One of my favorite villains in that egomaniacal Cruella De Vil from "101 Dalmatians." One statuette shows her with the ever present cigarette holder and the other is her morning in bed. What a gal!
The year was 2010. The Broadway Cares annual Christmas ornament was the incomparable Carol Channing as Dolly Levi in the Jerry Herman musical (with Michael Stewart providing the lyrics), "Hello Dolly." Beginning as a play in England, it was adapted into a French farce before falling into the hands of Thornton Wilder and becoming "The Merchant of Yonkers." With little success at the box-office Wilder revise it and presented it again as "The Matchmaker" in 1954 starring Ruth Gordon which in turn became a movie starring Shirley Booth in 1958. The producer David Merrick acquired the rights to make it a musical ("Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman" and "Call on Dolly" were two of the original titles) and he offered it to Ethel Merman and then Mary Martin, both of whom turned it down (Ironically, they both did it later.) To helm the project, Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins and Joe Layton were approached but with no agreement reached and ulti...
My Grandmother raised nine children, (seven girls and two boys.....my mother being the youngest.) She became a widow in 1935 when my grandfather was killed in an auto accident just north of our small town of Corbin, Kansas. From then on, she took turns living with her children for about a month at a time. Eventually, it was decided to build her a small one room house on my parents property where she could have her own space but be close at hand. (This "house" was constructed when I was thirteen or so.) A few years later, (now, in her eighties) she began receiving mail form an old beau that she had known in her youth and it soon blossomed into a certified romance. (A long distance one, but a romance nonetheless.) All of her children went into shock when she announced at the age of 89 that she and her reunited beau were going to be married! (Sadly, I no longer remember his name.... it may have been Leo.) At any rate, "Leo" made the trip from somewher...
One thing (call it a joy) that I remember from my boyhood in Corbin, Kansas was the ditch! Where I lived in that tiny town in Sumner County, there were only dirt roads. Oh, they were covered with gravel to stem erosion, I suppose, but they were still the victims of Summer downpours. And that was always a happy time for me and my friends. The closest swimming pool was miles away in Wellington and the one in Caldwell had yet to open (1956 I'm told by my friend Suzie). And if you wanted to swim in the local river (The Chikaskia), well, you needed someone to take you there...…….So, we just waited for rain. Rain that would fill the ditches and create our swimming hole. Now the ditches were not deep, ("no diving" was not even a thought) but they held enough water to cool you off and let you splash about...…..Granted, it was a tad muddy, but that came with the territory. There were several boards that spanned the ditch to enable one to cross without having t...
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