President John F. Kennedy had Tiffany & Co. make small silver calendars for his closest advisors in thanks for helping him through the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Each was personalized, with both his and their initials engraved: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3495/3879404536_c3abcdf100_m.jpg
The movie Matinee tells the story of the world premiere of the film Mant (“Half man, half ant, all terror!”), which happens to take place during the Cuban missile crisis, adding to the panic of the audience.
Matinee starred Omri Katz, whose two most famous roles were as J.R. Ewing’s only legitimate son, John Ross III, on Dallas and as Marshall whose family moves to Eerie, Indiana in a short-lived but cult-popular series. (Omri is also the name of King Ahab’s father in the Old Testament.)
Mickey Katz, an actor/comic/musician who specialized in Yiddish-language and Yiddish-inflected English-language entertainment, was the father of Joel Katz (who later changed his surname to Grey) and thus the grandfather of Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey.
Joel Grey originated the role of the Wizard of Oz in Broadway’s Wicked. Although this musical was declared Time Magazine’s “Musical of the Decade,” it lost the London Olivier Best Musical Award to Billy Elliot, and in a stunning upset, the Tony Award to Avenue Q. The Austraila production finally won the Helpmann Best Musical Award.
Billy Elliot is the first stage production to win the Olivier, Tony & Helpmann Awards for Best Musical and Best Actor in a Musical.
Time magazine’s new Man of the Year is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. He joins a varied crew including Charles Lindbergh (the first, in 1927), Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Jimmy Carter, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.
As far as anyone knows, Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting for Godot.
Besides being a gifted writer, Vladimir Nabokov was also an accomplished butterfly collector, and for a time simultaneously served as curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and as a professor of Russian language and literature at Wellesley College.
Vladimir Guerrero, Vladimir Nunez, and Vladimir Perez are all Dominican Republic natives who have played major league baseball.
Ron Shelton, writer and director of Bull Durham, was an infielder in the Baltimore Orioles baseball system from 1967-71, where he .251.
Sonny Till and the Orioles, an R&B band from Baltimore in the late 40’s / early 50’s, were one of the founders of the sound that became doo-wop. They inspired other R&B groups to adopt the names of birds (The Cardinals, The Crows, The Flamingos, The Larks, The Penguins, The Ravens, The Wrens, etc.). Their early hit “It’s Too Soon to Know” was one of the first race songs to reach the white charts. but their biggest hit of all was “Crying in the Chapel”.
The play and movie Hairspray are set in Baltimore, the biggest city in Maryland. It is not the capital, however; that is Annapolis.
Albuquerque is the biggest city in New Mexico, but it’s not the state capital. That is Santa Fe. (I actually had to argue this with someone on the phone while I lived in Albuquerque, someone out of state who was convinced it was.)
Bugs Bunny shouldn’t have made that left turn at Albuquerque.
Mel Blanc was the voice of such well-known characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Woody Woodpecker, Barney Rubble, Mr. Spacely, Speed Buggy, Captain Caveman, Heathcliff, and hundreds of others. Having earned the nickname “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” Blanc is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice-acting industry. At the time of his death, it was estimated that 20 million people heard his voice every day.
In early drawings and scripts for the Pixar movie Toy Story, Sheriff Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) was originally much larger than Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen), as well as considerably more bitter and unpleasant a personality than in the eventual film.
Woody Allen’s real name is Allan Stewart Konigsberg.
Königsberg is the former name of what is now the Russian city of Kaliningrad. The Kaliningrad Oblast (administrative region) is an exclave – it’s tucked between Poland and Lithuania, and not connected to the main part of the Russian Federation (see this map).
Charles Bronson (born Casimir Businskis), John C. Reilly, and zombie auteur George Romero were all born to Lithuanian (or Lithuanian-American) mothers.
The Grateful Dead sponsored the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team, which played in tie-dyed, skull-adorned uniform jerseys as a result. The band had become friends with Sarunas Marciulonis, of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, who built and played for what would have been a cash-strapped national team without their support.