The musical Oklahoma! was the first collaboration of Rogers and Hammerstein (they had both written Broadway hits before – Rogers with Larry Hart and Hammerstein with Jerome Kern). It’s usually noted as the first musical to integrate story, song, and dancing (though earlier musicals – like Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat and others – had managed the first two, but not the dance).
Gary Hart (born Gary Hartpence) served two terms in the U.S. Senate and had a brief surge in the 1984 Democratic Presidential primaries, losing to Walter Mondale. Hart ran again in the 1987-88 cycle but withdrew after a cruise he took on the Monkey Business with Donna Rice, to whom he was not married, attracted unwelcome attention.
Speaking at Rice University in 1962, John F. Kennedy explained the U.S. goal to land on the moon by the end of the decade with the words, “Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Rice University houses most of the surviving papers of Jefferson Davis. This turned out to be a good thing when his (ahem) Presidential Library* located on the grounds of Beauvoir (Davis’s Biloxi, MS final home) and specifically designed and built to withstand hurricane force winds, was completely destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. (The 150 year old house survived the storm, albeit with major damage.)
*This being its self designation, not my own.
At the start of their careers, lyricist Tim Rice & composer Andrew Lloyd Webber contributed five songs to a British musical called Hulla Baloo, which was actually set in a “loo.” The show was so bad that they both leave it out of their credits.
The song Waterloo was a 1958 hit for its composer and singer, Stonewall Jackson. “Stonewall” was not a nickname – Jackson had actually been named for the Confederate general.
While Stonewall Jackson was a professor at VMI, before the Civil War, he was well known and regarded by the African American community, both free and slave, for his work teaching Sunday school.
Dateline host and former news anchor Stone Stockton Philips was named in part for his grandfather, Stonewall Jackson Philips, Jr. (so thus indirectly for his great-grandfather and for Stonewall Jackson as well).
Philip Seymour Hoffman won 23 awards for his performance in Capote (2005) including the Oscar. He and Dustin Hoffman are the only two winners of a Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar to share a last name: Philip for Capote and Dustin for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Rain Man (1988).
Truman Copete once appeared on The Tonight Show and declared that author Jacqueline Susann looked like “a truck driver in drag.” Susann threatened to sue. Truman than apologized to “truck drivers everywhere.”
When Susann made a subsequent appearance on the show, Carson asked her “What do you think of Truman?” She repiled “Truman…Truman…I thnk history will judge him one of the best Presidents ever.”
The History Channel series “Ice Road Truckers” has featured truck drivers on wintertime roads across lakes in Canada’s Northwest Territories (Season 1), down the Mackenzie River and over the Arctic Ocean (Season 2), and Alaska’s Dalton Highway (Seasons 3 and 4). Season 5 will take several of the most viewer-popular drivers into the Himalaya Mountains of India. The only driver to be featured in all 5 seasons is Alex Debogorski of Yellowknife, NWT, and the only woman is Alaska’s Lisa Kelly.
When Alaska was acquired from Russia by Secretary of State William Seward, a Lincoln appointee/rival/friend, its capital and largest city was the Russian founded city of Sitka. Today Sitka has a population of under 9,000 but is still the 5th most populous city in the largest geographic state of the U.S…
Michael Chambon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an alternate history novel where Jewish refugees from the Nazis were relocated to Sitka, Alaska, which becomes a thriving metropolis.
Philip K. Dick, a sci-fi writer who suffered from schizoaffective disorders and whose stories often deal with reality being different than it appears, wrote the novel The Man in the High Castle. It’s set in 1962 (when it was written) but in an alternate timeline in which Guisseppe Zangara was successful in his 1933 attempt to kill FDR. (In our reality Zangara, a very short man, missed FDR because he was pushed aside by onlookers who didn’t see him and his bullets killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak who was at FDR’s side instead.) As a result of FDR never being president the Axis Powers won the war and Japan and Germany divided the U.S.A… A novel withing the novel is entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an illegal to own book which has as it’s plot an alternative history that is our own timeline: FDR survived assassination and the Allies won.
The 1998 South Park episode “Spookyfish” describes the opening of a portal, via an evil goldfish acquired from the Ancient Indian Burial Ground Pet Store, to an alternate timeline in which Eric Cartman is kind and generous, and wears a goatee like the ruthless, agonizer-using Spock in the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”. Kyle and Stan try to leave their own Cartman in the other world and keep the “good” one, but fail. Kenny tragically loses his life to the goldfish, unsurprisingly.
“Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” was the line spoken by the Evil Queen in the Disney version of Snow White. It has been so frequently misquoted as “mirror, mirror. . .” that Disney’s own 1998 remake of 101 Dalmatians used that version of the line instead of the original.
Adriana Caselotti, who played the heroine in the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was subsequently “blacklisted” by Walt so that her voice would never be heard in another production. Her only post-Snow White film role was an uncredited singing performance in The Wizard of Oz.
Actors who have played the Wizard of Oz in the Broadway cast of Wicked include Joel Grey (best known for Cabaret), Ben Vereen (best known for Roots), George Hearn (best known for the Broadway cast of Sweeney Todd), and David Garrison (bk4 Married With Children).
The 1975 summer-replacement variety series Ben Vereen… Comin’ at Ya lasted only four episodes despite featuring such performers as Lola Falana, Arte Johnson, and Avery Schreiber in addition to the multi-talented host.
President Lyndon Johnson once became personally involved in the design of a new U.S. Air Force uniform, fussing over the structure of the pants.