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm X College.[14] She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her.[15] Only two days before her death, Simone was awarded with an honorary diploma by the Curtis Institute, the school that had turned her down at the start of her career.[16]


Best-known work

Simone had her first and biggest hit in America with a rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy", a track from her debut album Little Girl Blue (1958). It peaked at number 18 in the pop singles chart and number 2 on the black singles chart.[17] In 1987, she experienced a resurgence in popularity when "My Baby Just Cares for Me" from the same album, became a hit all over Europe after it was featured in a Chanel no. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was then created by Aardman.

Well known songs from her Philips years include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964), "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne Me Quitte Pas" and "Feeling Good" on I Put A Spell On You (1965), "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966). "Feeling Good" was used in a Sky Movies advertisement, a 24 promotional advertisement, and in the drama series Six Feet Under (a promo for the 4th season). Several cover versions were made, most notably by British rock band Muse and Michael Bublé. It was sampled in a song by Mary J Blige on her album The Breakthrough (2006). "Sinnerman" (from the 1965 album Pastel Blues) featured in the films The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and Cellular (2004), an episode of the TV series Scrubs and on the soundtrack for the videogame Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. Hip-hop producer Kanye West sampled "Sinnerman" for the Talib Kweli single "Get By". Talib Kweli also recorded a hip-hop remake of Four Women, which is featured on Reflection Eternal with DJ Hi-Tek. Recently, a remixed version by Felix da Housecat was used in the soundtrack of the film Miami Vice (2006). It was also covered by 16 Horsepower.

Well known songs from her RCA-Victor years include "House of the Rising Sun" on Nina Simone Sings The Blues (1967), "Ain't Got No-I Got Life", "Gin House Blues" and "Do What You Gotta Do" on Nuff Said (1968), the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", "I Shall Be Released" and Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin" on To Love Somebody (1969).
"Ain't Got No-I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair, gave Simone a new and younger audience when it became a surprise hit, reaching nr. 2 in the UK charts in 1968. It has since become one of her most popular songs. It has been used in a television advertising campaign in the United Kingdom for Müller Dairy and returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder in 2006.
Simone had recorded the traditional song "House of the Rising Sun" in 1961 and it featured on Nina At The Village Gate (1962), predating versions by Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan. It was picked up by The Animals and became their signature hit. They repeated this with a Simone cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood was also featured in the J'adore Dior commercial.

Quotations

"Jazz is a white term used to define Black people. My music is Black Classical Music."
"You can see colors through music... Anything human can be felt through music, which means there is no limit to the creating that can be done... it's infinite."

Tyne Daly
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tyne Daly (born Ellen Tyne Daly on February 21, 1946 in Madison, Wisconsin) is a Tony Award-winning American stage and screen actress.





Personal life

Daly was born into a creative family; she is the daughter of actor James Daly. Her younger brother is actor Timothy Daly. She is also related to former game show host and newsman John Charles Daly. Her sister-in-law, Amy Van Nostrand, is also an actress.

She studied at Brandeis University and The American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

Daly was married to actor/director Georg Stanford Brown from 1966 to 1990. They have three daughters, Alisabeth, a potter, Alyxandra, and Kathryne Dora, who is an actress.


Career

Film roles

Daly's best known appearance in a feature film was as Inspector Harry Callahan's partner, Kate Moore, in the 1976 Dirty Harry film The Enforcer. She also made appearances in Play It As It Lays, John and Mary, The Adulteress, and Speedtrap.


Television roles

Daly is best known for her work in television, and appearances on primetime television programs.

In the 1970s, Daly began to appear frequently as a guest on episodic primetime shows such as Ironside, McMillan and Wife, The Mod Squad, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones. On several programs, including Medical Center, The Rookies, and Quincy, M.E., she appeared over the run of the programs several times as several different characters.

In 1981, Daly was cast as detective Mary Beth Lacey in the TV movie Cagney and Lacey, opposite Loretta Swit as Cagney. The following year, CBS developed a series based on the movie, and actress Meg Foster was cast as Cagney. After a few episodes, CBS decided to let Foster go because of her resemblance to Daly, and Sharon Gless was cast. Daly is perhaps best known for her appearance in this show, which ran for six seasons.

After the program ended, Daly continued to make additional appearances on prime-time programs, including a comedic turn on The Nanny, an appearance on the Sharon Gless program The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, and a reunion Cagney and Lacey movie in 1996. Her next continuing role was on the CBS drama Christy. Most recently, she appeared as Maxine Gray on the CBS drama Judging Amy, which ran from 1999 to 2005.


Theater roles

Daly has made several appearances on the Broadway stage. Her first appearance was in 1967, in a short-lived play, "That Summer, That Fall". She appeared in a revival of the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull, and had a nearly two-year run in a 1989 revival of Gypsy (musical) playing Mama Rose. She most recently appeared in the 2006 play Rabbit Hole, portraying the mother of the play's protagonist, played by Cynthia Nixon. [1]


Role model

Daly has been identified as a feminist role model, particularly based on her television roles in Cagney and Lacey and Judging Amy. Her role as Lacey showed a woman detective at a time where the idea was still novel; the show was also novel in presenting Lacey primarily in a work environment, rather than always showing the character at home. She has also been outspoken about maintaining a natural appearance as she ages, and for the run of Judging Amy, Daly's hair was shown in its naturally gray state. [2]


Awards and recognition

Daly has been nominated for the Emmy Award a total of 14 times; she won 6 times, for the following television performances:

Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Cagney and Lacey in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1988
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Christy in 1996
Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Judging Amy in 2003
She was also recognized for the following:

She won the 1990 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Mama Rose in Gypsy.
She was nominated for a 2006 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in Rabbit Hole.
Daly has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mary Chapin Carpenter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information
Born February 21, 1958
Origin Princeton, New Jersey
Genre(s) Country
Instrument(s) Guitar
Years active 1987 - Present

Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958 in Princeton, New Jersey) is a five-time Grammy Award-winning country/folk singer-songwriter and guitarist, with a diverse musical style that is sometimes said to be "unclassifiable."[citation needed]





Biography

Childhood

Carpenter, the daughter of a Life Magazine executive, spent two years in Japan as a child, moving to Washington, D.C. in 1974. She attended Princeton Day School, a private coeducational day school, before graduating from the Taft School in 1976. Carpenter has described her childhood as a "pretty typical[ly] suburban," with her musical interests defined chiefly by whatever albums her older sisters had lying around.[1] This included records by The Mamas & the Papas, the Beatles, and Judy Collins, along with some Woody Guthrie albums of her mother's.

Carpenter spent much of her time in high school playing the guitar and piano; in fact, while at Princeton Day School, legend has it that "classmates threatened to cut her guitar strings if she played 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' one more time."[2]


Early Performing and Alcoholism

Despite her interest in music, Carpenter says she never considered performing publicly until, shortly after graduating from Taft, her father suggested it. "He said, `There's a bar down the street, they have open-mike sessions, why don't you go out and play at one of those things?'" Carpenter recalled for Rolling Stone in 1991. "That was the first time it occurred to me, frankly."[1] She added that the audience was "polite," but that she "wanted to throw up."

Carpenter graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in American Civilization. She considered music a hobby at first, and, despite playing some summer sets in Washington's vibrant 80s music scene for extra money, kept on thinking she'd eventually get a "real job.".[1] At those gigs, most played in bars, Carpenter developed a serious drinking problem. "I had a big problem," she later recalled. "It was awful. I had to make a lifestyle change in a drastic way. It's still so painful to me to think about how I was."[1]

Thinking that music was part of the problem, Carpenter stopped performing and began interviewing for regular work, though when someone offered her a position she "panicked," and became determined "to go back into music but [to] change some things."[1] She decided to play only original material, rather than covers, and she also quit drinking. Within a few years, Carpenter had landed a manager and recorded a demo tape that led to a deal with Columbia Records.


Hometown Girl and "Is She Country?"

Carpenter's first album, Hometown Girl, was released in 1987. It was produced by Grammy-nominated guitarist and singer-songwriter John Jennings, with whom she had been performing in the D.C. area, and who has remained a long-time collaborator. Though songs from Hometown Girl got play on public and college radio stations, it wasn't until Columbia started promoting Carpenter as a "country" artist that she found a wider audience.[3] As Time critic Richard Corliss wrote, "She didn't go country; country went her."

For a long time, Carpenter was ambivalent about this pigeonholing, saying she preferred the term "singer-songwriter" or "slash rocker" (as in country/folk/rock.)[1] She told Rolling Stone in 1991, "I've never approached music from a categorization process, so to be a casualty of it is real disconcerting to me."

Some music critics argue that Carpenter's style covers such a wide range of influences that the question isn't even between "country" and "folk." Corliss described the songs in her album A Place in the World as "reminiscent of early Beatles or rollicking Motown,"[4] and one reviewer of Time* Sex* Love* noted the "wash of Beach Boys-style harmonies....backwards guitar loops" and use of a sitar on one track,[5] all elements that wouldn't be commonly found on a country or folk album.

In 2001, Carpenter herself definitively answered the question (though it was a kind of non-answer.) She said, "Lots of times people ask me, 'Are you still a country artist?' I have to tell them I don't know the answer."[5]


After Hometown Girl

Several years after Hometown Girl, Carpenter released the album that, to date, has been her biggest mainstream success, 1992's Come On Come On. The album's songs had the qualities that would come to identify her work: often humorous fast-paced country-rock songs, tempered by slower and softer songs that often speak to social or relational issues. One of her most widely known singles, from Come On Come On, is "Passionate Kisses" (written by fellow singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams), a song with a rock flavor musically and lyrics listing simple desires such as "a comfortable bed", "food to fill me up", and "time to think". A number of her songs speak to women, urging them on through hard times or troubled relationships. In Come On Come On's "He Thinks He'll Keep Her", co-composed by Carpenter and Don Schlitz, the singer makes the case for strength and self-respect. This was inspired by her indignance at a 1970s series of Geritol television commercials in which a man boast of his wife's seemingly limitless energy and her many accomplishments, concluding, "My wife...I think I'll keep her."

Since the success of Come On Come On, Carpenter has performed regularly on TV shows, such as Late Night with David Letterman and Austin City Limits, and at musical events across the country, including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado. She tours frequently and has remained very loyal to her hometown of Washington, DC, returning almost every summer to perform at the popular outdoor venue Wolf Trap.

As of 2006, Carpenter has released 10 solo albums. In addition to her solo work, her career has included a number of collaborations with such artists as Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, and Shawn Colvin. Carpenter is also well-known as a songwriter, writing songs for a variety of artists including friend Trisha Yearwood ("Where Are You Now") and the song "Love Goes On" as a tribute to writer Marjorie Williams, who died of cancer in 2005.


Changes in Carpenter's Recent Work

One common theme in Carpenter's 2000s-era music is that of taking life at one's own pace, rather than rampant goal-driven materialism, such as "The Long Way Home" from her 2001 album Time*Sex*Love, which pokes fun at a man who "retire(s) at thirty to his big-ass house next to the putting green." That album had a different feel musically, incorporating elaborate orchestra melodies, but with the characteristic lyrical depth. Understandably, it had less broad appeal than her earlier work. Carpenter says that this came as a surprise to her, though--explaining that, "When the record was released, I really believed there were several radio-friendly songs....it has been since proven to me that is not exactly the case." [5]

More recently, Carpenter has referred to her Come On Come On recording period as the time "when I was having songs on the airwaves,"[6] though, like the characters in her songs, that kind of goal-driven materialism doesn't seem to matter much to her anymore. (This is in stark contrast to the artist who, in 1991, was described by Rolling Stone as someone who "clearly wants broader pop success.")

In 2001, she explained that, "When I think of the artists I admire and seek out musically…. It's because I'm curious about where they're going to go the next time they have a chance to put a record out. It's not about where I find them on the radio dial, or how many records they're selling. It's more a sense that I've connected with what they have to say and it ends up being more than just a momentary connection; I want to continue to see what they have to say."[6]

Carpenter's latest album, Between Here and Gone, was released in 2004. Carpenter is currently working on a new album entitled The Calling, scheduled to be released on March 6, 2007 by Rounder Records' rock/pop imprint Zoë.


Personal life

Carpenter was married in 2002 in Virginia to a contractor, Tim Smith. They currently reside on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia and call their home "Elysium." Throughout her career, she has actively supported various charities, including CARE and Habitat for Humanity, and has conducted fundraising concerts for such causes as the elimination of landmines.

Jennifer Love Hewitt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Jennifer Love Hewitt
Born February 21, 1979 (age 27)
Waco, Texas, USA
Height 5'5.5 (166 cm)
Official site JenniferLoveHewittOnline.com
Notable roles Melinda Gordon in Ghost Whisperer;
Julie James in I Know What You Did Last Summer;
Sarah Reeves in Party of Five; Audrey Hepburn in The Audrey Hepburn Story

Jennifer Love Hewitt (born February 21, 1979) is an American actress and singer. She is well-known for her roles in the Fox television series Party of Five, as Sarah Reeves, from (1995-1999), and also starred in the I Know What You Did Last Summer films, as Julie James. Hewitt can currently be seen on the CBS television series Ghost Whisperer, as Melinda Gordon, a young newlywed who communicates with the dead. As a singer, her single "How Do I Deal" reached twenty-six on the American charts.





Biography

Early life and career

Hewitt was born in Waco, Texas to Herbert Daniel Hewitt and Patricia Mae Shipp. Her father is a technician and her mother worked as a speech pathologist. Hewitt grew up in Harker Heights, Texas. After the divorce of her parents, Hewitt and her only sibling, Todd Hewitt, were brought up by her mother. Her first name was given to her by her brother, after a girl of whom he was fond as a youngster, while her middle name, "Love", was given to her by her mother after her best friend in college.

As a young girl, Hewitt was attracted to music which led to her first encounters with the entertainment industry. At the age of three, she sang "The Greatest Love of All" (as recorded by Whitney Houston) at a livestock show. Just a year after that, at a restaurant-dance hall, she entertained an audience with her version of "Help Me Make It Through the Night". By the time she was five, Hewitt already had tap dancing and ballet in her portfolio. At nine, she became a member of the Texas Show Team (which also toured in the Soviet Union). At the age of ten, at the suggestion of talent scouts, she moved to Los Angeles, California, with her mother to pursue a career in both acting and singing.

After moving to Los Angeles, Hewitt appeared in more than twenty television commercials. Her first break came as a child actor on the Disney Channel variety show Kids Incorporated (1989-1991). In 1992, she played Pierce Brosnan's daughter in a pilot for NBC called Running Wilde, which featured Brosnan as a reporter for Auto World magazine whose stories cover his own wild auto adventures, but the series wasn't picked up and the pilot never aired. She later played on television in several short-lived series, such as Fox's Shaky Ground (1992-1993), ABC's Byrds of Paradise (1994), and McKenna (1994-1995). Finally, Hewitt became a young star after landing the role of Sarah Reeves on the popular Fox Television show Party of Five (1995-1999), joining the cast during its second season. She continued the same role in the short-lived Party of Five spinoff, Time of Your Life (1999). Hewitt was also one of the producers, but the show was cancelled after only half a season. She won sexiest woman of the year in 1997.


Film and music career

She made her film debut in the independent film Munchie (1992). Hewitt became a film star after a lead role in the horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). The film had great box-office appeal (125,000,000 U.S. dollars worldwide), and Hewitt became one of the most popular young stars in the USA (together with her co-stars: Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillippe, and Sarah Michelle Gellar). She also played in the sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). Other notable film roles included the high-school comedy Can't Hardly Wait (1998) and a starring role with Sigourney Weaver in the romantic comedy hit Heartbreakers (2001).

In 2000, Hewitt appeared in The Audrey Hepburn Story. That same year, she was the "most popular actress on television" due to her Q-rating (a measurement of a celebrity's popularity) of thirty-seven. For that reason, Nokia chose her to become its spokesperson, because of her "fresh image", and her being "a symbol of youthfulness and wholesomeness". In 2002, she was paired with Jackie Chan in the action comedy The Tuxedo which was a box office bomb.

Since September 2005, Hewitt has starred in the television series Ghost Whisperer. In Australia, Ghost Whisperer has been popular since its introduction; in the United States, the show averages 9-10 million viewers for each new episode.

To date, she has released four albums with some success, most notably in Europe and Japan. Her first album was released in Japan, where she is widely considered a pop star. Her explanation for her success in Japan is that the Japanese "love perky music. The poppier the music, the better."[1]

In March 2005, Hewitt was featured in Maxim magazine and their Girls of Maxim gallery. In May 2006, the magazine named her #29 in their Hot 100 list.


Trivia

Apparently a big fan of Sizzler restaurants. On a September 21, 2006 appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, she expressed her desire to be a spokesperson for Sizzler.[citation needed]
She has been dating actor Ross McCall[2] since January 2006.[citation needed]
Has dated singer John Mayer.[3]
Auditioned for the role of Juliet in Romeo + Juliet but lost the role last minute to Claire Danes when the director felt she was not modern enough for the part.[citation needed]
Lost the role of "Darlene" in Brokedown Palace due to scheduling conflicts with the film Can't Hardly Wait. Kate Beckinsale later got the role.[citation needed]
Was originally set to star in The Wedding Planner but was replaced by Jennifer Lopez after Lopez expressed interest in playing the part.

Charlotte Church
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Background information

Birth name Charlotte Maria Reed
Born February 21, 1986 (age 21)
Origin Cardiff, Wales, UK
Genre(s) Pop, Opera, Classical
Years active 1998-2007
Label(s) Sony BMG 1998-2006
(acquired from Sony upon merger with BMG)
Website CharlotteChurch.net

Charlotte Church (born Charlotte Maria Reed on February 21, 1986) is a Welsh pop singer and TV presenter who rose to international fame in childhood as a popular classical singer. To this date, she has sold 10 million albums worldwide.





Early life

Church was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, the capital of Wales. She was raised a Catholic by her mother, Maria, separated from her natural father. She was legally adopted by her mother's second husband, James Church. She had her first taste of stardom when she performed "Ghostbusters" at a holiday camp in Caernarfon at the age of 3, and had to be dragged from the stage when she refused to leave. Her big break came at the age of 11 when she sang "Pie Jesu" on the television show Talking Telephone Numbers in 1997, closely followed by her show-stealing performance on ITV's Big, Big Talent Show in 1998. This led to concerts at Cardiff Arms Park, Royal Albert Hall and the opening spot for Shirley Bassey in Antwerp.


Classical career

Charlotte was then introduced to the Cardiff-based impresario, Jonathan Shalit, who later became her manager, and negotiated a record contract with Sony BMG. Her breakthrough album, Voice of an Angel, showcased her unique voice in a collection of arias, sacred songs, and traditional pieces that sold millions of copies worldwide and made her the youngest artist with a No. 1 selling album to date.

Church later appeared on numerous PBS specials. Her self-titled second album included another array of operatic, religious, and traditional tracks. One track on the album, the soaring and inspirational Just Wave Hello, was the centerpiece of a millennium-themed ad campaign for the Ford Motor Company. The song's full-length video, featuring Church, won popular acclaim at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and introduced her to a new legion of fans.

In 2000, she released Dream a Dream, principally an album of Christmas carols, but including Charlotte's first foray into a more pop-influenced genre: the title track Dream a Dream, a memorable song borrowing the melody from Fauré's Pavane and featuring young American country singer Billy Gilman. Church also sung with Gilman in a duet ('Sleigh Ride') on his CD Classic Christmas.

In 2001, Charlotte Church added more pop, swing, and Broadway to her classical repertoire with her album Enchantment. That same year, movie-going audiences heard Church for the first time in the 2001 Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind. Since Celine Dion was not available to perform the film's end title song, "All Love Can Be" (Dion was beginning her concert engagement in Las Vegas), composer James Horner enlisted Charlotte to handle the vocals, and the song was re-written to Church's vocal range. Charlotte also handled other vocal passages throughout the score.

In 2002, at the age of 16, Charlotte Church released a 'best of' album called Prelude, and took part in the Royal Christmas tour alongside Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, concluding her classical music career. Her next album, Tissues and Issues, would be of a rather different genre.

Church has also sung in religious services in Taizé.


Pop career

Charlotte made her first venture out of classical music in February 2003 providing vocals for Jurgen Vries (aka DJ and producer Darren Tate's) single "The Opera Song". She was credited on the sleeve as CMC. The track reached #3 in the UK charts.

In 2005, she issued her first pop album Tissues and Issues and the first four singles have all been at least moderately successful in the UK with "Crazy Chick" reaching #2, "Call My Name" reaching #10, "Even God" reaching #17 and "Moodswings" reaching #14. Although these were released in Australia as well, they failed to reach the same level of success there, and in March 2006 it was announced that there would not be a US release of same nor any US release until a No. 1 hit was obtained.

In April of 2006 she performed three concerts in Glasgow, London, and Cardiff, in venues holding between 2,000 and 3,000 people; the dates at London and Cardiff were sold out. Supported by Irish band the New Druids, Charlotte performed mix of tracks from her debut pop album and a number of pop covers including Prince's "Kiss" and Gloria Estefan's "Rhythm is Gonna Get You." Though Church hinted at the possibility of a full tour in the future, no dates are yet scheduled.

In November of 2006 it was announced that she and Sony had parted ways. According to her publicist, this was a mutual decision reached after a series of meetings, ostensibly since her five and later six album deal had come to an end. There was some speculation that Church had decided to take a break (temporarily or permanently) from her singing career, in order to focus on her more successful television show (see below). Others suggested that the performance of her pop releases in the charts also played into the decision. [2]


Acting and television career

Church has made a number of cameo appearances on the television; she appeared on the CBS series Touched by an Angel, starred in the 1999 Christmas special of Heartbeat;, in 2003 she presented an episode of Have I Got News For You and in 2005 played herself in an episode of The Catherine Tate Show, in a sketch with the fictional character Joannie Taylor.

She made her silver screen debut in 2003's I'll Be There, co-starring and directed by Craig Ferguson. Church played the role of "Olivia," the daughter of a washed-up 80s rocker from a one-night-stand played by Ferguson. The film did not meet with widespread success, playing for only ten days in UK theaters and being released directly to video in the US.

Church will play a small role in a new film Bridge of Lies directed by Little Britain director Matt Lipsey, to be released in 2007.


The Charlotte Church Show

The Charlotte Church Show Wikinews has news related to:
Paris Hilton too costly to ridicule: Charlotte ChurchIn the summer of 2006, Charlotte began work on her own entertainment TV show, "The Charlotte Church Show." After a pilot episode which caused some controversy but which was never released to the public[1], the series began on September 1, 2006 on Channel 4.

The show, hosted by Charlotte and featuring two celebrity guests each week, involves a mixture of sketches, reality TV, interviews and music, as well as a recurring Welsh theme (the first show included a Wales vs. the World competition and a Welsh remake of Will and Grace). Denise van Outen, Michael McIntyre, Ruby Wax and Patsy Kensit were amongst the first celebrities to appear on the series.

The show has averaged 1.9 million viewers and 10% of the available audience, and on 6 October 2006, it was announced that Channel 4 had commissioned a further two series of the show. However, the show's ratings have yet to seriously compete with the well-established Friday Night with Jonathan Ross which is broadcast on BBC One in the same timeslot.[citation needed]

Church won a British Comedy Award for "Best Female Comedy Newcomer" in 2006,[2] and the 'Funniest TV Personality' award at the 2006 Loaded Magazine's 'LAFTA' awards[3].


Personal life

Church's personal life has often been portrayed in the sensationalist tabloid newspapers in the UK, rather more frequently than her career (inspiring the song "Let's Be Alone" on her album Tissues and Issues).

Revisited with particular frequency is her love life. In 2002, aged 16, she moved out of the family home to live with her boyfriend, Steven Johnson (inspiring the song "Casualty of Love", also from Tissues and Issues); the couple later split at the end of 2003. The tabloid press documented her subsequent relationship with Kyle Johnson (no relation), which ended in February 2005. The couple stated at the time that they remained friends, though shortly afterwards Johnson revealed graphic details about the couple's sex life to the press, leading to a public punch from Church, which she later admitted. The press has recently devoted much attention to Church's relationship with current boyfriend Gavin Henson, a Welsh International Rugby player: at the end of 2005, they purchased a property in her native Llandaff, Cardiff for a reported £500,000; both celebrities have since mentioned the possibility of marriage on talk shows and in the press.[4]

Other aspects of her personal life have been criticised in the press. In 2002, she was photographed smoking, and it gradually emerged that she had developed a smoking habit (another fact alluded to on her album Tissues for Issues, in the song "Confessional Song"). She has also been criticised for what the press have seen as excessive partying, with plenty of photos of the singer drunk or misbehaving adorning tabloid newspapers, including one in which she gave the photographer the finger. In more recent interviews, Church has stated that she has now stopped smoking and that her behaviour is now much more low-key.[5][6]

Church has lent her support to design limited edition T-shirts or vests for the 'Little Tee Campaign' for Breast Cancer Care which donates money for breast cancer research.[7]

She has signed a reported 6 figure deal to write her autobiography which will be published in 2007.

Liam Gallagher of the rock group Oasis is a big fan of Charlotte's, complimenting both her voice and hellraising activities. [8]


Controversy

Controversy surrounds the circumstances of the dismissal of Church's first manager, Jonathan Shalit. He was allegedly discharged from her representation in a letter faxed by Charlotte's mother; although allegations were later made by the Church family of "inappropriate tactile conduct" on the part of Mr. Shalit, nothing ever came of them. He subsequently sued for breach of contract and received an out-of-court settlement believed to be worth 2 million pounds sterling [9] (although the exact details were never released, as one of the parties to the matter was a minor and such details were protected under UK law).

Church has provoked controversy on some occasions with comments and criticisms (in an interview with Davina McCall, Charlotte agreed that being diplomatic was "not in [her] nature"[10]). Her remarks on the September 11, 2001 attacks drew some criticism [11]. More recently, the Daily Mail reported that the pilot episode of Church's new show, The Charlotte Church Show, provoked a backlash from some religious groups, as Church reportedly mocks the Roman Catholic Church and makes some controversial comments about Pope Benedict XVI, calling him a "Nazi" in reference to his compulsory time in the Hitler Youth and German Army, where he served briefly on an anti-aircraft battery.[12] One large Roman Catholic distributor of books, CDs and other goods, Ignatius Press, is reported to have pulled Church's products from its catalogue.[13]

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm

Drink 'till she's cute, but stop before the wedding

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines

Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

I'm not cheap, but I am on special this week

I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol

I intend to live forever - so far, so good

I love defenseless animals, especially in a good gravy

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

If you ain't makin' waves, you ain't kickin' hard enough!

Mental backup in progress - Do Not Disturb!

Mind Like A Steel Trap - Rusty And Illegal In 37 States

Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of.

Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have.

Televangelists: The Pro Wrestlers of religion.

The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes.

When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.

If I worked as much as others, I would do as little as they.

Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder...

24 hours in a day ... 24 beers in a case ...coincidence?

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

Many people quit looking for work when they find a job.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

When I'm not in my right mind, my left mind gets pretty crowded.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.

Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!

If you choke a smurf, what color does it turn?

Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?

What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery.

I poured Spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone.

I used to have an open mind but my brains kept falling out.

I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.

Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.

How do you tell when you run out of invisible ink?

Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them.

Laughing stock: cattle with a sense of humor.

Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

Wear short sleeves! Support your right to bare arms!

For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened, small stain.

OK, so what's the speed of dark?

Corduroy pillows: They're making headlines!

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.

Excuses are like asses everyone's got em and they all stink.

I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away... so does having no medical insurance.

I really think the Mars Rover is scouting for the next Wal-Mart Superstore site.

Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.

What we could really use is the separation of Bush and state.

Never play strip poker with a nudist, they have nothing to lose.

If you can't read this, you're illiterate.

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.

He who hesitates is boss.

As they say at the Planned Parenthood Clinic, better late than never