Jane Curtin is 63. JoAnne Worley is 73. Swoosie Kurtz is 66.
Jeff Foxworthy is 52. Some Foxworthiness:
- “I’ve been to all 50 states, and traveled this whole country, and 90 percent of the people are good folks. The rest of them take after the other side of the family.”
- “Did you know babies are nauseated by the smell of a clean shirt?’
- “Watching a baby being born is a little like watching a wet St. Bernard coming in through the cat door.”
- “If your working television sits on top of your non-working television, you might be a redneck.”
- “Now, it’s true I married my wife for her looks… but not the ones she’s been givin’ me lately.”
- “If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you’ll be going, ‘you know, we’re alright. We are dang near royalty.'”
- “You may be a redneck if… your lifetime goal is to own a fireworks stand.”
Rosie Perez is 46. Ms. Perez was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar in 1994 for Fearless.
Macy Gray is 43.
Author Alice Sebold is 47.
She was a freshman in college when one night she was attacked while she was walking home, dragged into an underground tunnel, and raped. She thought that she was going to be murdered throughout the experience. When she later talked to the police, they said that a girl had recently been murdered in that same tunnel, and so she should consider herself lucky for having survived. A few weeks later, Sebold spotted the rapist on the street, and she went to the police. He was arrested, and Sebold testified against him at the trial. The rapist was convicted and received the maximum sentence, and Sebold thought that the end of the trial would put the experience behind her.
The Writer’s Almanac (2007)
Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. Follow The Writer’s Almanac link to learn how the aftermath led to Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the best-selling book of 2002.
Author Robert M. Pirsig was born on this date in 1928.
He’s the author of the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), a book that has sold more than 5 million copies, which is a lot for a book on philosophy.
It’s an account of his road trip from Minnesota to California, and his quest to reconcile Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. The book begins:“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.
“In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. […] I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this.”
The Guardian by Joseph Mills | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
It’s a great book.
Jane Addams was born on September 6th in 1860.
Miss Addams has been called “the greatest woman in the world,” the “mother of social service,” “the greatest woman internationalist” and the “first citizen of Chicago.” With her idealism, serene, unafraid, militant, was always paramount. Devoted to the cause of social and political reform, to the betterment of the economic condition of the masses, to world peace and to internationalism, Miss Addams’s influence was world-wide. She was, perhaps, the world’s best-known and best-loved woman.
She made enemies. Her views were sometimes considered dangerously radical. Socialists and other radicals met at Hull House, and her opponents sometimes forgot that her liberal attitude in permitting such meetings did not include a membership in the groups she tolerated. In the World War her efforts for peace were unabated even when the United States entered the struggle and the wartime hysteria which ensued obscured for a time the American public’s realization of Miss Addams’s purity of purpose and character.
Above from Ms. Addams New York Times obituary in 1935.
It’s amazing how much some people resent it when you treat people less fortunate with love, care and fairness.
Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette was born on this date in 1757. Not yet 20, Lafayette was commissioned a major general in the American army by the Continental Congress. (It helped that he served without pay and funded his own troops.) Lafayette was wounded at Brandywine, served Washington loyally at Valley Forge and during an attempted cabal against the Commander-in-Chief, saved American troops and supplies in Rhode Island, was instrumental in obtaining vital French assistance from Louis XVI, and was on the field at Yorktown in 1781 when the British surrendered. By then Lafayette was 24.