Hoist those skirts a little higher!!!!
 

Well, I’m another day late again, and I’m, once again, sad to have to report another loss from the music world. We lost Gordon Lightfoot yesterday. He had numerous hits in the 70’s and early 80’s, most notably, “If You Could Read My Mind”, “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”, and “Sundown”. Gord was 84 years old and considered by many to be one of the very best of the singer-songwriter generation….a real icon!!!

Rest in peace, Gord, and thank you for all of the great music you gave us. :heartbeat:

~Theo~ :bouquet:

Early Morning Rain (GL)
 

Gordon Lightfoot was simply amazing and definitely provided culturally significant work as an artist.

Tina Turner (Rest In Peace)
 

What's Love Got To Do With It? (1983)



:kissy:



Will miss her greatly.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Celebrated Poet of Lesbian Life, Dies at 76
 

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Celebrated Poet of Lesbian Life, Dies at 76

Her collection “Crime Against Nature,” which recounts her losing custody of her children after she came out, made her a literary star — and a target of conservatives.

https://i.postimg.cc/cLQJmMQK/IMG-0246.webp
Minnie Bruce Pratt in 2008. No one was more shocked than she — a woman married almost 10 years and with two small sons — at the turn her life was taking when she came out as a lesbian. Credit...Rachel Fus

By Penelope Green
July 13, 2023

Minnie Bruce Pratt, a feminist poet and essayist whose collection “Crime Against Nature,” which mapped her despair, anger and resilience after losing custody of her children when she came out as a lesbian, earned one of poetry’s highest honors and made her a target of hard-right conservatives, died on July 2 near her home in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 76.

Her death, at a hospice facility for L.G.B.T.Q. people, was caused by glioblastoma, her son Benjamin Weaver said.

It was 1975 when Ms. Pratt walked into her first gay bar, the Other Side, in Fayetteville, N.C. Same-sex relationships were still considered a crime in that state — “a crime against nature,” as the statute was described — so patrons parked around the corner in hopes that their license plates wouldn’t be photographed by the police. They signed into the place under fake names, as it was run as a private club. (Ms. Pratt often used Susan B. Anthony as hers.)

No one was more shocked than she — a woman married almost 10 years and with two small sons — at the turn her life was taking, as she wrote in her memoir, “S/He” (1995). Like many women of her generation, Ms. Pratt was fired up by the consciousness-raising groups she joined. She campaigned for gender parity in university teaching positions where she was a doctoral student (learning to push back when male colleagues asked her to type their papers and groped her at academic conferences) and discovered that she loved women.

https://i.postimg.cc/nV4ZNcX5/IMG-0247.webp
After their father took custody, Ransom (rear) and Benjamin Weaver were able to see their mother during school breaks. When she self-published her first collection of poetry, they helped her put copies of the books together.Credit...JEB (Joan E. Biren)

“You don’t have a dog’s chance in court,” her lawyer warned her when she and her husband, a poet and an academic like herself, were divorcing. He took full custody of their sons and moved out of state. “How could that happen to someone with a Ph.D.?” a fellow teacher asked years later.

“Crime Against Nature” had been more than a decade in the making when it was published in 1990, making Ms. Pratt a literary star. The Academy of American Poets awarded her the Lamont Poetry Prize, one of the organization’s highest honors. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the poet Carol Muske declared the book a “publishing event” — “startling in the beauty of its unadorned voice,” with each poem “a verbal emergency.”

One poem in the volume, “No Place,” begins with these lines:

One night before I left I sat halfway

down,

halfway up the stairs, as he reeled at the

bottom,

shouting Choose, choose. Man or woman,

her or him,

me or the children. There was no place

to be

simultaneous, or between. Above, the

boys slept

with nightlights as tiny consolations in

the dark,

like the flowers of starry campion, edge of

the water.

Her poetry and activism came out of the Women in Print movement, in which feminist and lesbian poets began hand-printing and binding their work, often in chapbooks: short volumes that resemble zines. It was a vibrant community that gathered at lesbian and feminist bookstores and meeting places, like the basements of Unitarian churches.

Ms. Pratt was constantly on the road, touring the South, giving readings and visiting her children as their father permitted as part of an evolving arrangement that allowed them to be with her during summer vacations and other school breaks.

The movement was an extraordinary time, said Julie Enszer, the editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom, a nearly half-century-old lesbian literary journal. By 1985, she said, there were about 110 feminist bookstores in the country. Ms. Pratt joined Feminary, a feminist journal and collective, and with a colleague who was her girlfriend she founded the Night Heron Press.

There, she published her first book of poetry, “The Sound of One Fork,” in 1981 — a collection of sensuous pieces that evoke her childhood in Alabama. Her sons, then teenagers on their summer break, helped her put copies of the book together, as she wrote in an essay for the Poetry Foundation. Making them, she said, was her favorite memory.

https://i.postimg.cc/qRYtYBgg/IMG-0248.webp
Ms. Pratt wrote eloquently of the “in-between” space that she and her spouse, the author Leslie Feinberg, left, inhabited as a butch and femme couple. Credit...Robert Giard Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Minnie Bruce Pratt was born on Sept. 12, 1946, in Selma, Ala. Her father, William L. Pratt Jr., worked in the lumber industry. Virginia Earl (Brown) Pratt, her mother, was a social worker and a teacher who once told her that she was disgusted by her daughter’s lesbianism but who later became an ally.

Minnie Bruce was an English major at the University of Alabama when she married Marvin Weaver in 1966. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1968 and was also a Fulbright scholar. When her husband took the children after their divorce, she was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working on her Ph.D. in English, which she earned in 1979.

In addition to her son Benjamin, she is survived by her other son, Ransom, and five grandchildren.

Ms. Pratt was the recipient of many awards and grants. A 1990 fellowship given by the National Endowment for the Arts to her and two other lesbian poets — the Native American writer Chrystos and Audre Lorde — drew criticism from Jesse Helms, the ultraconservative Republican senator from North Carolina, who campaigned to have their grants rescinded. He said that because the three were lesbian writers, their work was obscene and not suitable for federal funding. The N.E.A. disagreed.

In 1991, the three women won another grant, from the Fund for Free Expression, for being “targets of right-wing forces.”

Until her retirement in 2015, Ms. Pratt was a professor in the writing program and the gender studies department at Syracuse University, where she helped develop its L.G.B.T. studies program. She was the author of eight books of poetry, and her work has been collected in many journals. Her most recent book, “Magnified” (2021), is a collection of love poems to her spouse, the queer author and activist Leslie Feinberg, who died of complications of Lyme disease in 2014 at 65.

Like Feinberg — whose 1993 novel, “Stone Butch Blues,” was lauded for its evocation of gender complexity and considered a touchstone of queer literature — Ms. Pratt wrote eloquently about the “in-between” space, as she called it, that she and Feinberg (who mostly shunned gender honorifics) inhabited as a butch and femme couple.

In “S/he,” which is both an erotic memoir and an investigation into the myriad, shifting expressions of gender, Ms. Pratt writes of a Thanksgiving dinner the couple attended at her son Benjamin and his girlfriend’s house while they were in graduate school. Ms. Pratt was intrigued when no one claimed the seat at the head of the table or stepped up to carve the turkey. Her son clearly hung back. Ms. Pratt ducked out to the bathroom, and when she returned, her spouse was seated next to the empty chair at the head, with the turkey platter in front of them and a carving knife in one hand.

“I’ve never done this before in my life,” Feinberg said, slicing. Mr. Weaver said approvingly, “It took a lot of courage to grasp that knife.” And Ms. Pratt took her place at the head of the table.

Penelope Green is a reporter on the New York Times Obituaries desk and a feature writer. She has been a reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor at the Sunday magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/b...ion=Obituaries

RIP Tony Bennett <3<3<3
 

1964 on the Ed Sullivan show singing "I left heart in San Francisco"

I just loved his song, Margaritaville.

When I think of Jimmy Buffet, I think of Ronnie Milsap (it was almost like a song).

https://youtu.be/KbeQa2hmznk?si=1gXrokk0Y0U5W6Kg

Rest in peace, Jimmy Buffet.

Rest in Peace, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal). :candle::candle::candle:

Dianne Feinstein always had LGBTQ+ rights at the heart of her politics. We have lost a fierce advocate.

Dianne Feinstein's life changed the day Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated — the "darkest day" of her life
By Caitlin O'Kane
September 29, 2023 / 12:34 PM / CBS News

In 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, and the city's Mayor George Moscone were assassinated. The person who broke the news to the world: Dianne Feinstein, then president of the city's Board of Supervisors.
"Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed," Feinstein told a gaggle of reporters, who expressed shock at the news. "The suspect is Supervisor Dan White."

Feinstein, who died at age 90 on Friday, went on to become California's first woman U.S. senator. But directly after the assassination, she assumed the role of mayor of San Francisco.

In 2008, the 30th anniversary of the assassination, Feinstein spoke to SF Gate about discovering Milk's dead body in city hall after their colleague, White, killed him. "I went down the hall. I opened the wrong door. I opened (Milk's) door. I found Harvey on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse and put my finger through a bullet hole. He was clearly dead," she told the local newspaper.

Feinstein said she was on a three-week vacation before the murder, but she spoke to White on the phone during that time. He was upset that the mayor wasn't going to reappoint him and felt that Milk did not defend him, according to Feinstein.

During his murder trial, White employed the now-infamous "Twinkie Defense," blaming junk food – as well as stress about his job – for the murders. By blaming mental illness, White received a lesser sentence, manslaughter. Furious Milk supporters, who wanted White convicted of first-degree murder, rioted in the city in what is known as the "White Night" riots.

In her interview with SF Gate, Feinstein said White did not kill Milk because he was homophobic, but rather because he felt betrayed by Milk when the mayor decided not to reappoint him.

During the trial, Feinstein testified about White and their friendship, which brought the defendant to tears. But she told SF Gate that when White was released from prison in 1984, she had San Francisco Police Chief Con Murphy tell White not to come back to the city, because "his chances of survival were not good." White committed suicide in 1987. Feinstein told SF Gate if she could undo the moment of the assassination, she would do "it in a second, in a nanosecond."

When the Oscar-nominated film "Milk" was released in 2008, she said she didn't want to see it. "I think in my face you saw the pain of the day 30 years ago," she told SF Gate. "I still have a hard time returning to it, and I'm not a masochist. I know what happened. I lived those times, and I've tried to learn from them in terms of the kind of public servant I am, and that's really enough for me."

Feinstein has since called the day of the assassinations "the darkest day of my life." In the summer of 2016, after several instances of gun violence across the country – including the killings of two Black men by police officers – Feinstein put out a statement and referenced the killings that affected her life.

She said after White's trial, the city was "filled with grief and torn apart by hate and a lack of trust" and as mayor, she formed a task force of gay and religious community leaders as well as police officers to help heal the city.
Decades after the tragic event, Feinstein continued to remember Milk, regularly posting about him on his birthday or on the anniversary of the assassinations. And in 2022, she marked the acceptance of USNS Harvey Milk – a Naval shipped named after the gay rights icon – into the Navy.

She was on the San Francisco board when it passed Milk's gay rights ordinance, which banned discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community in housing, employment and public accommodations. The only person who voted against the ordinance was White, according to a New York Times report from 1978.

During her time as a senator, Feinstein continued to stand up for LGBTQ rights, introducing the Respect for Marriage Act in 2011. The law, passed in 2022, guarantees legal protections for same-sex marriages and repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented the recognition of same-sex marriage by the federal government. Feinstein was one of the few senators who opposed DOMA in 1996.

She also advocated for equality in the military and supported the Equality Act, which would expand civil rights for the LGBTQ community at the federal level.

RIP
 

Alan Jackson one of country musics greatest entertainers has passed away due to a stroke. The complete story is in youtube.

Luckily, this seems to be a hoax. It's been going around the internet since December 2022. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/al...on-death-hoax/

Piper Laurie, so good as Carrie's mother in that movie:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/14/us/pi...ary/index.html

RIP
 

Matthew Perry, star of the tv show Friends, drowned tonight
From TMZ:
Perry is most famous for his role as Chandler Bing on the hit '90s sitcom, which ran for 10 seasons ... and with him in all 234 episodes. His character was a fan fave, as was performance -- mannerisms and lines of which have gone on to be recreated and spoofed by fans all over the world. One comes to mind, in particular ... "Could (blank) BE more .."

While 'Friends' was his biggest claim to fame ... MP had starred/guest starred in countless other TV shows over the years -- such as 'Boys Will Be Boys,' 'Growing Pains,' 'Silver Spoons,' 'Charles in Charge,' 'Sydney,' 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' 'Home Free,' 'Ally McBeal,' 'The West Wing,' 'Scrubs,' 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,' 'Go On,' 'The Odd Couple' and more.