Gore Vidal is 86 today.
Steve Reich is 75. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:
In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.
The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.”
Ernest Evans is 70; that’s Chubby Checker. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962, though not at my high school where the Carmelite fathers decreed it too impure.
My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and
mama ain’t around
We’re gonna twisty twisty twisty
‘Til we turn the house down
Senator Jeff Bingaman is 68 today.
Roy is 67.
Siegfried & Roy met in 1957. Siegfried took a job on an ocean liner, first working as a steward. Roy got a job on the same ship as a waiter. While working one night, Roy heard people applauding and looked over to see Siegfried on a makeshift stage, taking a rabbit out of a hat. The two young men became friends and Roy began to serve as Siegfried’s assistant.
One night Siegfried asked Roy what he thought of the show. Roy got up the nerve to tell Siegfried that he found the magic a little too predictable. Astounded at Roy’s candor, especially considering he was five years Siegfried’s junior, Siegfried asked him how the show might be made better. “If you can make a rabbit and a dove appear and disappear, can you do the same with a cheetah?” Roy inquired. “In magic, anything is possible,” Siegfried responded.
As fate would have it, Roy had smuggled Chico the cheetah onboard, liberating him from the zoo. So Siegfried & Roy began to develop the magic that would become their trademark. Though the next five years were tough, traveling around Europe, playing small, unsophisticated clubs for little pay, they refused to become discouraged. Instead they focused on their magic and presentation.
Lindsey Buckingham is 62.
Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore) is 60.
Dave Winfield is 60.
A true five-tool athlete who never spent a day in the Minor Leagues, Dave Winfield played 22 seasons, earning 12 All-Star Game selections. At 6-foot-6, he was an imposing figure and a durable strongman with the rare ability to combine power and consistency. In tours of duty with six Major League teams, Winfield batted .283, hit 465 home runs and amassed 3,110 hits. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Championship in 1992.
Dennis Eckersley is 57.
Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988-93, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.
Al Sharpton is 57.
Stevie Ray Vaughan would have been 57 today. He died in 1990.
Janel Moloney of The West Wing is 42.
Gwen Stefani is 42, neither “Hollaback” nor “Girl.”
A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
Cause I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl
(A hollaback girl is a girl who lets boys do whatever, then waits for them to call, to holler back. Originally it meant a cheerleader who echoed the lead cheerleader’s call. The song uses both meanings well.)
Emily Post was born on October 3rd in 1873, thank you very much.
She taught as the basis of all correct deportment that “no one should do anything that can either annoy or offend the sensibilities of others.” Thousands found their social problems solved by her simple counsels. Her name became synonymous with good manners.
Mrs. Post’s advice was varied. She gave suggestions about how to inculcate good manners in an active 7-year-old boy and she could and did answer complicated questions about the proper way to address titled persons of Europe.
But for the most part she advised the debutante, the confused suitor and the newly married couple who wished to establish themselves in good relations with the world about them. She always avoided giving lonelyhearts advice and never suggested ways to capture a husband or wife, although many young persons found courtship easier because of what she said.
George Bancroft was born on October 3, 1800. As Secretary of the Navy, Bancroft initiated the creation of the United States Naval Academy in 1846. A historian even more than a politician, Bancroft wrote one of the first great histories of the U.S., the multi-volume History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent.
John Ross was born on October 3, 1790.
John Ross, a man with the legend touch, walked tall upon the earth and cast a long shadow. He set a precedent in democratic political history that will never be broken. By free ballot, he was elected to ten successive terms of four years each as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
He died in office as chief executive of a government fashioned after that of the United States of America.
Intellectually, he was the greatest chief in the history of the Cherokee people.. . .
John Ross stood so high in the eyes of his people that they called him Guwisguwi, the name of a rare migratory bird of large size and white or grayish plumage that had one time appeared at long intervals in the old Cherokee country.
He was only one-eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scot. He was as much a Scotsman as his great opponent, Andrew Jackson, and fought just as tenaciously. But he was forever Cherokee-minded.