from Bruce
Anecdotes
Mishaps
• Problems sometimes arose during Anna Pavlova’s tours through the United States. One theater manager proudly displayed a shiny floor that he had specially polished for her performance. Unfortunately, the floor was much too slippery to dance on, so Ms. Pavlova had it roughed up with sandpaper before her performance. On another occasion, it was too late to sandpaper a floor, so the dancers attempted to perform on it despite its slipperiness. Her dancers wet their shoes, hoping for traction, while Ms. Pavlova in desperation poured honey on her shoes in an attempt to make them stick to the floor. Nothing worked. According to dancer H. Algeranoff, “We went down like ninepins ….”
• While performing in the play Angel Street in New York, Vincent Price had the misfortune to bite into a well-frozen ice cream treat during intermission, dislodging a cap on a front tooth. Determined that the show must go on, Mr. Price lodged a wad of adhesive tape into the gap in his front teeth, then continued his performance. Unfortunately, the gap of adhesive tape came loose, flying out of his mouth during an impassioned speech and hitting his co-starring actress on her cheek. For the rest of what was supposed to be a stirring scene, Mr. Price lisped his lines.
• When the Cotton Club needed a new house band in 1927, Duke Ellington decided to audition his band for the job. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the number of musicians that the Cotton Club required, so he scrambled to add more musicians to his band. This slowed him down, and he and his band arrived for the audition two hours late. No problem. The managing owner of the Cotton Club, Harry Block, also arrived two hours late. Because all of the other bands had already auditioned, the only band Mr. Block heard was Duke Ellington’s, and he hired it.
• Ruth St. Denis was accustomed to improvise on stage, and frequently did not memorize the steps of her dances. During her duet with husband Ted Shawn in Josephine and Hippolyte, they smiled at each other and talked together throughout the dance. The audience thought they were making love talk at each other; instead, she was saying things such as “Teddy, what do I do next?” Mr. Shawn was saying things such as, “Ruthie, take six steps stage right, turn, look, hold out your arm and I’ll come back to tell you what’s after that.”
• At Stratford, Connecticut, the American Shakespeare Festival participants decided to give previews to high school students. Unfortunately, its staging of Romeo and Juliet still had a few kinks to be worked out. For example, when Romeo poisoned himself, he was standing over Juliet, who was lying on a narrow raised bier, and so when Romeo died, he fell over directly on top of Juliet because there was nowhere else to fall. Of course, the audience laughed when Juliet woke up and asked, “Where is my Romeo?”
• Zero Mostel was occasionally forced to deal with mishaps on stage. For example, in a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, the house moved every way but the one way it was supposed to move. So Mr. Mostel said in one of Tevye’s conversations with God, “Just because I didn’t pay the rent to the landlord, you don’t have to punish me.” And as the stagehands worked to fix the house, he added, “If you were a decent God, you’d put my house in order.”
• When Richard Burton was starring at the old Vic in Hamlet, John Gielgud stopped by his dressing room after a performance so that they could go out and have supper together. However, Mr. Burton took a long time changing out of his costume so Mr. Gielgud said, “I’ll go on ahead. Come when you’re better — I mean, when you’re ready!” In his book Acting Shakespeare, Mr. Gielgud calls this one of his favorite theatrical gaffes.
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© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. said:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "DEMO — Hearing Things"
Single: This is a one-sided single.
Artist: Vincent Trocchia
Artist Location: Lancaster, Ohio
Info:
“Although this is a demo, it sounds like it’s finished. It’s an excellent country song.” — Bruce
#1 COUNTRY ARTIST
Greece (unsigned), MYSPACE MUSIC
2010
WINNER
Gibson Guitar / ASCAP
Best Unsigned Songwriter Competition (Pop)
Nashville, TN
2002
WINNER
We Are Listening Songwriting Contest Series 2009
HONORABLE MENTION Billboard World Music Contest 2010
ALBUM CUT
"Back In Back Down"
Replete Brothers
Z records
2015
ALBUM CUT
"Funky Country"
Jerry Lindquvist
Rivertown
Wing Records
2010
Price: Name Your Price (Includes FREE) for track
Genre: Country
Links:
“Hearing Things”
Vincent Trocchia on Bandcamp
Vincent Trocchia on ReverbNation
Other Links:
Bruce’s Music Recommendations: FREE pdfs
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
“Businessman‘s Conspiracy”
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
An extra thick marine layer really confused the defective rooster - the sun would start to break through, and he'd start to crow, then the sun would disappear, and he'd stop mid-crow.
Kinda sounded like an old car engine that wouldn't quite turnover, every few minutes, most of the afternoon.
Practice makes perfect?
All But One
‘SNL’
After an off-season of some mystery involving several favorite performers, “Saturday Night Live” said it was returning for its 47th year this weekend with all but one of its incumbent cast members on board.
Only Beck Bennett, known for impersonations of former Vice President Mike Pence and a buff Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is exiting.
Aidy Bryant, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Kenan Thompson and Pete Davidson, all busy cast members whose returns were considered questionable, will be coming back.
The returns illustrate a new-found flexibility for the show, and its importance to NBC in a changing television environment.
Instead of demanding a full-time commitment, Michaels has been allowing cast members to take time off during the season for other projects, and that will continue this year. McKinnon is to produce and star in the upcoming Peacock series “Joe Exotic,” and Thompson’s NBC sitcom, “Kenan,” will return for a second season.
‘SNL’
Still Waits For Change
Anita Hill
America had yet to really understand sexual harassment when Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas (R-Long Dong Silver) in front of an all-male Senate panel in October 1991. He was confirmed to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s work was just beginning.
Now, three decades later, what does 65-year-old Hill wish she could have told 35-year-old Hill, the young professor in the bright blue suit who testified calmly and deliberately that day but had utterly no idea what lay ahead?
“I wish I had known then that the work would take a long time,” she says now. “That I should be patient — diligent, but patient.” As a lawyer, she had thought institutions would do their job, she says. “What I wasn’t understanding was our culture of denial.”
It’s safe to say the soft-spoken Hill, an exceedingly private person who has spent her entire adult life in the classroom, didn’t grow up planning to become an activist. But the Thomas hearings set her on a different path, and when the #MeToo reckoning exploded in 2017, she was automatically a potent symbol. She still teaches gender, race and law at Brandeis University and also chairs the Hollywood Commission, which fights harassment in the entertainment industry, along with other advocacy work.
And, she says, despite the power of millions of #MeToo tweets sharing such experiences that launched the movement in 2017, a year later at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearing, “Christine Blasey Ford testified about her own experience with sexual assault ... and the Senate seemed to refuse to even do a thorough investigation. So, it is endemic and it’s systemic.” And men can experience gender violence as well, she points out — often when they don’t conform to conventional notions of masculinity or gender expression.
Anita Hill
Guitar Sells For $900,000
Johnny Ramone
The guitar played by Johnny Ramone on all 15 Ramones albums and at nearly 2,000 live performances by the rock band sold at auction over the weekend for more than $900,000, the auctioneer said Monday.
The 1965 Mosrite Ventures II electric guitar was bought by a collector in the U.S. who wishes to remain anonymous, Boston-based RR Auction said in a statement.
Ramone, whose real name was John Cummings, bought the guitar to replace his original blue Ventures II, which was stolen, according to RR Auction.
It was played at every Ramones performance from November 1977 until his retirement in August 1996, RR said. He died in 2004.
Some of the other items sold included Johnny Ramone’s Mark-2 signature guitar for almost $50,000, and Joey Ramone’s Shure microphones from the final Ramones concert for more than $13,000.
Johnny Ramone
Series Reboot
‘Babylon 5’
A new version of the Emmy-winning space opera television series Babylon 5 is in the works. The CW has put in development Babylon 5, described as a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the critically acclaimed 1990s series, from original series creator J. Michael Straczynski and Warner Bros. Television.
Written by Straczynski, the reboot revolves around John Sheridan (played by Bruce Boxleitner in the original series), an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, who is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war. His arrival triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.
Straczynski executive produces via his Studio JMS. Warner Bros. Television is the studio.
Created by Straczynski, the original Babylon 5 debuted in 1993 with the pilot film The Gathering. A future-history story covering the years 2257-2262, with each year corresponding to one season, Babylon 5 was the first series to introduce viewers to the concept of a five-year arc, with a defined beginning, middle and end. The series launched in 1994 and ran for five seasons and 110 additional episodes. Cast included Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O’Hare, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andrea Thompson, Bill Mumy, Jason Carter, Tracy Scoggins, Stephen Furst, Patricia Tallman, Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Jeff Conaway and Robert Rusler.
Straczynski won over a dozen awards for his work on the series, including two Hugo Awards, the Saturn Award, the Space Frontier Foundation Award, and the Ray Bradbury Award. Following the original series, Straczynski continued to tell stories in the Babylon 5 universe, with the TNT series Crusade, seven subsequent feature-length films, and a series of novels, novelizations, short stories, and comics from DC.
‘Babylon 5’
Undermine Trust
Elections
The Fox News editor who parted ways with the right-wing network after calling Arizona for Joe Biden in last year's election weighed in on Sunday on the controversial audit of votes in the state conducted by Cyber Ninjas.
On CNN's "Newsroom," the host Jim Acosta asked Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News digital politics editor, about the audit in Arizona's Maricopa County.
Supporters of Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) had hyped the audit, claiming it would uncover evidence of a plot to deprive Trump of victory.
Acosta on Sunday asked Stirewalt if he felt vindicated by the result of the audit. Stirewalt replied that he didn't.
"The point of these is to undermine confidence. It's not what the finding is," Stirewalt said. "So I take no satisfaction or pleasure from seeing this outcome that roughly corresponds with the real results. They're doing their damage anyway."
Elections
Unconditional Release
Hinckley
A federal judge approved a plan Monday to unconditionally release John Hinckley Jr., who had shot and wounded former President Ronald Reagan in 1981, from all remaining court-ordered restrictions, if he continues to follow rules and agrees to undergo regular mental health examinations.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said he plans on issuing his ruling on the plan later this week, the Associated Press reported.
Hinckley, who was previously granted conditional release in 2016, was allowed to stay at his mother's home in Williamsburg, Virginia. Since then, he has been kept under regular court-ordered supervision and mandated therapy.
Hinckley, now 66, is not allowed to own a gun, contact Reagan's children, other victims or their families, or actress Jodie Foster - who he was obsessed with at the time of the 1981 shooting.
Friedman said Hinckley could be released from all court supervision by June 2022, if he continues to follow those rules.
Hinckley
Sheriff Threatened Jail
Wisconsin
A federal judge ruled that a Wisconsin sheriff violated free speech protections guaranteed by the first amendment when he asked a teen to remove an Instagram post about Covid-19 that “upset” local parents in March last year.
The teen, Amyiah Cohoon, and her parents sued the sheriff’s department after a deputy threatened to arrest family members if Amyiah did not delete an Instagram post which described her experiences when possibly infected by Covid-19. She was 16 at the time.
After receiving calls from members of the public, county health officials referred the matter to the sheriff’s office. It sent a deputy to the Cohoon household, where Amyiah’s parents were told to have her remove the post or the deputy would issue disorderly person’s citations “if not start taking people to jail”.
Amyiah took the posts down. She was then the subject of an update to parents from the local school district which described her posts as baseless rumors and “a foolish means to get attention”.
On Monday, Amyiah told the Washington Post: “All I wanted to do was let people know that I was ill at the time, because I was around a bunch of other people.”
Wisconsin
3 Mummy Faces Revealed
Egypt
The faces of three men who lived in ancient Egypt more than 2,000 years ago have been brought back to life. Digital reconstructions depict the men at age 25, based on DNA data extracted from their mummified remains.
The mummies came from Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Egyptian city on a floodplain to the south of Cairo, and they were buried between 1380 B.C. and A.D. 425. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Tübingen, Germany, sequenced the mummies' DNA in 2017; it was the first successful reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian mummy's genome, Live Science reported at the time.
And now, researchers at Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Reston, Virginia, have used that genetic data to create 3D models of the mummies' faces through a process called forensic DNA phenotyping, which uses genetic analysis to predict the shape of facial features and other aspects of a person's physical appearance.
Scientists used a phenotyping method called Snapshot to predict the men's ancestry, skin color and facial features. They found that the men had light brown skin with dark eyes and hair; overall, their genetic makeup was closer to that of modern individuals in the Mediterranean or the Middle East than it was to modern Egyptians', according to the statement.
The researchers then generated 3D meshes outlining the mummies' facial features, and calculated heat maps to highlight the differences between the three individuals and refine the details of each face. Parabon's forensic artist then combined these results with Snapshot's predictions about skin, eye and hair color.
Egypt
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