Lobenthal.com

Then-ABT David Moore was sitting by the Libermans’ pool in Litchfield County ca. 1981.

Baryshnikov also was poolside. David couldn’t help studying his boss’s feet up close.

He described them “like a little gecco, lizards that have sucking pads on the bottom of their toes so they can hold on to glass. His feet had that kind of prehensility. Part of his talent is that contact he has that enables him to hang in the air.”

Despite Misha’s pretty big arch, David thought there “wasn’t a real beauty in them” by virtue of his “short toes: he wouldn’t have done well on pointe.” Speaking visually, that is, because surely shorter, rather even toes are easier to stand up on. But optically–too short toes on pointe–not the most pleasing.

A prime factor in Baryshnikov’s utility was that his feet were “veiny: when you’ve got big, strong veins blood flows quickly.” More blood flowing = more oxygen = more energy. I’m all for it.

Darn clever, these ballet dancers: when you’re sitting next to that kind of kinetic phenomenon, you want to study how it works.

The Bros. spent $20 million to buy a tax cut for themselves of over one billion per annum.

And I bet they take their penny wrappers to the bank quite often as well.

Jon Queally at Common Dreams reports on the fleecing of our country by these sociopathic siblings.

Dr. Alvin Poussaint and Diana Sands, 1968

One of the cast members of the original Hallelujah, Baby! on Broadway recalled star Leslie Uggams:

“They would come with a new song: ‘Leslie, we’ve got to have this in the show tomorrow.’ Leslie would have that in the show tomorrow We all watched. She had it, as if she had studied it for weeks.  She would turn those wheels. I don’t know if she had somebody there on a piano working with her.”

Jonathan Swan at Axios demonstrates the way that AG Sessions has thrown any last residue of loyalty to American democracy overboard, as he put the screws on FBI head Wray to fire deputy director McCabe for the alleged crime of being married to a woman who ran for office as a Democrat. Swan reports that Wray threatened to resign if Trump and Sessions didn’t back off.

Exactly fifty years after Diana Sands played Shaw’s Saint Joan at Lincoln Center, Condola Rashad will play her this spring at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

We don’t really believe that decrepit saw that political message and diverting entertainment can’t combine? It should be tossed into the bin of received ideas we all need to de clutter from time to time.

Just rediscovered the song “Ask Yourself Why” when I saw 1969’s  La Piscine for the first time in twenty years.

Music by Michel Legrand, lyrics by the Bergmans. You can hear Ruth Price, Sally Stephens and Barbra Streisand get it into it. They’re telling us something important.

Wouldn’t it have been better for Timothee Chalamet–

instead of apparently lying about his contract preventing him from speaking out about Woody Allen but doing an end run around the issue by offering his salary to advocacy groups–

to have said that he had the greatest respect for Woody Allen as a filmmaker, was honored to be hired by him, was concerned about the allegations against him, however, and in that spirit was offering his salary?

It’s existentially OK to be ambivalent about things and to say so. But it sometimes seems that our society has become one in which any complexity of thought, emotion, judgment is to be avoided at all costs.

Whatever he actually feels about it–obviously Chalamet is being handled by handlers who thought they were being clever.

Instead, he’s made himself or been made to look too clever by half.

Even more than theater or movies, the milieu of ballet is highly tactile, highly sensuous as well as erotic.

Abuses should be curbed; power asymmetries of every sort should be remedied.

But let’s not make it something that it can’t–or even shouldn’t–be.

After what happened in Bel-Air and Santa Barbara, how can so many of the oligarchs still believe that climate change won’t touch them?