Mank on Netflix explores the mysteries of Citizen Kane
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After Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz shared the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 1941’s Citizen Kane, the wunderkind Welles sent this letter to his collaborator: “Dear Mankie, Here’s what I wanted to wire you after the Academy Dinner: ‘You can kiss my half.’ I dare to send it through the mails only now that I find it […]
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When Riddle and Ronstadt Made Beautiful Music Together
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“Who is Linda Ronstadt?” That was the question Grammy/Oscar/Emmy winning arranger Nelson Riddle asked when he hung up the phone after a conversation with Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s manager. It was May of 1982 and Riddle was no longer at the top of his game: his best years, those times when he and Frank Sinatra were recording […]
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Helping Children Understand COVID and Death
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2020 was truly the year of living dangerously. In the United States, when the final numbers are in, more than 3,000,000 will have died. Although Covid-19 claimed more than 300,000 of those lives in this country, it was not the only culprit. Deaths were up in many categories, including coronary heart disease, diabetes, and high […]
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Rituals Impact Grief Recovery after the Loss of a Loved One
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“Dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead, he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.” These words from author John Steinbeck are cynical, but revelatory: across cultures, in many different ways, we embrace rituals at the time of death. And, we bestow them freely upon the deceased, whatever […]
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The Traveling Cremains of Dorothy Parker
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Fifty-three years after her death, Dorothy Parker’s cremains have just been buried in their forever home at Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York. This protracted ordeal began on June 7, 1967 when Parker died from a heart attack in her Manhattan hotel suite. The wry author and wisecracking mainstay of the famed Algonquin Round Table […]
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