Tonight on HBO will premiere a documentary, Fall From Grace, created by Alexandra Pelosi about former Governor Jim McGreevey who came out when he was Governor of New Jersey. He resigned but for several months he became the first serving 'out Governor'. Check your local listings for this HBO documentary.
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The Happy Couple
The closet door just keeps slamming open in news divisions all over America. Quickly following in the tracks of Anderson Cooper and Sam Champion, NBC Weekend TODAY News reader Jenna Wolfe has announced that she is a lesbian. She in a relationship with NBC News Correspondent Stephanie Gosk.
She told PEOPLE magazine, "This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to us,but I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”
Wolfe and Gosk have been a couple for three years. They are currently planning a wedding in New York City.
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Well, Jon Hamm's 'biggest asset' has become a 'big problem'. The New York Daily News is reporting that the star of "Mad Men' was instructed to wear underwear on the set. Seems as if the star's huge endowment was distracting the other actors and disrupting the set. My guess is that they also insisted on briefs instead of boxers.
The Daily News Reports:
Especially causing a giggle for the crew were scenes shot in Hawaii, where Hamm lounges around sipping a cocktail in tiny shorts that leave little to the imagination.
“His privates are the inside joke,” says our source, who adds that Hamm “knows what he’s got.”
A quick Google search does show that the actor appears to go commando while not on set. There’s no shortage of images of him strolling down the street looking very healthy.
“Imagine how distracting that would be on the side of a bus or building,” laughed our source. “When the promotional pictures came back the first few seasons, we had to work with them. Everyone was concerned about too much Christina Hendricks boob, but it’s Jon that has the most to show. It’s a good problem to have.”
This is a beautiful Irish folk song about leaving the Emerald Isle and heading to America leaving behind the great love of his life - Ireland. Enjoy and have a wonderful St. Patrick's Day.
Just when I believed there was nothing more to feel or learn about the Stonewall Uprising in New York in June, 1969, along comes the off-Broadway production of 'Hit The Wall'. The astounding new play opened at the Barrow Street Theater in New York City left me laughing, crying, breathless and proud.
Simply put, you will be doing yourself a great disservice if you miss this extraordinary intimate and powerful production.
The theater has pumped new life into an old story of courage and heroism. Instead of reading or watching about Stonewall the audience actually feels what it must have been like to be there that night.
Writer Ike Holter has avoided the tendency to allow usual stereotypes to dominate and gave those characters rich and complex personalities who the audience learn to love. He makes sure we understand them and care for them before taking us into battle.
Director Eric Hoff has mounted one of the most innovative productions seen in years on such a small stage with a huge story. Hoff has done a masterful job. The brilliant use of lighting, set design and special effects makes the audience participants into that historical night. The staging of the riots and police brutality of that first night is just amazing feat for him to accomplish in such a small space with a limited cast.
The music is provided by a small 'hippie' electronic band that moves from onstage to off stage with ease. Judy Garland is remembered (who was buried the day of Stonewall) with an amazing electronic version reminisce of Jimmy Hendrix of 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow'.
None of this would have work without the outstanding ensemble cast who as a group gives us a night in the theater we will not forget. Each and everyone of them gave a great performance and dive into their characters.
The Cast
Especially shining on opening night were the performances by Nathan Lee Graham, Rania Salem Manganaro and Sean Alan Krill. The funny, hip and powerful performances by the duo Gregory Haney and Arturo Soria became the center piece of the evening. The two should have their own television show.
'Hit the Wall' will be the Barrow Street Theater until July 7th. This production is the best night you will have a long time in a theater. Don't miss it.
Alright, so for many of you I am coming out of the closet as a hopeless Elvis fan.
In my youth, he got me going with shaking his hips, his sultry looks and incredible talent. Even today listening to his music I find myself taken back into time of true greatness. The songs like "Love Me Tender" and "Can't Stop Loving You" are among my favorites. Who can't feel the urgency of "It's Now Or Never"?
Mail Online has a photo essay of Elvis of pictures taken when Elvis was just 21. The photographer Alfred Wertheimer went on the road with "The King" in 1956. Elvis had just signed his contract with RCA and had yet to make his famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
These photographs by Mr. Wertheimer will explain to you why I fell in love with the bad boy Elvis (Always loved those bad boys!).
Life Magazine has pulled from its archives unpublished photographs of the late Steve McQueen. The star was the toast of Hollywood when the magazine sent photographer John Dominis to hang out with the sexy icon for three weeks. The star's nickname was the 'king of cool'.
In the 1960's and 1970's, he was big box office.
McQueen's best known movies were The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, Papillon and The Towering Inferno. He received an nomination for an Academy Award for the Sand Pebbles.
The actor was known as a 'man's man' and was an avid race of motorcycles. He had a collection of over hundred classic cycles. McQueen lived life hard and on the edge by drinking heavy, using cocaine and smoking endlessly. He dies of cancer at the age of 50
In an article by Harry Haun for The New York Observer, he reports that Actress Judith Light is taking New York by storm. The last three years has seen one success after another. First came the Tony Award nomination for Lombardi and then the Tony Award win for Other Desert Cities. The multi-Emmy Award winning actress will appear in The Assembled Parties which opens at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on April 17.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
It was not the sort of applause that generally greets a star. It was that more rarefied kind reserved for somebody truly beloved. Last December, when Judith Light took to the stage of the New Amsterdam at The 24th Annual Gypsy of the Year competition to do what has become her regular moment-of-silence spot for those lost to AIDS, there was a massive outpouring of affection. A longtime Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS standard-bearer, she couldn’t be better cast for the bit, her voice ringing with dignity and compassion. But that reception set off in me a wave of jealousy, along with the toxic thought, “Damn! They love her as much as I do!”
Bernie Telsey, the casting director and co-founder of Manhattan Class Company, understands my petty feeling well—he doesn’t enjoy sharing Ms. Light either. On the one hand, as he counseled me last week, you’re happy that people see what you see. On the other hand, “she’s not your secret anymore.”
Mr. Telsey, who had almost everything to do with getting Ms. Light back on the Broadway track, having hired her in 1999 to replace the awesome, award-showered Kathleen Chalfant in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit, has cast Ms. Light as the honoree—“for her bold, daring, risk-taking spirit”—at MCC’s annual fund-raising gala, “Miscast 2013,” which will be held March 4 at the Hammerstein Ballroom.
She’s had three shows on the Main Stem in three seasons—pretty good hittin’ in anybody’s book, and worth celebrating—and she was a shoo-in, Mr. Telsey said, when he and his MCC partners, Robert LuPone, Will Cantler and Blake West, threw the bones on the floor. “When we talked of someone who’s touched our lives as an actress, as an ambassador for our arts and education program, it was unanimous. All four of us have that kind of relationship with her.”
Since Wit, he pointed out, she hasn’t stopped working in New York. “She’s so connected with the words that she’s saying, in whatever play, that she touches you as an audience member. When she speaks, it crosses over those footlights and lands in your lap. She’s sharing that character’s story, and you just feel connected with her.”
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TWO WEEKS DEEP INTO REHEARSAL, Ms. Light spoke of The Assembled Parties guardedly and in generalities, perhaps hoping to preserve its surprises. Act I takes place in 1980, Act II in 2000—Mr. Greenberg is fond of generation-jumping (Three Days of Rain)—and the show’s focus is how a well-to-do Jewish family fares over the decades.
“My character, in this particular play, is a woman who has made what she considers to be a terrible mistake and had to get married,” she explained. “This happens around 1949, 1950. And she is cut off by her mother, who denies her the closeness that they once had. The thing that’s happening is that Jessica Hecht’s character—my sister-in-law—does something that transforms my whole life and my whole relationship to her. The Assembled Parties is about making a relationship, and making a family, out of people who are not necessarily family. It’s about connections, making connections.” Her performance promises to be impressive, if her turn in Eric Simonson’s Lombardi two years ago is any gauge. In 244 performances, she played the ultimate in football widows, Marie (Mrs. Vince) Lombardi, who treated her loneliness with stiff drinks.
“I knew from the start—from the first reading—that she absolutely got the character,” Mr. Simonson recalled. “She understood the humor, which was key to understanding the role.””
But it wasn’t just that. “Judith was a consummate professional in rehearsal,” he said, “extremely positive in nature, never said a bad word about anybody—and the cast came to call her ‘Mom.’”
After the curtain falls or the series fails, there is still Light. When America Ferrera, her Ugly Betty co-star, did a stage turn for the Women’s Project recently in Bethany, Ms. Light led the opening-night cheering session. When Lily Rabe, her daughter in MCC’s Colder Than Here, won the Actors’ Equity Callaway Award for playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice, she was the kveller in the crowd. When Danny Pinatauro, her son for 196 Who’s the Boss? episodes, made his stage debut at the Duplex as a street hustler in The Velocity of Gary, “Mom” was down front, beaming.
Lombardi got her a Tony nomination. The Tony itself came last year for following Linda Lavin’s Off-Broadway act when Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer-contending Other Desert Cities went to Broadway: a visiting relative politically out of sync in a Republican California home, fresh out of rehab and flinging stinging zingers right and right.
Of course, none of it might have happened without Wit. “They believed in me,” Ms. Light said. “I’d done nothing on stage for 22 years, and they gave me a shot. I still remember a review I got that said, ‘This person wouldn’t be your first or your 500th choice for Wit—but, oh my goodness!’
Here is the description that came with the video:
The woman in the video found the lion, injured in the forest, on the verge of death. She took the lion home with her and nursed it back to health. Later, when the lion was better, she made arrangements with a zoo to take the lion. Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit the zoo. This video was taken when she walked up to the lion's cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion's reaction when he sees her!!
Irish Central is reporting that Daniel Day-Lewis will retire to his Wicklow Farm if he wins his third Oscar. The genius actor wants some time off. The site reports:
Set to make history as the first man to win a third best actor Oscar, Lewis has confirmed his plans for a sabbatical.
The 55-year-old star, nominated for the role of Abraham Lincoln, has told friends he does not expect to appear in another movie before he turns 60.
Instead he plans to focus on family life at his remote 50-acre estate in Co Wicklow, south of Dublin.
He has told friends he wants to: ‘learn rural skills’ such as stonemasonry.
Previously awarded an Oscar for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis has reportedly told his agents that he is on ‘sabbatical.' He currently has no films officially in production.
A third Oscar win will see Day-Lewis make history and place him above several Hollywood legends.
Spencer Tracy, Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Fredric March and Sean Penn are the other eight actors to have won two Oscars.
There is no indication of what he will do if he doesn't win the Oscar!(Photograph Below Is Wicklow Area)
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