The illustrationfriday.com challange word this week is “island”. The song “Zombie Jamboree” began life as “Jumbie Jamberee”, a calypso song written by Winston O’Conner. Winston performed under the name Lord Intruder in the early 1950s. In 1953, Lord Intruder released the song as the B-side to his recording of “Disaster With Police”. The Kingston Trio recorded …
If you are too young to remember when “The Tonight Show“ was hosted by Johnny Carson, then you probably don’t remember Myron Cohen. Myron Cohen was a textile salesman working in New York City’s “Garment District“. Early in his career, he developed client relationships by telling jokes. Pretty soon, his jokes became more popular than …
In doing research for this challenge, I read quite a few of the tales collected by The Brothers Grimm. I really enjoyed some of the more obscure and abstract stories, specifically “The Mouse, The Bird and The Sausage.” Once upon a time a Mouse, a Bird and a Sausage lived together in a single house. …
Continue reading ‘Monday Artday: the brothers grimm part 2’ »
Through talks with peasants and visits to small villages, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected some of the most gruesome, frightening and disturbing stories and published them in several volumes for children. Originally published in the early nineteenth century, these stories were watered down and homogenized over years of retelling. But in their original form, these …
Thelma McQueen was born in Tampa, Florida in 1911. She trained as a dancer and took her stage name from the “Butterfly Dance” after performing it in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She never liked the name “Thelma” and legally changed her name to “Butterfly.” Although she appeared in an uncredited role in …
The illustrationfriday.com challenge word this week is “clutter”. Sylvia Frumkin was the pseudonym given to Maxine Mason, the subject of the 1982 book “Is There No Place On Earth For Me?”by Susan Sheehan. Maxine was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The content of her speech revealed what was going on in her cluttered mind. There’s no such …
The challenge word this week on Monday Artday is “paris”. On July 3, 1971, The Doors’ Jim Morrison died of a heroin overdose in the bathtub of his Paris apartment, essentially ending Robby Krieger’s career. I see that a band calling itself “Riders on the Storm” is on tour, with a stop near me in …
The illustrationfriday.com challenge word this week is “memories”. This weekend is Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer. I was prompted to think of all of the things I experienced this past summer. While not necessarily the best memory of the summer, the most unusual occurred on Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial beginning of …
The current challenge word at sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “black”. In the middle nineteenth century, Jack Black (no, not THAT Jack Black) served as rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. That meant he was the head vermin exterminator, but he was a bit of a showman, too. Henry Mayhew, founder of British …
Diane Nemerov was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family. Her parents were fur merchants. Her older brother, Howard, served as United States Poet Laureate in 1963 and again in 1988. When she was 14, she met and fell in love with Allan Arbus, a photographer who would later abandon photography for …
