Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 14th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.
AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.
Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Arthur Laurents: 1917. The three-time Tony Award winning playwright, director and screenwriter started out by writing scripts for radio shows and training films for the U.S. Army during World War II. One photograph of GIs in the South Pacific jungle inspired him to write Home of the Brave about anti-Semitism in the military. The play opened on Broadway in 1945 and ran for sixty nine performances. (When the play was adapted for the 1949 film, the topic switched from anti-Semitic to anti-black bigotry.) That first run wasn’t a long one, but its controversial subject would come back to haunt him later when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was placed on the infamous entertainment blacklist during the McCarthy red scare.
His tenure on the list was relatively brief, and by the mid-1050s, Laurents was in Broadway and Hollywood’s good graces again. Good thing, because he went on to write West Side Story and Gypsy, and the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. He also wrote the scripts for the films The Way We Were and The Turning Point, and directed the 1983 stage production of La Cage Aux Folles. Laurents died just this past May in New York of pneumonia at the age of 93. His partner of more than fifty years, Tom Hatcher, had preceded him in 2006. In honor of Laurents’s career, the lights on Broadway were dimmed at 8:00 p.m. on May 6, 2011.
My Mom: 1940. Happy Birthday Mom!
Jane Lynch: 1960. Nobody does bitter sarcasm like Jane Lynch. Since 2009, she has played the role of Sue Sylvester on Glee, where her Emmy- and a Golden Globe-winning performance is the only rational reason why anyone would want to watch Glee (in my opinion at least). She has also appeared in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and has a recurring role in The L Word. In 2010, Lynch married clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Embry in Sunderland Massachusetts. You can see their video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project here. Just this past Wednesday, it was announced that Lynch joined tennis legend Billie Jean King and a handful of other celebrities to form LPAC, which bills itself as “the first of it’s kind Lesbian Political Action Committee.”
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
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Lindoro Almaviva
July 14th, 2012
Happy birthday to your mom and mine!
MJC
July 14th, 2012
The Hitchcock film is _Rope_, not _The Rope_. Laurents was still directing right up until his death…amazing.
Reed Boyer
July 14th, 2012
Happy Birthday to your Mom. My own (born 1935) passed away unexpectedly August 1 last year (two weeks before her birthday). It’s become my habit to keep track of everyone else’s parental birthdays and annoy them by urging them to “do something splendid for the parent.” You are thus duly noodged.
And a happy Bastille Day to all – the day my late other half and I used as “our anniversary.”
We didn’t move in together until nearly a year after we met. We counted back and realized (as we were painting the apartment July 4th weekend)) that it was close to a year since we’d met – and there was a one-week gap between meeting the first time and seeing each other the second time . . .
We settled on July 14th. I say that it was because “it’s French” (“the hated French” are my people) and he liked being able to re-use the red, white, and blue decor and bunting from the 4th. And so it went for 18+ years, becoming a little more over-the-top each time.
This year would have been our 25th. So I’ve raided the local 99 cent store – and the bunting was a great excuse for a proper house-cleaning.
And because Merced (“nexus of all that is strange”) has no AIDS Walk, and I always bitch about the LifeCycle Ride sucking money to L.A. and S.F., I’m sponsoring a friend in the SF AIDS Walk this weekend. They share knowledge and staff from UC SF with Fresno (our nearest public HIV/AIDS management clinic/resource). And he’ll arrive to find that his apartment entrance has been “bunted” within an inch of a fare-thee-well.
Have a splendid Bastille Day, for tomorrow is St. Swithin’s Day, and God only knows if it will rain in England this year:
“St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.’
St. Swithin was akin to being the Puxatawney Phil of apple-farming weather prognostication.
And for St. Swithin’s Day, a (different) friend and I are driving over to Yosemite, for Merced is “the gateway to Yosemite” and I haven’t been over there in more 20 years.
Thanks for letting me consider this my open thread for the day. You always extend the invitation, and I decided to just go ahead and sprawl out all over the place. That’s what’s happening in my world.
mikeksf
July 14th, 2012
Nice sprawl, Reed.
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