RIP

[not2shygrrl]

This link is all I have found on Amanda and I feel it is quite appropriate here. So sad at such a young, promising and impressionist style to now be gone.



Editor’s Note: We are deeply saddened by the passing of Amanda Arkansassy Harris. Amanda was a talented artist, a beacon for the queer femme community and an absolute joy to work with. Our hearts go out to everyone in mourning.

https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/07/12...nsassy-harris/

[Kobi]

The grand dame of daytime television drama, Agnes Nixon liked to say that “everyone's life is a soap opera.” For proof, she offered up her own.

She had an “abandonment complex” because her parents divorced soon after she was born. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic enclave in Nashville in the 1930s and 1940s, she felt painfully different because the other children all seemed to have fathers. Hers was “nearly psychotic” and schemed to crush her post-collegiate dream of being a writer.

He wanted his daughter to follow him into his burial garments business and arranged for her to meet Irna Phillips, a pioneering writer of radio serials her father was certain would “set me straight” regarding the foolishness of a writing career, Nixon often said.

And then Nixon invariably inserted a soap opera staple into the story — the plot twist. During the meeting, Phillips looked up from reading the sample script that was Nixon's resume and asked, “How would you like to work for me?”

"It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Nixon later said. “It was freedom.”

Although her characters were inevitably embroiled in melodrama, Nixon was repeatedly honored for elevating soaps during a television career that spanned more than 60 years. She pioneered socially relevant themes and dealt with them seriously, bringing attention to such once-taboo topics as racism, AIDS, lesbian relationships and teenage prostitution.

In 1962, Nixon wrote a story line for “The Guiding Light” on CBS about a character who develops uterine cancer and has a life-saving hysterectomy. The network and show sponsor Proctor & Gamble agreed to the plot only if the words “cancer,” “uterus” and “hysterectomy” were not used.

When “One Life to Live” debuted in 1968, it featured a complicated story aimed at making viewers confront their prejudices, Nixon later said. It involved a young black woman that the audience is led to believe is white; she plans to marry a white doctor, but later falls in love with a black resident.

When Nixon was recognized in 2010 with a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences said that she had “totally changed the traditionally escapist nature of daytime serials while straining to make the world a better place.”

She wasn’t trying to “break barriers,” Nixon said in 1999 on the TV biography “Intimate Portraits,” but thought it was insane “to say that entertainment and public service can never be in the same story.”

In 1981, the television academy had given Nixon its highest honor, the Trustees Award, for “distinguished service to television and the public.” She was the first woman to receive the distinction, joining an elite group that includes Edward R. Murrow and Bob Hope.

After writing the initial weeks of “Search for Tomorrow” for CBS in 1951, she played a role in the success of six other soap operas.

She helped Phillips launch “As the World Turns” on CBS in 1956 and, two years later, joined the network’s “Guiding Light” as head writer. In 1964, she took charge of NBC’s ratings-challenged “Another World” and turned it around.

Within four years, ABC came calling with a powerful enticement — creative control. Her husband, Robert Nixon, left his job as a Chrysler Corp. executive, and the couple formed a company to produce her first solo effort, “One Life to Live.”

The show quickly won praise for realism after premiering in 1968. A story on teenage venereal disease caused 50,000 viewers to write in, and an official at the Centers for Disease Control told Nixon: “You've shown us how to reach the teenagers of America,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1991.

When ABC wanted a second daytime drama, Nixon came up with “All My Children” in 1970. She also co-created a third soap for the network, “Loving,” that aired from 1983 to 1995.

Nixon readily acknowledged “All My Children” as her favorite dramatic offspring. The show was set in Pine Valley, the presumptive dramatic equivalent of Rosemont, the Philadelphia suburb where Nixon lived in a pre-Revolutionary War home. She based archvillain Adam Chandler, who didn't “know how to love,” on her father and gave her favorite character, wickedly manipulative Erica Kane, abandonment issues.

Susan Lucci became one of daytime’s most popular stars playing Erica from the show’s earliest days until the program’s end in September 2011. She repeatedly called Nixon “a genius as a storyteller.”

When “One Life to Live” left the air in early 2012, few network soap operas remained. As women increasingly entered the workforce, viewership eroded and the genre continued to lose ground to cable and offerings on the Internet.

“The name of entertainment is escape,” Nixon said in 1981 in People magazine, and it made her wealthy, one excruciatingly slow plot turn at a time. In the mid-1970s, Nixon had sold both “One Life” and “All My Children” to ABC for an undisclosed sum.

“I loved the writing and I hated the business,” Nixon told The Times in 1998, when it was reported that she earned more than $1 million a year.

She was born Agnes Eckhardt on Dec. 10, 1922, in Chicago, to Harry and Agnes Eckhardt and grew up in Nashville living with her bookkeeper mother and extended family. Previous reports put her year of birth as 1927 but the announcement of her funeral Mass said she was born five years earlier.

At Northwestern University, she studied drama alongside Charlton Heston and Patricia Neal but felt “outclassed,” as an actor, Nixon later said, and turned to writing.

Days after earning a bachelor's degree in the late 1940s, Nixon was writing for Phillips on a radio soap. When Phillips headed west to work in television, Nixon moved to New York to write for early prime-time TV dramas.

On a blind date in 1950, she met her future husband and soon agreed to marry him on one condition — that she could continue her career. They settled in the Philadelphia area and had four children in five years. With no time to travel to New York City for work, she returned to Phillips and soaps, writing at home and mailing in her scripts.

Having a bustling career in the “pre-Betty Friedan days” was tough and made her feel like a misfit, she told the Washington Post in 1983.

For years, she and her husband split their time between the Philadelphia area and New York City. After he died in 1996, Nixon said she found writing “All My Children” therapeutic.

By then, she had long devoted herself to long-range plotting and still followed her mentor’s maxim: “We don’t just live the high points and low points, we live minute by minute.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituar...nap-story.html

[Kobi]

Gloria Naylor, whose debut novel "The Women of Brewster Place," became a bestseller, a National Book Award winner and a TV miniseries released through Oprah Winfrey's production company, has died at the age of 66.

Naylor's other books included "Linden Hills," ''Mama Day" and "Bailey's Cafe."

"The Women of Brewster Place" is Naylor's self-described "love letter" to a determined community of seven African American women in a decaying housing project, the exact location unspecified. It was published in 1982 and praised by the New York Times as "emotionally satisfying and technically accomplished," with Brewster Place itself the narrative's star. "Brewster Place" won the National Book Award for best first fiction and was often likened to novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among others as landmark books by black women.

Naylor, who grew up in New York City, would credit her mother for making "Brewster Place" possible.

"Realizing that I was a painfully shy child, she gave me my first diary and told me to write my feelings down in there," Naylor said in her National Book Award acceptance speech. "Over the years that diary was followed by reams and reams of paper that eventually culminated into 'The Women of Brewster Place.' And I wrote that book as a tribute to her and other black woman who, in spite of the very limited personal circumstances, somehow manage to hold a fierce belief in the limitless possibilities of the human spirit."

Winfrey was among the novel's many fans and the miniseries came out in 1989, with a cast including Winfrey, Cicely Tyson and Robin Givens. "The Women of Brewster of Place" was also adapted into a musical, and Naylor revisited the setting in her 1998 novel "The Men of Brewster Place."

Naylor was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and received a master's from Yale University in African American studies, a degree earned around the time "Women of Brewster Place" was published. By the late 1970s, she had published stories in Essence magazine that would later become part of "Brewster Place."

In college, she had vowed to write at least four novels, and at least one that would outlast her. Her fiction often centered on a common meeting place, like the diner in "Bailey's Cafe," and her characters tended to be dreamers whose fantasies reflected Naylor's early love for fairy tales.

"It runs throughout my work, the theme of dreaming," she told The Associated Press in 1992. "I ask myself why it always seems important. I am a daydreamer and I once was an avid daydreamer. I would dream in serials, the daydreams would start where the others left off."

"I was still reading (fairy tales) ... at age 16. You wanted Prince Charming and I looked too long. At some point, an adult woman has to wake up and smell the coffee."

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituar...nap-story.html

[Kobi]

Joan Marie Johnson Faust, one of the founding members of the New Orleans girl group the Dixie Cups, died Oct. 5, 2016, according to multiple news sources. She was 72.

Sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Lee Hawkins formed the Dixie Cups along with Faust, their cousin. In June 1964, the trio famously kicked the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with the song “Chapel of Love.” It proved to be their biggest hit, selling more than 1 million copies.

Faust and her cousins had several other hits including 1964’s “People Say,” which reached No. 12, and “You Should Have Seen the Way He Looked at Me,” which made it into the Top 40. In 1965, the Dixie Cups had a top-20 hit with their version of a traditional New Orleans song “Iko Iko.”

Faust became a member of the Jehovah’s Witness religious denomination and left the Dixie Cups after the trio stopped recording temporarily in 1966.

In 2007, the Dixie Cups were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

[Kobi]

Tom Hayden, an activist, politician, and author who was one of the famed "Chicago Seven" who protested the 1968 Democratic National Convention, died Oct. 23, according to his wife, Barbara Williams. He was 76.

The former husband of actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda, Hayden was one of the giants of the counterculture in the 1960s, a radical anti-war protester who advocated for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War. Later in life, he developed a career in California politics and wrote a number of books.

Hayden's activism began in the 1950s as he attended the University of Michigan, where in 1960 he was among the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As a member of SDS, Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement, the group's manifesto, in which he railed against U.S. foreign policy and politics, racial discrimination, and business, while advocating for civil disobedience and political reform.

Hayden would become president of the SDS in 1962 after returning from a trip south as one of the Freedom Riders who challenged the legitimacy of segregation on buses. In 1965, he took his activism even further afield, traveling for the first time to North Vietnam, where he toured villages and met with an American POW. About his experiences, Hayden wrote the 1966 book "The Other Side," the first of his publications.

The fight to end the Vietnam War took place at home, too, and it was there that Hayden and a number of his fellow activists rose up in protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. With the goal of protesting President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam War policies, Hayden and the rest of the Chicago Seven organized a rally in Grant Park – a rally that ended up playing host to 15,000 protesters who turned it into a riot.

Hayden, along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner, was charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot for his actions in organizing the DNC protest. The men became known as the Chicago Seven as they fought their case to federal court, where it dragged on for months as many counterculture icons of the day were called upon to testify and the defendants pulled stunts including appearing in judicial robes with police uniforms underneath.

In the end, all seven of the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charge, though Hayden and four others were convicted of inciting a riot, sentenced to five years in prison and fines of $5,000 each. Upon appeal, the convictions were reversed.

It was 1972 before the appeals of the Chicago Seven trial were complete. That same year, Hayden and Fonda traveled to Vietnam in a highly controversial visit that left her dubbed "Hanoi Jane" and angered many in the U.S. But it would only be a few years before Hayden began to tone down his rhetoric as a budding politician.

Hayden's first political run came in 1976, when he made a bid for the U.S. Senate and came in second in the primary. In 1982, he was successfully elected to the California State Assembly, where he served until 1992, when he was elected to the California State Senate. He served through 2000, during which time he attempted runs for California Governor and Mayor of Los Angeles, both of which were unsuccessful.

In 1998, Hayden wrote the Hayden Act, am animal welfare act that extends the minimum amount of time an animal in a public pound or shelter has before being euthanized. The act was made California law in 1999.

Hayden taught at a number of colleges and universities, including UCLA and Harvard, and he wrote books including "Reunion: A Memoir" (1988), "Ending the War in Iraq" (2007), and "The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama" (2009).

[Kobi]

Bobby Vee, the 1960s pop singer whose hits inlcuded "Take Good Care of My Baby" and "Run to Him," has died at 73 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, as Robert Velline, Vee's big break came on the heels of a tragedy: he was hired at 15 to fill a concert bill in Moorhead, Minnesota, for what had been intended to be the next show on the 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour after the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Following the exposure he received from that performance, Vee recorded a single, Suzie Baby, that did well in the upper Midwest and landed him a contract with Liberty Records. Vee reached the top ten in 1960 with "Rubber Ball" and "Devil or Angel," and 1961 saw him notch a number one hit with "Take Good Care of My Baby" and a number two hit with "Run to Him."

Vee continued to release hits through the 1960s, more than three dozen in the top 100 in total, including "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," "Come Back When You Grow Up" and "Charms."

Though his run of hits ended after 1970, Vee performed until 2011, when he announced his retirement due to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

[ProfPacker]

Omg, Tom Hayden and Bobby Vee in one day? Having spent my college years in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor was very involved with the war and civil rights movement. Our campus SDS rep. was Diana Orton who died in a townhouse that blew up in Greenwich Village.

We learned so much from Tom Hayden. Thank you Tom for being brave and true, you opened up an entire generation to owning and having agency in our lives.

Tom Hayden started by speaking and organizing at Univ of Mich. It was the time that formed me at someone with a social conscience and possibly a future social worker who never gave up the concept of social justice for psychotherapy.

Very sad day indeed.

Bobby Vee was part of my initial music way before the Beatles and Stones.