Archive for the 'Female performers' Category

Bea Arthur, 1922-2009

Saturday, April 25, 2009

I really assumed she’d live forever. Such amazing delivery and timing.

Bea Arthur, star of ‘Golden Girls’ and ‘Maude,’ dies at 86, LA Times
Golden Girl Bloopers, YouTube

on the set of Love Streams

Friday, April 10, 2009

Last week it was 1965 and John Cassavetes was driving a French journalist through the Hollywood Hills to his home, snapping his fingers along to the Beach Boys, and joking about making a musical of “Crime and Punishment.”
In the clip below nearly twenty years have passed, but this appears to be the same house from [...]

Estelle Bennett, 1942-2009

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Estelle Bennett, Ronnie Spector and Nedra Talley-Ross
Estelle Bennett, a Singer for the Ronettes, Is Dead at 67, NY Times

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Thursday, February 12, 2009

My review of Sam Staggs’ “Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life” appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. While revisiting Douglas Sirk’s film I poked around the internet a bit, and here are some findings:
Errol Morris speculates about the Ryberg Electronics label on the packing crates that Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) [...]

“Patti Lupone, she gonna beat you”

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I’ve been meaning to write about the incredible experience of being in the audience at the performance of Gypsy in which Patti Lupone battered the fourth wall into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces, but I haven’t had the time to collect my thoughts—or really, to recover. I do hope to detail the extraordinary command performance, but [...]

Leakage

Friday, December 19, 2008

Some scattered thoughts after finishing, or rather, tearing through Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. Like others, I was transfixed.
There’s something about how Sontag thinks of the mind that I found kind of haunting: “I must not do all those things so that I will not know these horrible moments when my [...]

It’s about time

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Justin Bond has a blog. A taste:
Actually my make-up was wind-swept and tear-stained already after being WHIPPED FROM PILLAR TO POST (OMG -What do you think that aphorism is referencing?) by that asshole Jack Frost when I was walking home from my shrink appointment, but DON’T EXPECT COMPLETE TRUTH in this blog and if you’ve [...]

Emily Post Studies

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

“Well,” my mother often said, “you’ll never have tea with the Queen.” This was usually in response to some breach of etiquette—elbows on the table or maybe something more indelicate like burping. It’s true that I haven’t had tea with the Queen (yet), but I did just review Laura Claridge’s Emily Post: Daughter of the [...]

“Miss Lachrymose”

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

In her very first stage appearance Doris Day wet herself. It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red satin pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her.
The rest [...]

Estelle Getty, 1923-2008

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Getty was evasive about her height, acknowledging only that she was “under 5 feet and under 100 pounds.”
Estelle Getty, Actress, Dies at 84, New York Times