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Dody Goodman, Dody Goodman

I was saddened to see that Dody Goodman passed away (age 93). I loved her on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman where she played the ditzy, dizzy mother. And that voice. She was so vaudeville.

She started out as a serious ballet dancer and in her NYT obit there is a reference to her still being able to do a high kick over her head at age 85; Work!
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There is an excellent documentary about Stax Records where Hayes was a resident producer/writer/artist that shows his brilliant non-conformist career in sharp relief. The whole label was a kind of anti-Motown aesthetic and the documentary has a lot of footage from the Wattstax event. The whole label was one of the early totally self-determining efforts to crash through the White Order's recording business monolith ( and Stax was founded by a small clique of southern white folk! ). They had a brilliant recording formula that put the bass and drums/rhythm section on top of the mix which went against everyone else's production laws at the time. Hayes was one of the artists that took the label into outerspace as far as wide spread popularity goes. He really changed many later artist's approaches to recording.
I don't know if it's the same documentary that you talk about Seven, but I saw a docu on PBS where I live about the history of Stax records. I loved it and I love the Stax sound, the show had a lot of Otis Redding in it.

RIP Isaac Hayes,, love your music and talent.

PS-I once saw an episode of the UK"s Graham Norton where Hayes was the guest. Hayes was cool.
French Quarter residents and her many fans mourn the passing today of Ruth Moulton aka Ruthie the Duck Girl..

quote:

"For almost 50 years, she has been a living, loopy, ambulatory French Quarter landmark: Miss Ruthie the Duck Girl, a sidewalk sideshow followed by waddling water fowl and wide-eyed tourists. For a while, she was Ruthie on wheels, roller-skating to the beat of a different drummer. And she's also been Ruthie the wild bride of the streets, trailing veils as she makes her rounds, cadging beers and smokes "for later," smilingly sweet one moment, cursing a blue streak the next. ...Outlandish and capricious, she's the last of the great Quarter characters, an eccentric on a scale both lowly and grand..."
~ David Cuthbert, The Times Picayune


http://www.eccentricneworleans.com/ruthie.htm

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not sure any/many of you m'boarders knew him
but it's with such sadness and thru many tears
that i post this picture of my dear friend,
Stephen O. Price aka the Stevelady.

the original miss trannyshack from 1996.
an elegant, glamourous, wonderful human being.
so funny. SO fierce!!!
succumbed to cancer yesterday afternoon.
RIP, la lady... i'll miss you so much.

[IMG]Photobucket[/IMG]
John Lyon Burnside III, longtime partner of Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay, died peacefully in San Francisco on September 14 at the age of 91. The cause of death was an extremely aggressive form of glioblastoma brain cancer. Hay, who many consider the founder of the modern gay liberation movement, died in 2002 at the age of 90 from a tumor in the lungs.
More on John Burnside's passing:

http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20127430&BR...dept_id=568862&rfi=6
(from a post Armen Ra put up on another site)

THE GREAT YMA SUMAC! R.I.P.

Legendary soprano Yma Sumac, the "Peruvian Songbird who dazzled music lovers in the 1950s and 60s with her incredible range, died at an assisted living facility in Los Angeles, her website said Monday. She was 86.

"It is with deep sadness, that we report that Yma Sumac passed away at 11 am on Saturday November 1st. It was peaceful. Those closest to her were at her side," said a website statement.

The Los Angeles Times said Sumac, who had been living in Los Angeles for the past 60 years, died of cancer.

Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, in Peru, but rose to fame through her golden vocals in the Hollywood of the 1950s, where she took the name of Yma Sumac, or "how pretty" in Inca's Quechua language.

The Peruvian Songbird, as she became known, traveled across Europe and Japan presenting herself as an Inca priestess and astounding audiences with her five-octave range.

She acted with Charlton Heston in the 1953 film "The Secret of the Inca," and cut numerous records with her unique style combining folk music, jazz, salsa and even rock 'n' roll that made her both famous and critically acclaimed.

"Yma Sumac has a voice totally out of the ordinary," said Lyrical Association of Peru president Enrique Bernales.

He told Lima's radio RPP she had a range of five-octaves, "the only known voice in the 20th century capable of such a wonder ... she was never out of tune, with all the notes precise in tone and register.
"
"She is the only Peruvian whose name is written in Hollywood's Walk of Fame," another Lima radio station said Monday, remembering Sumac.

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said it would place flowers on the Peruvian Songbird's star in the fabled sidewalk, and called on all her fans to do likewise.

Her website said that Sumac will have a private funeral and be buried at a Hollywood cemetery.

When asked recently how she would like to be remembered, Sumac said: "That I made good music and brought happiness to people's hearts.
"
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Miriam Makeba dies after collapsing on stage

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who wooed the world with her sultry voice but was banned from her own country for more than 30 years under apartheid, died after collapsing on stage in Italy. She was 76.

In her dazzling career, Makeba performed with musical legends from around the world -- jazz maestros Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon -- and sang for world leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us," Mandela said in a statement.
He said it was "fitting" that her last moments were spent on stage.

The Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno, near the southern city of Naples, said Makeba died early Monday of a heart attack.
Makeba collapsed on stage Sunday night after singing one of her most famous hits, "Pata Pata," her family said in a statement. Her grandson, Nelson Lumumba Lee, was with her as well as her longtime friend, Italian promoter Roberto Meglioli.

"Whilst this great lady was alive she would say: 'I will sing until the last day of my life,' " the statement said.

Castel Volturno Mayor Francesco Nuzzo said Makeba sang at a concert in solidarity with six immigrants from Ghana who were shot to death in September in the town, an attack that investigators have blamed on organized crime.

The death of "Mama Africa," as she was known, plunged South Africa into shock and mourning.
"One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing," Foreign Affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said in a statement.
"Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song."

Makeba wrote in her 1987 memoirs that friends and relatives who first encouraged her to perform compared her voice to that of a nightingale. With her distinctive style combining jazz with folk with South African township rhythms, she was often called "The Empress of African Song."

The first African woman to win a Grammy award, Makeba started singing in Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan neighborhood of Johannesburg that was a cultural hotspot in the 1950s before its black residents were forcibly removed by the apartheid government.

She then teamed up with South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela -- later her first husband -- and her rise to international prominence started when she starred in the anti-apartheid documentary "Come Back, Africa" in 1959.

When she tried to fly home for her mother's funeral the following year, she discovered her passport had been revoked. It was 30 years before she was allowed to return.

In 1963, Makeba appeared before the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. The South African government responded by banning her records, including hits like "Pata Pata," "The Click Song" ("Qongqothwane" in Xhosa), and "Malaika."

"Pata Pata" became a Top 20 U.S. hit in 1967.
Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording in 1966 together with Belafonte for "An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba." The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

Thanks to her close relationship with Belafonte, she received star status in the United States and performed for President Kennedy at his birthday party in 1962. But she fell briefly out of favor when she married black power activist Stokely Carmichael -- later known as Kwame Ture -- and moved to Guinea in the late 1960s.

Besides working with Simone and Gillespie, she also appeared with Paul Simon at his "Graceland" concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.
After three decades abroad, Makeba was invited back to South Africa by Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon, shortly after his release from prison in 1990 as white racist rule crumbled.
"It was like a revival," she said about going home. "My music having been banned for so long, that people still felt the same way about me was too much for me. I just went home and I cried."

Makeba courted controversy by lending support to dictators such as Togo's Gnassingbe Eyadema and Felix Houphouet-Boigny from Ivory Coast, performing at political campaigns for the veteran leaders even as they were violently suppressing the movements for democracy that swept West Africa in the early 90s.
The first person to give her refuge was Guinea's former President Ahmed Sekou Toure who was accused in the slaughtering of 10 percent of the population.

Makeba, though, insisted that her songs were not deliberately political.
"I'm not a political singer," she insisted in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper earlier this year. "I don't know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us -- especially the things that hurt us."

Makeba announced her retirement three years ago, but despite a series of farewell concerts she never stopped performing. When she turned 75 last year, she said she would sing for as long as possible.

Makeba is survived by her grandchildren, Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Monique Lee, and her great-grandchildren Lindelani, Ayanda and Kwame.
Bettie was like the Einstien of 20th century sexuality.


Here's the NYTimes' obit, the quote at the end says it all.


Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies at 85
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: December 11, 2008
Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.
Her death was reported by her agent, Mark Roesler, on Ms. Page’s Web site, bettiepage.com.
Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20 years, had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to be released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of CMG Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she died.
In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography investigators.
But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.
Then in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later movie character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer’s girlfriend. Fashion designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs, reincarnated Bettie in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore, Madonna and others appeared in Page-like photos.
There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts and beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan clubs sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared, including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide said in 2006.
Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in 1996. It was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson.
A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in 2006, adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May Page was born in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page’s six children. The father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters, Ms. Page said years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10. She and some of her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She attended high school in Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student, graduating second in her class.
She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn’t control my students, especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy Neal in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a few years. She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes.
She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting that changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup portfolio. By 1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw, who ran a mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page image with spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager’s pictures featured her in jungle shots, with and without leopards skins.
Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name was often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree. Money and offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was becoming depressed.
In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures drove her to quit modeling two years later. She moved to Florida. Subsequent marriages to Armond Walterson and Harry Lear ended in divorce, and there were no children. She moved to California in 1978.
For years Ms. Page lived on Social Security benefits. After a nervous breakdown, she was arrested for an attack on a landlady, but was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a California mental institution. She emerged years later as a born-again Christian, immersing herself in Bible studies and serving as an adviser to the Billy Graham Crusade.
In recent years, she had lived in Southern California on the proceeds of her revival. Occasionally, she gave interviews in her gentle Southern drawl, but largely stayed out of the public eye — and steadfastly refused to be photographed.
“I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
BEAMS to the the one and only PURRfectly divine Eartha Kitt.

Eartha Kitt, Singer And Dancer, Dies At 81
by POLLY ANDERSON

NEW YORK — Eartha Kitt, the self-proclaimed "sex kitten" whose sultry voice and catlike purr attracted fans even as she neared 80, has died. The singer, dancer and actress was 81.

Family spokesman Andrew Freedman said Kitt, who was recently treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, died Thursday in Connecticut of colon cancer.

Dubbed the "most exciting woman in the world" by Orson Welles, Kitt's career spanned six decades, from her start as a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham troupe to cabarets and acting and singing on stage, in movies and on television.

She won two Emmys, and was also nominated for several Tonys and two Grammys.

Kitt was featured on the cover of her 2001 book, "Rejuvenate," a guide to staying physically fit, in a long, curve-hugging black dress with a figure that some 20-year-old women would envy. She also wrote three autobiographies.

She persevered through an unhappy childhood as a mixed-race daughter of the South, and made headlines in the 1960s for denouncing the Vietnam War during a visit to the White House.

Her first album, "RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt," was released in 1954. It featured songs such as "I Want to Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon" and the saucy gold digger's theme song, "Santa Baby," which is revived on radio each Christmas.

The following year, the record company released "That Bad Eartha," which featured "Let's Do It," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."

After becoming a hit singing "Monotonous" in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1952," Kitt appeared in "Mrs. Patterson" in 1954-55. (Some references say she earned a Tony nomination for "Mrs. Patterson," but only winners were publicly announced at that time.) She also made appearances in "Shinbone Alley" and "The Owl and the Pussycat."

She was the sexy Catwoman on the popular "Batman" TV series in 1967-68, replacing Julie Newmar, who originated the role. A guest appearance on an episode of "I Spy" brought Kitt an Emmy nomination in 1966.

In 1996, Kitt was nominated for a Grammy in the category of traditional pop vocal performance for her album "Back in Business." She also had been nominated in the children's recording category for the 1969 record, "Folk Tales of the Tribes of Africa."

Kitt also acted in movies, playing the lead female role opposite Nat King Cole in "St. Louis Blues" in 1958. She more recently appeared in "Boomerang" and "Harriet the Spy" in the 1990s.

"Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland," she said in a 1996 Associated Press interview. "It depends so much on gadgetry and flash now. You don't have to have talent to be in the business today.

"I think we had to have something to offer, if you wanted to be recognized as worth paying for."

Kitt was plainspoken about causes she believed in. Her anti-war comments at the White House came as she attended a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson.

"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she told the group of about 50 women. "They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."

For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA, which allegedly found her to be foul-mouthed and promiscuous.

"The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth _ in a country that says you're entitled to tell the truth _ you get your face slapped and you get put out of work," Kitt told Essence magazine two decades later.

In 1978, Kitt returned to Broadway in the musical "Timbuktu!" _ which brought her a Tony nomination _ and was invited back to the White House by President Jimmy Carter.

In 2000, Kitt earned another Tony nomination for "The Wild Party." She played the fairy godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" in 2002.

As recently as October 2003, she was on Broadway after replacing Chita Rivera in a revival of "Nine." She also gained new fans as the voice of Yzma in the 2000 Disney animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove," and won two Emmys for her voice work in "The Emperor's New School."

Kitt was born in North, S.C., and her road to fame was the stuff of storybooks. In her autobiography, she wrote that her mother was black and Cherokee while her father was white, and she was left to live with relatives after her mother's new husband objected to taking in a mixed-race girl.

An aunt eventually brought her to live in New York, where she attended the High School of Performing Arts, later dropping out to take various odd jobs.

By chance, she dropped by an audition for the dance group run by Dunham, a pioneering African-American dancer. In 1946, Kitt was one of the Sans-Souci Singers in Dunham's Broadway production "Bal Negre."

Kitt's travels with the Dunham troupe landed her a gig in a Paris nightclub in the early 1950s. Kitt was spotted by Welles, who cast her in his Paris stage production of "Faust." That led to a role in "New Faces of 1952," which featured such other stars-to-be as Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde and, as a writer, Mel Brooks.

In 1960, she married Bill McDonald but divorced him after the birth of their daughter, Kitt.

While on stage, she was daringly sexy and always flirtatious. Offstage, however, Kitt described herself as shy and almost reclusive, remnants of feeling unwanted and unloved as a child. She referred to herself as "that little urchin cotton-picker from the South, Eartha Mae."
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