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when they’re being interviewed.

Sit still, cinmematic luminaries.

Watch Tebaldi’s 1967 interview on the Bell Telephone Hour.

Interesting that Meryl Streep doesn’t squirm when she discusses Callas.

Echt ballet, echt American Ballet Theatre, 1987.

Just came across a snapshot I’d taken in Los Angeles in March of that year.

I was there on some Radical Rags business. ABT was there as part of its annual marathon four-month tour, that usually began in Washington, D.C. in December and ended there in April. Grueling for the dancers, but also great because they had so many performances.

Tchernichova and Leslie Browne were sharing a motel suite in Wilshire, some ways from the Shrine Auditorium, where they were in residence for a full three weeks. Ballet still had cultural heft then, crossover oomph. It was during ABT’s run that Martine van Hamel filmed an excerpt from Sleeping Beauty for the movie Little Nikita. Together with ABT’s Michael Owen, Robert Hill, Christine Dunham.

In their hotel suite, I saw an anonymous motel bureau enlivened by a incongruous concatenation: Browne’s flowers from the night before, plopped into a garbage pail drafted into makeshift service as a vase. And next to it an array of pointe shoes lined up in formation.

It was so echt I had to take a snapshot. May put it up but it’s too dark perhaps to register much.

We’ve just heard the incredible news that Rep. Neal turned down New York State’s offer of Trump’s tax returns because it might look, as if such a thing was possible after Trump, “unseemly.”

Pelosi is chilling the Democrat’s efforts to bring Trump to justice and head off a dictatorship. She simply doesn’t get it. She must be overruled by the caucus.

He is harboring and paying a six-figure salary to a scofflaw who is defying a legal subpoena.

has done it again!

Bravi and thank you from the bottom of our hearts, Great Britain.

Love & gratitude,
United States of America.

The exhibition catalogue for FIT’s upcoming show “Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse” can now be pre-ordered on Amazon.

The book comes out from Vendome Pess in October, the exhibit opens early next year.

In the catalogue, you’ll read my “Dryads of West 55th Street” essay, in which you discover how:

“The curtain was always up: offstage during the 1950s, ballerinas of New York City Ballet (NYCB) employed sartorial strategies designed to sustain theatrical illusion. They costumed themselves as exponents of a chic and an allure distinct from but coextensive with their balletic identities.”

Dauphin Jared defends his travesty of a peace plan by saying “I am not here to be trusted.”

Culturally, Trump, his family and administration are like a more expensively-dressed version of the Beverly Hillbillies. He’s both remaking America in his own image and bringing to super nova fulfillment long-standing traits in our national character. And as well, he’s perpetuating the right-wing’s four-decade campaign to make America more ignorant, more arts-intolerant, more illiterate and thus more obedient.

At the History News Network, Walter G. Moss describes the links between “Donald Trump, The Humanities, and the Decline of American Values.”

This is one reason, btw, why ballet and opera are in so much trouble. I want to talk more about that later.

Bravo to Moss for bringing up a subject that most writers are afraid to approach for fear of being labelled effete or elitist in some way.

I mean, when you don’t have facts or truth on your side, what do you do?
You yell.

Rep. Jordan isn’t as shrill as Lindsay Graham, but he’s just as preposterous, dishonest, and seditious. And loud, too.

Jimbo gave America another dose of his hectoring show trial assault on American democracy on ABC News today, bellowing leading, tendentious lies about Mueller and his investiation.

Impeach ’em all.

Draft-dodgers Donald Trump and John Bolton are intent on tricking us into war with Iran.

Since, as we all know, sex is at the root of everything, it would be interesting to mark-up a sexual profile of these two old men who cannot wait to send a lot of young men and women to their death needlessly.

And let’s not forget Mike Pompeo.

Combat veteran, Massachusetts Rep. and presidential contender Seth Moulton is spot on when he tells Jake Tapper:

“The parallels between how the Bush Administration pushed us into war with Iraq and how the Trump Administration under a draft-dodging commander-in-chief is pushing us into war with Iran parallel with Vietnam with what Bolton and Pompeo are trying to do. . . put enough troops in the gulf that there’s a good chance there will be the kind of interaction, an altercation that set off Vietnam, that that will set off war with Iran.”