Lobenthal.com

On the Thursday or Friday before Labor Day 1995,  Lee Israel leaves a message asking me to call her.  I believed that I knew what that was going to be about.  Some type of intimidation. I’d put an author’s query in the Equity newsletter re: Tallulah and Lee must have gotten wind.

Didn’t call her back and was away for the weekend.

On the evening of Labor Day, I was back in my apartment, when I screen a call from a strange voice saying that “Ann [e?] Howard” was calling, because she’d seen “your notice in the actors’ paper” and she had a story about Tallulah at the Elysee Hotel that she wanted to share.

For a moment I was taken in and all but reflexively reached to pick up the phone. By that time Ann[e?] Howard was hanging up and I was realizing that, yes, it was Lee in disguise.

A moment later: “What kind of loser. . . .?”

Not to be outdone, the next day, I called her and left a fulsome message letting her know that I’d received her call, that I’d heard so much about her from Stephan Cole  (who did like her) and please call me. Not a word about Ann [e?] Howard.  Never heard from her again.

The life of a NYC arts writer!

The Speaker understands that if Trump is allowed to extort America on a whim because Fox “News” yanked his chain —

insisting on the absolutely essential wall that somehow wasn’t essential when the GOP exerted unified control of government —

that he will do so over and over and over again.

to shut down the Mueller probe?

Increasingly it seems likely.

And Viper McConnell, deep into his soul-searching mode, is enabling Trump every step of the way.

Dems need to discuss how Trump & his handmaidens in the GOP are destroying our national security.

Extraordinary photos, design, cast of characters, historical moment—Valentin Baranovsky’s newish book of mostly photos and some text about Nureyev’s return to the Kirov stage in 1989.

So Sen. McConnell’s considering his place in history, is he?

It’s on the slag heap.

McConnell destroyed bipartisanship in the Senate, stole a Supreme Court seat, rammed through a Supreme Court justice he knew was a perjurer and a likely sex assaulter, and renewed his adamant opposition to democracy in that recent travesty op-ed he poison-penned for the Washington Post.

And a hell of a lot of other awful things.

Like keeping the government shut down, avowing his allegiance to Trump rather than to the people of the United States.

You’ve got x amount of years to do atonement, Sen. McConnell.

A majority of Americans oppose Trump holding the country hostage and have no patience with his fantasy wall and the fraudulent premises on which he’s trying to get it psuedo-funded.

repressive inertia. In his last letter, published by Ballet Review in 2004, written to his final protege Igor Markevitch in 1929, he wrote:

“One must have patience and be something of a philosopher in life to see beyond the obstacles that petty, narrow-minded people put up against all efforts to dispel the ordinary.”

It’s you who’ve lost all credibility.

P.S.

You never had any.

will be hosted by Jacques d’Amboise at the National Dance Institute February 4.

Who again is that tubercular woman howling in the street at the end of Crime and Punishment?

That’s what Trump and his retinue have turned into.