WA2K Radio is now on the air

i'm a bit late as usual, but the Dixie Chicks' tune reminded me of this reggae classic by Jimmy Cliff:

Well they tell me of a pie up in the sky
Waiting for me when I die
But between the day you're born and when you die
They never seem to hear even your cry
So as sure as the sun will shine
I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine
And then the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all
Ooh the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all

Well the oppressors are trying to keep me down
Trying to drive me underground
And they think that they have got the battle won
I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they've done
'Cause as sure as the sun will shine
I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine
And then the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all
Ooh the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you're dead you can't
But I'd rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave
So as sure as the sun will shine
I'm gonna get my share now of what's mine
And then the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all
Ooh the harder they come the harder they'll fall,
One and all...

I Always care For You

v1
What are you longing for
I'll hitch it to a shining star
Alone you only go so far
Hey you're all I'm living for

v2
If you want a helping hand
A someone to share the plan
I could be your right hand man
Be there when you make your stand

bridge
Or if you just want to earn applause
Turn your back to the righteous cause
It's not against any witness clause
You're not breaking any modern laws

chorus
I will be there for you
Any time you want me to
I'll always care for you
I'll always care for you

v3
What are you crying for
I love you like a movie star
But I'm not here to fight a war
If you're not ready to bear the scar

Chorus
I would be there for you
Any time you want me to
I'll always care for you
I'll always care for you

Bret Harte
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 - May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.




Life and career

Born in Albany, New York, Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coast town now known as Arcata, then just a mining camp on Humboldt Bay.

His first literary efforts, including poetry and prose, appeared in The Californian, an early literary journal edited by Charles Henry Webb. In 1868 he became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, but this one more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. His story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," appeared in the magazine's second edition, propelling Harte to nationwide fame.

When word of Dickens' death reached Bret Harte in July of 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly for twenty-four hours, so that he could compose the poetic tribute, Dickens in Camp. This work is considered by many of Harte's admirers as his masterpiece of verse, for its evident sincerity, the depth of feeling it displays, and the unusual quality of its poetic expression.



Determined to pursue his literary career, in 1871 he and his family traveled back East, to New York and eventually to Boston, where he contracted with a publisher for an annual salary of $10,000, "an unprecedented sum at the time."[2] His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872 he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work (or republish old), delivering lectures about the gold rush, and even selling an advertising jingle to a soap company.

In 1878 Harte was appointed to the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany and then to Glasgow in 1880. In 1885 he settled in London. During the thirty years he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing, and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work. He died in England in 1902 and is buried at Frimley. In 1987 he appeared on a $5 U.S. Postage stamp, as part of the "Great Americans" Series of issues.


Criticism

Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte's death, Mark Twain famously insults Harte, characterizing him and his writing as insincere; he criticizes the miners' dialect, claiming it never existed outside of the story ("The Luck of Roaring Camp"). Twain reserves his most damning statements for Harte's personal life, especially after Harte left the West.


Dramatic and Musical Adaptations of on Harte's work

Several film versions of The Outcasts of Poker Flat have been made, including one in 1937 with Preston Foster and another in 1952 with Dale Robertson. Tennessee's Partner (1955) with John Payne and Ronald Reagan was based on a story of the same name. Paddy Chayefsky's treatment of the film version of Paint Your Wagon seems to borrow from "Tennessee's Partner": two close friends -- one named "Pardner" -- share the same woman. The spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse is based on The Outcasts of Poker Flat and The Luck of Roaring Camp.
Operas based on The Outcasts of Poker Flat include those by Samuel Adler[1] and by Stanford Beckler.[2]

Other works

Plain Language from Truthful James, known also as The Heathen Chinee, was a satire of racial prejudice in northern California, but was embraced by the American public as a mockery of Chinese immigrants, and shaped anti-Chinese sentiment more than any other work at the time.[3]

Legacy

Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California was named after him.
A community called The Shores of Poker Flat, California claims to have been the location of Poker Flat, although it is usually accepted that the story takes place further north.

Ruby Keeler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Ethel Hilda Keeler
Born August 25, 1909
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada
Died February 28, 1993, age 83
Rancho Mirage, California, USA

Ruby Keeler, born Ethel Hilda Keeler, (August 25, 1909 - February 28, 1993), was an actress, singer, and dancer most famous for her on-screen coupling with Dick Powell in a string of successful early musicals at Warner Brothers.

Keeler was born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1909, of Irish Catholic extraction. She was the sister of minor actresses, Helen and Gertrude Keeler.

Her father was a truck driver, and when she was three years old, her family packed up and moved to New York City where he knew he could get better pay.[1] But it was not enough: there were six children, and although Keeler was interested in taking dance lessons, the family could not afford to send her.

Keeler attended St. Catherine of Siena parochial school on New York's East Side, and one period each week a dance teacher would come and teach all styles of dance. The teacher saw potential in Keeler and spoke to her mother about Ruby taking lessons at her studio. Although her mother declined, apologizing for the lack of money, the teacher wanted to work with her so badly that she asked her mother if she would bring her to a class lesson on Saturdays, and she agreed.

During the classes, a girl she danced with told her about auditions for chorus girls. The law said you had to be 16 years old, and although they were only 13, they decided to lie about their ages at the audition. It was a tap audition, and there were a lot of other talented girls there. The stage was covered, except for a wooden apron at the front. When it was Ruby's turn to dance, she asked the dance director Julian Mitchell, if she could dance on the wooden part so that her taps could be heard. He did not answer, so she went ahead, walked up to the front of the stage, and started her routine. The director said, "who said you could dance up there?" She replied, "I asked you!" and she got a job in George M. Cohan's The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923), in which she made forty-five dollars a week to help her family.[citation needed]

She was only 14 when she started working at Texas Guinan's El Fay nightclub, a speakeasy frequented by gangsters.[2] She was noticed by Broadway producer Charles Dillingham, who gave her a role in Bye Bye Bonnie, which ran for six months. She then appeared in Lucky and The Sidewalks of New York, also produced by Dillingham. In the latter show, she was seen by Flo Ziegfeld, who sent her bunch of roses and a note, "May I make you a star?". She would appear in Ziegfield's Whoopee! in 1928, but before that, she would get married to Al Jolson, the famous singer. They met in Los Angeles (not at Texas Guinan's as he would claim), where she had been sent by Loew's theaters to assist in the publicity campaign for The Jazz Singer. Their meeting was brief, but Jolson was smitten. Back in New York, he immediately proposed, but was rebuked. However, after a brief courtship Keeler relented and agreed to marry Jolson. The couple began were married in Pittsburgh on September 21, 1928 while she toured with Whoopee!;[3] she was 19 and he was 42. The marriage (during which they adopted a son) was a rocky one. They moved to California, which took her away from the limelight. In 1929, at the urging of Ziegfeld, Jolson agreed to let her travel to New York to star in Show Girl.

In 1933, producer Darryl F. Zanuck cast Keeler in the Warner Bros. musical 42nd Street appearing opposite Dick Powell and Bebe Daniels. The film was a huge success due to Busby Berkeley's lavish and innovative choreography. As a result of her performance in 42nd Street, Jack L. Warner gave Keeler a long-term contract and cast her in such hits as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Dames (1934).

After a difficult marriage, Keeler and Jolson were divorced in 1940. Keeler remarried in 1941 to John Homer Lowe. Not anxious to be a movie star, and happy in her second marriage, Keeler left show business in 1941. She went on to raise five children. Lowe died of cancer in 1969. In 1971, she came out of retirement to star in the hugely successful Broadway revival of No, No, Nanette, along with fellow Irish-Americans Helen Gallagher and Patsy Kelly. The production was directed by Keeler's 42nd Street director, Busby Berkeley. The astounding popularity of the play caused a renaissance of sorts of all things 20s and early 30s- art deco, tap dancing and Depression Era songs. Keeler, once again, was sought out for interviews; one pre-condition, however, was that she would not talk about Jolson.

Ruby Keeler was among the first tap dancing stars in motion pictures. Her style was an Irish Step. Both the shoes and the style are different from regular tap dance. In Keeler's time, instead of metal taps, the soles were wooden and hard. Buck dancers stayed in relatively the same place on stage, and their concern was the rhythm coming from their feet, rather than how they looked on stage. They stayed on the balls of their feet most of time, which meant that their torsos moved very little, and the movements were isolated to below the waist. Because of this style of movement, the early Buck dancers often appeared less graceful in comparison with later tap dancers.

Ruby Keeler died of cancer in Rancho Mirage, California, aged either 82 or 83, and was interred in the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange, California. She has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6730 Hollywood Blvd.

Van Johnson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Charles Van Johnson
Born August 25, 1916 (1916-08-25) (age 90)
Newport, Rhode Island, USA

Van Johnson (born Charles Van Johnson on August 25, 1916, in Newport, Rhode Island) is an American film and television actor and dancer.

Johnson was born to Charles E. Johnson (who was born in Sweden) and Loretta, who was of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.




Career

His acting career began in earnest in 1936 in the Broadway revue New Faces of 1936. In 1939, he landed a part in Rodgers and Hart's Too Many Girls in the role of a college boy (after being Gene Kelly's understudy in Pal Joey). RKO then signed him to a short-term contract to star in the film adaptation of the play which became Johnson's film debut. MGM picked up his contract from RKO soon after and cast him in several bit parts.

In 1942, while en route to a preview screening for Keeper of the Flame, he was involved in a car crash that left him with a metal plate in his forehead. This left him exempt from service in World War II. After this incident, MGM built up his image as the "all-American boy" by co-starring him in films with June Allyson and Esther Williams, among others. He also had his fair share of serious roles in films such as A Guy Named Joe, Week-End at the Waldorf, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Battleground.

When the studio system declined in the mid-1950s, Johnson's popularity did also. He left MGM for Columbia Pictures to co-star in The Caine Mutiny (1954) to much acclaim (His scar from the car crash is very visible in this film). Since 1960, his film career has been inconsistent. Johnson guest-starred on television shows such as Batman, Here's Lucy, and The Love Boat and in the 1970s ground breaking mini-series, Rich Man, Poor Man, with stars Peter Strauss and Nick Nolte. In 1985, he enjoyed something of a comeback. He toured with the hit Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles and appeared in a supporting role in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Van Johnson has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6600 Hollywood Blvd.


Personal life

Johnson married Eve Lynn Abbott on January 25, 1947, the day her divorce from actor Keenan Wynn was finalized. In 1999, Eve told a reporter that their marriage had been arranged by MGM because the studio "needed their star to be married to quell rumors about his sexual preferences".[1] In his 2005 biography of Louis B. Mayer, Lion of Hollywood, Scott Eyman quotes her as saying, "In retrospect I can see he (Mayer) was arranging my marriage to Van just as Universal did for Rock Hudson. That was a farce. Ours was a real marriage. I was in love with Van, but I wouldn't have married him if I'd known he was a homosexual." According to stepson Ned Wynn, the Johnsons separated in 1961 over an alleged affair by Eve with a young man, and divorced in 1968. Eve Lynn Abbott Wynn Johnson died in 2004 at the age of 90.

He is estranged from their daughter, Shuyler, born in 1948. She stated to the The Globe that he was a cold and detached father for most of her life.

He underwent treatment for skin cancer in 1963. In his later years, Johnson enjoyed a quiet life in retirement in New York.

Mel Ferrer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Birth name Melchior Gaston Ferrer
Born August 25, 1917 (1917-08-25) (age 89)
Elberon, New Jersey, US
Years active 1947 - present
Spouse(s) Barbara C. Tripp
Frances Pilchard (married twice)
Audrey Hepburn (1954-1968)
Elizabeth Soukutine

Mel Ferrer (born August 25, 1917 in Elberon, New Jersey) is an American actor, film director and film producer.





Early life

Born Melchior Gaston Ferrer into a prosperous family, his Cuban-born father a medical surgeon and his mother a prominent New York City socialite. He is the brother of noted cardiologist and educator, Dr. M. Irené Ferrer and noted surgeon, Dr. Jose M. Ferrer. Mel Ferrer was educated at private schools before attending Princeton University until his sophomore year, when he dropped out to devote more time to acting. At that time he also worked as an editor of a small Vermont newspaper and wrote a children's book, "Tito's Hats."


Career

Ferrer began acting in summer stock as a teenager and at age twenty-one was appearing on the Broadway stage as a chorus dancer, making his debut there as an actor two years later. After a bout with polio, he entered the radio world as a DJ in Texas and Arkansas, developing into a producer-director of top-rated shows for NBC in New York. He returned to Broadway and then became involved in motion pictures, directing more than ten feature films and acting in more than eighty.

In 1945 he made a modest directing debut with The Girl of the Limberlost, a low-budget black-and-white film for Columbia. He returned to Broadway to star in Strange Fruit, based on the novel by Lillian Smith. He made his screen acting debut in Lost Boundaries (1949), and as an actor is best remembered for his role of the injured puppeteer in the musical Lili (1953) (starring Leslie Caron) and as Prince Andrei in War and Peace (1956) (co-starring with his then wife, Audrey Hepburn).

Ferrer pursued limited television, doing some directing for the series The Farmer's Daughter in (1963), but it best remembered for his role opposite Jane Wyman as Angela Channing's attorney and briefly, her husband, Phillip Erikson, in Falcon Crest from 1981-1984. (Erikson met his demise in the same plane crash that killed Cliff Robertson).


Personal life

He has been married five times, most notably to actress Audrey Hepburn from 1954 to 1968, with whom he had a son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, born in 1960. He and Hepburn had acquired a home in Switzerland and after their divorce he maintained a residence in Lausanne and often worked on films in Europe. He has been married five times to four women (remarrying his first wife, Frances Pilchard, after his divorce from Barbara C. Tripp), and has five children in total by three of the marriages. He dated Tessa Kennedy, an interior designer but a married woman, before his marriage to Lisa Soukhotine in 1971.

He had two children with Frances Pilchard, of whom the eldest child died as an infant.

His sister was the famous cardiologist and educator Dr. M. Irené Ferrer, she helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram (which have become diagnostic essentials in heart treatment).

He is unrelated to actors Jose Ferrer and Miguel Ferrer.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Mel Ferrer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6268 Hollywood Blvd.

Leonard Bernstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Leonard Bernstein (IPA pronunciation: ['bɝnstaɪn])[1] (August 25, 1918 - October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, and pianist. He was the first conductor born in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim, and is known for both his conducting of the New York Philharmonic, including the acclaimed Young People's Concerts series, and his multiple compositions, including West Side Story, Candide and On the Town. He is known to baby boomers primarily as the first classical music conductor to make many television appearances, all between 1954 and 1989.




Biography

Childhood

Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 to a Jewish family from Rivne, Ukraine. His grandmother insisted his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, as they liked the name better. He had his name changed to Leonard officially when he was fifteen.[2] His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman, and initially opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein frequently took him to orchestra concerts. At a very young age, Bernstein heard a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began learning the piano. As a child, Bernstein attended the Garrison School and Boston Latin School.[3]


University

After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1934 Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with Walter Piston and was briefly associated with the Harvard Glee Club.[4] After completing his studies at Harvard he enrolled in the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he received the only "A" grade Fritz Reiner ever awarded in his class on conducting. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein also studied piano with Isabella Vengerova.[5]


Adult life

During his young adult years in New York City, Bernstein enjoyed an exuberant social life, mostly in the company of other gay young men. [6] After a long internal struggle and a turbulent on-and-off engagement, he married Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn on September 9, 1951, reportedly in order to increase his chances of obtaining the chief conducting position with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor of the New York Philharmonic and Bernstein's mentor, advised him that marrying would help counter the gossip about him and appease the conservative BSO board. [7]

Leonard and Felicia had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina. [8] During his married life, Bernstein tried to be as discreet as possible with his extramarital liaisons. But as he grew older, and as the Gay Liberation movement made great strides, Bernstein became more emboldened, eventually leaving Felicia to live with companion Tom Cothran. Some time after, Bernstein learned that his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. Bernstein moved back in with his wife and cared for her until she died. [9]

It has been suggested that Bernstein was actually bisexual (an assertion supported by comments Bernstein himself made about not preferring any particular cuisine, musical genre, or form of sex), and it has been alleged that he was conflicted between his devotion to his family and his gay desires, but Arthur Laurents (Bernstein's collaborator in West Side Story), said that Bernstein was simply "a gay man who got married. He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay." [10] Shelly Rhoades Perle, another friend of Bernstein's, said that she thought "he required men sexually and women emotionally." [11]


Career

Leonard Bernstein - 1944Bernstein was very highly regarded as a conductor, composer, and educator, and probably best known to the public as longtime music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, for conducting concerts by many of the world's leading orchestras, and for writing the music for West Side Story. He wrote three symphonies, two operas, five musicals, and numerous other pieces.


Bernstein conducting the New York City Symphony (1945)In 1940, he began his study at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer institute, Tanglewood, under the orchestra's conductor, Serge Koussevitzky. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky's conducting assistant.[12] He would later dedicate his Symphony No. 2 to Koussevitzky.[13]

On November 14, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he made his conducting debut on last minute notification, and without any rehearsal, after Bruno Walter came down with the flu. The next day, The New York Times editorial remarked, "It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves."[14]He was an immediate success and became instantly famous due to the fact that the concert was nationally broadcast. The soloist on that historic day was Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the New York Philharmonic, who played Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Since Bernstein had never conducted the work before, Bruno Walter coached him on it prior to the concert. It is possible to hear this remarkable event thanks to a transcription recording made from the CBS radio broadcast that has since been issued on CD.

After World War II Bernstein's career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1949 he conducted the world première of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen, and when Serge Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestral and conducting departments at Tanglewood, holding this position for many years.

In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives. The composer, old and frail, was unable to attend the concert, but listened to the broadcast on the radio with his wife, Harmony. They both marveled at the enthusiastic reception of his music, which had actually been written between 1897 and 1901, but until then had never been performed. Bernstein did much to promote the music of this American composer throughout his career. Ives died in 1954.

Bernstein was named Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957 and began his tenure in that position in 1958, a post he held until 1969, although he continued to conduct and make recordings with that orchestra for the rest of his life. He became a well-known figure in the US through his series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his Omnibus programs that CBS aired in the early 1950s. His first Young People's Concert was televised only a few weeks after his tenure as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic began. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. Some of his music lectures were released on records, with several of these albums winning Grammy awards. To this day, the Young People's Concerts series remains the longest running group of classical music programs ever shown on commercial television. They ran from 1958 to 1972. More than thirty years later, twenty-five of them were rebroadcast on the now-defunct cable channel Trio, and released on DVD.

In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a life-long association with Israel. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967 he conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded most of his own symphonic music with the Israel Philharmonic.


In 1959 he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS. A major highlight of the tour was Bernstein's performance of Shostakovich's fifth symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to New York, they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He made two recordings of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, and another one in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the only recording he ever made with them (along with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1, also recorded live in concerts at Orchestra Hall in Chicago at that time).

In 1960 Bernstein began the first complete cycle of recordings in stereo of all nine completed symphonies by Gustav Mahler, with the blessings of the composer's widow, Alma. The success of these recordings, along with Bernstein's concert performances, greatly revived interest in Mahler, who had briefly been music director of the New York Philharmonic late in his life. That same year, Bernstein conducted an LP of his own score for the 1944 musical On The Town, in stereo, the first such recording of the score ever made, for Columbia Masterworks Records. Unlike his later recordings of his own musicals, this was originally issued as a single LP rather than a 2-record set. It was later issued on CD. The recording featured several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

During his New York Philharmonic directorship, Bernstein was also responsible for introducing the symphonies of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen to American audiences, leading to a revival of interest in this composer whose reputation had previously been mostly regional. Bernstein recorded three of Nielsen's symphonies (Nos. 2, 4 and 5) with the Philharmonic, and recorded the composer's 3rd Symphony with a Danish orchestra after a critically-acclaimed public performance there.

In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti's production of Verdi's Falstaff, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. In 1970 he returned to the State Opera for Otto Schenk's production of Beethoven's Fidelio. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, A Quiet Place. Bernstein's final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: Following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanchina he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a stunned, but cheering audience.

Beginning in 1970, Bernstein conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he re-recorded many of the pieces that he had previously taped with the New York Philharmonic, including sets of the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann. Some of the Mahler symphony recordings from Bernstein's second cycle for Deutsche Grammophon were also made with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Later that year, Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic with such artists as Placido Domingo, who in his first television appearance performed as the tenor soloist in Beethoven's Ninth. The program, first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS on Christmas Eve 1971, was intended as a celebration of Ludwig van Beethoven's 200th birthday. The show made extensive use of the rehearsals and finished performance of the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio. Originally entitled Beethoven's Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna, the show, which won an Emmy, was telecast only once on U.S. commercial television, and remained in CBS's vaults, until it resurfaced on A&E shortly after Bernstein's death - under the new title Bernstein on Beethoven: A Celebration in Vienna. It was immediately issued on VHS under that title, and in 2005 was issued on DVD.

Bernstein was invited in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, to deliver a series of 6 lectures on music. Borrowing the title from a Charles Ives' work, he called the series "The Unanswered Question"; it is a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrows terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. Three years later, in 1976, the entire series of videotaped lectures was telecast on PBS. The lectures survive both in book and DVD form today.

In 1978, the Otto Schenk Fidelio, with Bernstein still conducting, but featuring a different cast, was filmed by Unitel. Like the program, Bernstein on Beethoven, it also was shown on A&E after his death and subsequently issued on VHS. Although the video has since long been out-of-print, it was released for the first time on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006.

In 1979 Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the first and only time, in two charity concerts. The performance, of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, was broadcast on radio, and posthumously released on CD.

He received the Kennedy Center Honors award in 1980.

On PBS in the 1980s, he was the conductor and commentator for a special series on Beethoven's music, which featured the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies, several of his overtures, and the Missa Solemnis. Actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the program, reading from Beethoven's letters.

In 1985, he conducted a complete recording of his score for West Side Story for the first and only time. The recording, much criticized for featuring what critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri te Kanawa, Jose Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless a national bestseller.

In 1989, Bernstein again conducted and recorded another complete album of one of his musicals, again featuring opera singers rather than Broadway stars. This time it was Candide, and due to the fact that the show was always intended to be an operetta, the recording was much more warmly received. It starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green, and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The Candide recording, unlike the West Side Story one, also included previously discarded numbers from the show.

A TV documentary of the West Side Story recording sessions was made, and the Candide recording was made live, in concert. This concert was eventually telecast posthumously.

On Christmas Day, 25 December 1989, Bernstein conducted the Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus (Playhouse) as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the Ode to Joy, substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy).[15] Bernstein, in the introduction to the program, said that they had "taken the liberty" of doing this because of a "most likely phony" story, apparently believed in some quarters, that Schiller wrote an "Ode to Freedom" that is now presumed lost. Bernstein's comment was, 'I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing."

Bernstein was highly-regarded as a conductor among many musicians, including the members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, evidenced by his honorary membership, the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was President, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he appeared regularly as guest conductor. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler, Aaron Copland, Johannes Brahms, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Gershwin (especially the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris), and of course with the performances of his own works. Unfortunately, Bernstein never conducted a performance of Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, nor did he ever conduct Porgy and Bess. However, he did discuss Porgy in his article, Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?, originally published in the New York Times and later reprinted in his 1959 book The Joy of Music.

He had a gift for rehearsing an entire Mahler symphony by acting out every phrase for the orchestra to convey the precise meaning, and of emitting a vocal manifestation of the effect required, with a subtly professional ear that missed nothing.

Bernstein influenced many conductors who are performing now, such as Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Carl St. Clair. Ozawa made his first network television debut as guest conductor on one of the Young People's Concerts.

Bernstein conducted his final performance at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.[16] He suffered a coughing fit in the middle of the Beethoven performance which almost caused the concert to break down. The concert was later issued on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.

He died of pneumonia and a pleural tumor just five days after retiring. A longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema from his mid-20s. Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.


Recordings

Bernstein recorded extensively from the 1950s through the 1980s. Aside from a few early recordings for RCA Victor, Bernstein recorded primarily for Columbia Masterworks Records, especially when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic. Many of these performances have been digitally remastered and reissued by Sony as part of the "Royal Edition" and "Bernstein Century" series. His later recordings (1976 onwards) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia Masterworks label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique (1976) for EMI and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1981) for Philips Records, a label joint with Deutsche Grammophon as PolyGram at that time.


In popular culture

The Seinfeld character Maestro often refers to ideas that he learned from Leonard Bernstein.
The film The Assassination of Richard Nixon depicts the character Sam Bicke, who idolizes the person and music of Leonard Bernstein, and mails Bernstein tapes explaining his disappointment in America and his justification for his planned destruction of the White House: "Mr Bernstein: I have the utmost respect for you. Your music is both pure and honest and that is why I have chosen you to present the truth about me to the world."
In the song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M., "Leonard Bernstein" is shouted when everyone stops during the last verse.
Tom Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic", published in the book "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers", deals with a meeting Bernstein held in his apartment to raise money for the Black Panther Party, and the subsequent public response.

Quotations

To composer Ned Rorem:
" The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible: you just don't meet everyone in the world

Richard Greene
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Marius Joseph Greene (25 August 1918 in Plymouth - 1 June 1985 in Norfolk) - some sources list his birthdate as 1914 - was a noted English movie and television actor. His aunt was the musical theatre actress Evie Greene. His father, Richard Abraham Greene and his mother, Kathleen Gerrard, were both actors with the Plymouth Repertory Theatre.[1] A matinee idol who appeared in more than 40 films, he was perhaps best known for the lead role in the long-running British TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, which ran 143 episodes from 1955 to 1960.

He was of Irish and Scottish Catholic extraction, being born in Plymouth, England. Son of four generations of actors, Greene was educated at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Kensington, London and left at age 18. He started off his stage career as the proverbial spear carrier in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1933. A good looking young man, Greene helped his income by modeling shirts and hats.

Greene joined the Jevan Brandon Repertory Company in 1936 where he won accolades in the same year for his part in Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears which bought him to the attention of Alexander Korda and Darryl F. Zanuck. Aged 20, he joined 20th Century Fox as a rival to MGM's Robert Taylor. His first film for Fox was John Ford's Four Men and a Prayer. Greene was a huge success, especially with female film goers who sent him mountains of fan mail which at its peak rivaled that of Fox star Tyrone Power.

Greene interrupted his acting life to serve in World War II in the Royal Armoured Corps of the Twenty Seventh Lancers where he distinguished himself and after three months went to Sandhurst and was commissioned in the 27th Lancers in May 1944 with the rank of Captain. He was relieved from duty to appear in the British propaganda films "Flying Fortress" and "Unpublished Story," in 1942, and appeared in "The Yellow Canary" while on furlough in 1943. [2] He later toured in Shaw's "Arms and the Man" entertaining the forces. Greene was discharged in December 1944 and appeared in the stage plays "Desert Rats" and "I Capture the Castle".

The war however effectively ruined Greene's rising career and though he did well in the popular Forever Amber (1947), Greene then found himself cast in a series of swashbuckling roles. Having turned away from films in favor of stage and screen and having been through a divorce from Patricia Medina, who he was married to from 1941 to 1951, Greene was cash strapped when Yeoman Films of Great Britain approached him for the lead role in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Greene took the role, and was an immediate success. It also solved all his money problems and made him into a star. Greene married Brazilian heiress Mrs.Beatriz Robledo Summers (1960 - 1980, when they separated) and together they purchased a stud farm in County Wexford, Ireland. Within five years he was listed among the top breeders of thoroughbred horses in England and Ireland. [3] He also pursued his interest in sailing, successfully competing in yacht racing. He rarely accepted roles from then onwards, seeming to lose interest in the whole industry. His unfulfilled ambition had been to ride in the (British) Grand National. Greene underwent surgery in 1982 for a brain tumor and never fully recovered. He died of cardiac arrest three years later in Norfolk.

Grandma's letter. She is eighty-eight years old and still drives her own car.

She writes:

Dear Granddaughter:

The other day I went up to our local Christian book store and saw a Honk if you love Jesus bumper sticker.
I was feeling particularly sassy that day because I had just come from a thrilling choir performance, followed by a thunderous prayer meeting.
So, I bought the sticker and put it on my bumper.
Boy, am I glad I did, what an uplifting experience that followed. I was stopped at a red light at a busy intersection, just lost in thought about the Lord and how good he is, and I didn't notice that the light had changed.
It is a good thing someone else loves Jesus because if he Hadn't honked, I'd never have noticed.
I found that lots of people love Jesus!
While I was sitting there, the guy behind started honking like crazy, and then he leaned out of his window and screamed, For the love of God!
Go! Go! Go! Jesus Christ, GO! What an exuberant cheerleader he was for Jesus!
Everyone started honking! I just leaned out my window and started waving and smiling at all those loving people. I even honked my horn a few times to share in the love!
There must have been a man from Florida back there because I heard him
Yelling something about a sunny beach.
I saw another guy waving in a funny way with only his middle finger stuck up in the air.
I asked my young teenage grandson in the back seat what that meant.
He said it was probably a Hawaiian good luck sign or something.
Well, I have never met anyone from Hawaii , so I leaned out the window and gave him the good luck sign right back.
My grandson burst out laughing. Why even he was enjoying this religious experience!!
A couple of the people were so caught up in the joy of the moment that they got out of their cars and started walking Towards me.
I bet they wanted to pray or ask what church I attended, but this is when I noticed the light had changed.
So, I waved at all my brothers and sisters grinning, and drove on through the intersection.
I noticed that I was the only car that got through the intersection before the light changed again and felt kind of sad that I had to leave them after all the love we had shared.
So I slowed the car down, leaned out the window and gave them all the Hawaiian good luck sign one last time as I drove away.


Praise the Lord for such wonderful folks!!


Will write again soon,
Love, Grandma

Good morning, WA2K listeners and contributors.

First allow me to acknowledge M.D. and edgar for their musical duo. Loved the reggae song, honu, and the lyrics are a mite familiar, but they are a great response to The Dixie Chicks.

edgar, we need a good right hand man around. Thanks, Texas.

Hawkman, we are once again delighted with your bio's and especially with your grandma story. Love it when someone clueless makes lemonade out of lemons. I can truly imagine the delight her grandson must have experienced. Hope our Raggedy did not get queasy on her merry-go-round experience and will be here to identify each celeb by photo.

Regardless of those who are not fans of Sean Connery's accent, he will always be the best James Bond to many of us.

From Diamonds are Forever, here is Shirley Bassey with the theme song.

Diamonds are forever,
They are all I need to please me,
They can stimulate and tease me,
They won't leave in the night,
I've no fear that they might desert me.
Diamonds are forever,
Hold one up and then caress it,
Touch it, stroke it and undress it,
I can see every part,
Nothing hides in the heart to hurt me.

I don't need love,
For what good will love do me?
Diamonds never lie to me,
For when love's gone,
They'll luster on.

Diamonds are forever,
Sparkling round my little finger.
Unlike men, the diamonds linger;
Men are mere mortals who
Are not worth going to your grave for.

I don't need love,
For what good will love do me?
Diamonds never lie to me,
For when love's gone,
They'll luster on.

Diamonds are forever, forever, forever.
Diamonds are forever, forever, forever.
Forever and ever.

Writer in the Sun

The days of wine and roses are distant days for me.
I dream of the last and the next affair and of girls I'll never see.
And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun,
The retired writer in the sun and I'm blue,
The retired writer in the sun.
Tonight I trod in the starlight, I excused myself with a grin.
I ponder the moon in a silver spoon and the little one 'live within.
And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun,
The retired writer in the sun.
The magazine girl poses on my glossy paper aeroplane
Too many years I spent in the City playing with Mr. Loss and Gain.
And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun,
The retired writer in the sun and I'm blue,
The retired writer in the sun.
I bathe in the sun of the morning, lemon circles swim in the tea
Fishing for time with a wishing line and throwing it back in the sea.
And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun,
The retired writer in the sun and I'm blue,
The retired writer in the sun.

Donovan

edgar, your song just gave us the answer about Donovan. Obviously, he is Donovan Leitch, Sr., Texas.

Here's an odd song by him, folks.

The continent of Atlantis was an island which lay before the great flood
in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.
So great an area of land, that from her western shores
those beautiful sailors journeyed to the South and the North Americas with ease,
in their ships with painted sails.
To the East Africa was a neighbour, across a short strait of sea miles.
The great Egyptian age is but a remnant of The Atlantian culture.
The antediluvian kings colonised the world
All the Gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis.
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth.
On board were the Twelve:
The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist,
The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though Gods they were -
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice and let us sing and dance and ring in the new
Hail Atlantis!
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be,
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be,
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be,
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.
My antediluvian baby, oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah,
I wanna see you some day
My antediluvian baby, oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah,
My antediluvian baby,
My antediluvian baby, I love you, girl,
Girl, I wanna see you some day.
My antediluvian baby, oh yeah
I wanna see you some day, oh
My antediluvian baby.
My antediluvian baby, I wanna see you
My antediluvian baby, gotta tell me where she gone
I wanna see you some day
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, oh yeah
Oh glub glub, down down, yeah
My antediluvian baby, oh yeah yeah yeah yeah

To tell the truth Letty, I prefer your hobby horse. I've been humming the "Carousel Waltz" ever since I took that spin.

Very interesting bios today, especially the part about Ruby Keeler's wooden soled shoes and Mark Twain's criticism of Bret Harte.
I have the DVD of Bernstein's recording (the way he wanted it to be heard) of West Side Story and although the critics felt the opera singers were miscast, it is an absolute joy to watch and hear.

Bret Harte; Ruby Keeler, Michael Rennie; Van Johnson; Mel Ferrer; Leonard Bernstein; Richard Greene (saw him invent the steamship in the movie "Little Old New York" on TCM - Fulton would have been flattered. I could never see anyone but Errol Flynn as Robin Hood) and "the one and only" James Bond. - <sigh>

Oops. Forgot to take Richard out of Sherwood.

Great collage today, Raggedy, and we are soooo happy that you are no longer a bull dog. Glad you added Richard because now I don't have to look for him in the forest. <smile>

Guess I'll have to re-read Bob's bio about Bret Harte as I liked his short stories, and who could forget Michael in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I think Ruby did this one originally, folks, but this is an updated version.

Come and meet those dancing feet
On the avenue I'm taking you to
Forty-Second Street
Hear the beat of dancing feet
It's the song I love the melody of
Forty-Second Street

Little nifties from the fifties, innocent and sweet
Sexy ladies from the eighties, who are indiscreet

They're side by side, they're glorified
Where the underworld can meet the elite
Forty-Second Street

Come and meet those dancing feet
On the avenue I'm taking you to
Forty-Second Street
Hear the beat of dancing feet
It's the song I love the melody of
Forty-Second Street
Little nifties from the fifties, innocent and sweet
Sexy ladies from the eighties, who are indiscreet
They're side by side, they're glorified
Where the underworld can meet the elite
Naughty, bawdy, gawdy, sporty,
Forty-Second Street.

Done in a minor key, I think.

Cathy's Clown
The Everly Brothers

[Written by Don and Phil Everly]

Don't want your love any more
Don't want your kisses that's for sure
I die each time I hear the sound
Here he comes, that's Cathy's clown

I gotta stand tall
You know a man can't crawl
For when he knows he's telling lies
And he lets them pass on by
He's not a man at all

Don't want your love any more
Don't want your kisses that's for sure
I die each time I hear the sound
Here he comes, that's Cathy's clown

When you see me shed a tear
And when you know that it's sincere
Don't you think it's kind of sad
That you're treating me so bad
Or don't you even care

Don't want your love any more
Don't want your kisses that's for sure
I die each time I hear the sound
Here he comes, that's Cathy's clown

Hey, edgar. Know that one, buddy, and speaking of clowns how about "fools"?

George Shearing and Sergio Mendes have done this song, but this version is by The Beatles.

Day after day, alone on the hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still.
But nobody wants to know him,
They can see that he's just a fool.
And he never gives an answer .....

But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

Well on his way, his head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices, talking perfectly loud.
But nobody ever hears him,
Or the sound he appears to make.
And he never seems to notice .....

But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

And nobody seems to like him,
They can't tell what he wants to do.
And he never shows his feelings,

But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down.
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning around.

Odd song, that. Wonder if there's a meaning behind it?

just sent the lyrics of this song to farmerman so his "honeybees" will get busy for him !

here it is again , sung by GLORIA GAYNOR - some honeybee ! :wink: