Future British Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill, while a spunky young minister at the Colonial Office before World War I, wrote a long memo to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Elgin, which concluded, “These are my opinions. WSC.”
Lord Elgin wrote below that, “But not mine. E.”
A nice anecdote from Roy Jenkin’s fine biography Churchill.
The full name of Ellie Creed’s cat in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary was Winston Churchill (“Church”).
On September 25, 2009, Creed performed a concert in Houston, Texas that was recorded, broadcast via a live internet stream, and released on December 8, 2010, as a concert film titled Creed Live, the band’s first live recording. The performance broke four world records, including the world record for the most cameras used at a live music event (239). The previous holder of this record was Justin Timberlake. The performance also featured the very first usage of the “big freeze” technology, popularized by The Matrix, in a concert environment.
There are three creeds recognised by most of the western churches. In order of length, they are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and St Athanasius’ Creed.
The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are often included in the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, the post-American Revolution offshoot of the Church of England.
The largest urban concentration of slaves in the Colonies during the American Revolution was in New York City and its surrounding areas, where some 15,000 African-Americans were held in bondage.
It’s estimated that 6-12% of the Continental Army during the American Revolution was African-American, mostly free Blacks.
Peter Salem was one such African American soldier, serving in Massachusetts.
Prince Estabrook was a black slave and Minutemen Private who fought and was wounded at the Battle of Lexington, the first battle of the American Revolutionary War.
(Imagine what he must have been thinking.)
Prince’s birth name was Prince Rogers Nelson.
There have been seven U.S. Navy warships named USS Lexington, after the famous early battle of the American Revolution; the last was an aircraft carrier decommissioned in 1991.
Ninja’d!
Horatio, Lord Nelson, asked in his last will and testament that his beloved mistress Emma Hamilton be provided for by the kingdom after he died, but that didn’t happen, and she died penniless in Calais.
Charles Nelson Reilly’s openly gay TV persona was quite ahead of its time. He recalled a network executive telling him, “They don’t let queers on television.” In rebuttal, he was a game show fixture on such shows as The Match Game and The Hollywood Squares; was a guest on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than 95 times; earned an Emmy nomination for his second-banana work on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and appeared on Saturday morning children’s shows such as Lidsville.
Edward Mulhare, who played the Ghost on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, understudied for Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady on Broadway, taking over the role of Henry Higgins when Harrison tired of playing the part.
Hope Lange played Mrs. Muir on TV.
Jessica Lange’s only husband, Paco Grande, was a photographer. They met in 1968 and married two years later. He began losing his sight from retinitis pigmentosa in the early 1970s. They divorced 1982 following a long separation, and she paid him alimony afterwards. She went on to have children by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Sam Shepard.
“I’ll never get over Paco Grande …”
The Baryshnikov Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, provides space and production facilities for dance, music, theater, film, design and visual arts. The building also houses the Orchestra of St. Luke’s DiMenna Center for Classical Music.
The Cleveland Orchestra’s first concert was at Gray’s Armory near what is now Progressive Field, where the Cleveland Indians play. The Orchestra now regularly plays at Severance Hall in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, and, in the summer, outdoors at Blossom Music Center in rural Bath, Ohio.
Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, lay down a set of rules of audiences that still governs classical musical audiences today: listen attentively, don’t talk during the concert, and only applaud at the end of the piece, not at the end of each movement. Previously, audience members would talk and drink while the musicians played; Thomas would stop the performance, wait for talkers to be quiet, and the start again from the beginning (sometimes more than once).
David McCullough’s book on Theodore Roosevelt’s early life is Mornings on Horseback. He concluded that young “Teedie’s” asthma was largely psychosomatic.
David McCullough was the narrator for Ken Burns’ CIVIL WAR documentary series.