A very nice recap of the past year!! A musical of sorts
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Eartha Kitt
Eartha Kitt
An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, a pregnancy resulting from the rape by a white plantation owner and a sharecropper mother of African-American and Cherokee Native American descent. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine, and at 15 she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways. By the 1950s, however, she had sung and danced her way out of poverty and into the spotlight: performing with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe on a European tour, soloing at a Paris night club and becoming the toast of the Continent. Orson Welles called her "the most exciting girl in the world". She speaks out on hard issues and plays no favorites; at one point, she drew flak from blacks by working throughout South Africa and reveling in her treatment there as an honorary white.
Watch the video “I Want to be Evil”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ5VaBgXzuM
Friday, January 2, 2009
Odetta
Odetta Dies at 77
Listen to NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97735199
Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.
Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. “All of the songs Odetta sings,” she replied.
One of those songs was “I’m on My Way,” sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word,” Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, “Oh Freedom,” which is rooted in slavery: “Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.”
Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.
“They were liberation songs,” she said in the interview with The Times. She added: “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”
Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later Odetta discovered that she could sing.
“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”
She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.
“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.
"Sunny" von Bulow Dies after Years in a Coma
NEW YORK – Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, an heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged in a pair of sensational trials were two murder attempts by her husband, died Saturday at age 76.
She died at a nursing home in New York, her children said in a statement issued by family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.
Sunny von Bulow was a personification of romantic notions about high society — a stunning heiress who brought her American millions to marriages with men who gave her honored old European names.
But she ended her days in a coma, showing no sign of awareness as she was visited by her children and tended around the clock by nurses. In the 1980s, she was the offstage presence that haunted her husband's two sensational trials in Newport and Providence, R.I. At the first trial, in 1982, Claus von Bulow was convicted of trying twice to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I. That verdict was thrown out on appeal, and he was acquitted at a second trial in 1985.
The murder case split Newport society, produced lurid headlines and was later made into the 1990 film, "Reversal of Fortune," starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons.
Claus von Bulow is now living in London, "mostly taking care of his grandchildren," said Alan Dershowitz, the defense lawyer who handled the appeal and won his acquittal at the second trial. He wrote the book "Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case," on which the movie was based.
Dershowitz said there was "overwhelming" evidence that her coma was self-induced — caused by a "large ingestion of drugs, and Claus had nothing to do with it," Dershowitz said.
"There are no winners in a case like this," he added.
Claus von Bulow's main accusers were his wife's children by a previous marriage to Austrian Prince Alfred von Auersperg — Princess Annie-Laurie "Ala" von Auersperg Isham and Prince Alexander von Auersperg. They renewed the charges against their stepfather in a civil lawsuit a month after his acquittal.
Two years later, Claus von Bulow agreed to give up any claims to his wife's estimated $25 million-to-$40 million fortune and to the $120,000-a-year income of a trust she set up for him. He also agreed to divorce her, leave the country and never profit from their story.
Sales of Sunny von Bulow's property brought $4.2 million from her oceanfront estate in Newport, $6.25 million from her 12-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and $11.5 million from the art and antiques from the homes.
Prosecutors contended that Claus von Bulow wanted to get rid of his wife to inherit a large chunk of her wealth and be free to marry a mistress. The defense countered by painting Sunny von Bulow, who suffered from low blood sugar, as an alcoholic and pill popper who drank herself into a coma.
Claus Von Bulow was accused of injecting his wife with insulin first in December 1979, causing a coma from which she revived. Prosecutors said he tried again a year later, on Dec. 21, 1980, and the 49-year-old heiress fell into what her children on Saturday called "a persistent vegetative state."
Her world was reduced to a private, guarded room in the Harkness Pavilion and later the McKeen Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She died at the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, her family said. Her doctor testified that the cost of maintaining her was $375,000 the first year, 1981. No figures were available for the years that followed, but by the early 1990s, room charges were up to about $1,500 a day — $547,000 a year — plus $200,000 to $300,000 for round-the-clock private nursing.
She was born Martha Sharp Crawford aboard a railcar in Manassas, Va., on Sept. 1, 1932, daughter of utilities tycoon George Crawford, who died when she was 4.
Sunny, nicknamed for her disposition, was raised by her mother in New York City.
While touring Europe with her mother, she met Prince Alfred von Auersperg, who was younger, penniless and working as a tennis pro at an Austrian resort catering to rich Americans. They were married in 1957 and divorced eight years later after she returned alone to New York with their young son and daughter.
On June 6, 1966, she married von Bulow, who then quit his job as an aide to oilman J. Paul Getty. He could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday. In addition to her two children from her first marriage, Sunny von Bulow is survived by Cosima Pavoncelli, a daughter from her marriage to von Bulow. Pavoncelli sided with her father during the trials.
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