The Illustration Friday challenge word this week is “surrender”.
“This next one is the first song on our new album. It just came out this week and the song is called ‘Surrender’.”
Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, Live at Budokan 1978
This illustration was done on inspiration from my son. He reminded me of the single dumbest introduction of a song in live album history.
After a lengthy hiatus, the Monday Artday illustration website returns with its first challenge word since September 2010.
And that word is “fitness”.
“And we’ll go lifting weights, twelve ounces at a time.”
Antifreeze by Wammo, as recorded by The Asylum Street Spankers.
Listen to the whole song right here
This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “dusty”.
Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien performed with her brother and a friend as a singing trio. They first practiced in a field in springtime, so they settled on the name “The Springfields” for their group. Ever the tomboy, Mary earned the nickname “Dusty” from her rough style of playing football with the boys. After moderate success as part of the group, young Mary broke out on her own using the name Dusty Springfield.
She was the first public figure to introduce American soul music to England. Her affinity for evening gowns and unique style of make-up caused a sensation with young women in the 1960s. They copied her so-called “panda eye” mascara, a look that rivaled the “Beatle haircut” among their male counterparts.
Because of her love and respect of American pop music, she implored her studio musicians to imitate the sound heard on Motown soul recordings. She was a perfectionist in the studio and produced many of her own recordings without taking official credit. After making a huge name for herself as part of the British Invasion, Dusty switched gears and recorded a more “rootsy”-oriented album. The result was the acclaimed ground-breaking 1969 release Dusty in Memphis. It was nominated for a Grammy and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1987, she recorded a duet with new wave popsters Pet Shop Boys. In 1994, director Quentin Tarantino featured her recording of “Son of a Preacher Man” in his film Pulp Fiction. Renewed interest in Dusty’s music surged.
Dusty was diagnosed and battled breast cancer for five years until her death in 1999. She passed away on the day she was scheduled to go to Buckingham Palace to receive her award of Officer, Order of the British Empire.
When Dusty was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 1999, her friend, singer Elton John, said, “I think she is the greatest white singer that there ever has been.”
At the age of eighteen, Victor Kilian began performing in vaudeville. In the 1920s, he moved on to Broadway and by the 1930s, he began a career in motion pictures as a character actor. He played minor roles but he was in demand for three decades. In 1942, playing a villain in Reap the Wild Wind, Victor lost an eye while staging a fight scene with John Wayne.
In 1950, Victor was blacklisted for his political beliefs. He was able to return to Broadway when the Actors’ Equity Association refused to acknowledge Hollywood’s ban. When the blacklisting was finally lifted, Victor appeared in many guest roles on television in the 60s and 70s. In 1976, he was cast in the role for which he is most remembered Grandpa Larkin AKA “The Fernwood Flasher” on the soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Since his wife of forty-six years passed away in 1961, Victor lived alone in Hollywood. In March 1979, 88 year-old Victor was beaten to death by robbers burglarizing his apartment. The crime remains unsolved.
Brad Delp was “the nicest, most considerate guy you could ever hope to meet,” according to colleagues and those close to him. Brad was the primary singer and rhythm guitarist for the popular 70s band Boston. Boston’s 1976 eponymous debut sold seventeen million copies and featured Brad’s soaring vocals and multi-octave range on many of the band’s most famous hits like “More Than A Feeling” and “Long Time”.
Boston co-founder, micro-managing perfectionist Tom Scholz, delayed the release of their next two albums. When Third Stage, Boston’s appropriately-named third effort, was released, only Scholz and Brad remained from the band’s original lineup. Between infrequent tours and infrequent albums, Brad formed a Beatles tribute band called Beatlejuice and performed in the Boston area.
On March 9, 2007, Brad’s fiancée, Pamela, arrived at his New Hampshire home. Something was not right. She found a note taped to the windshield of Brad’s car. It read: To whoever finds this I have hopefully committed suicide. Plan B was to asphyxiate myself in my car. She found a dryer vent hose attached to the car’s exhaust pipe. Pamela called the police.
When police arrived, they found another note on an upstairs door directing them to the master bathroom. A third note warned of the presence of carbon monoxide. The police officers knocked on the closed bathroom door. “Mr Delp?”, they asked. Receiving no reply, they forced the door open. Immediately, they were overcome by the smell of burning charcoal. Inside the bathroom, they found two smoldering charcoal grills producing huge billows of gray smoke. The bottom of the door and the windows had been sealed with tape. Brad Delp lay dead on the floor, his head resting on a pillow, another note paper-clipped to his collar. This note read: “Mr. Brad Delp. Je suis une âme solitaire. (I am a lonely soul.)”
Brad was 55. He was thoughtful and considerate to the end.
Jean Seberg made her motion picture debut at age 19 in Otto Preminger’s unusual interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, about Joan of Arc. Preminger’s daring casting of the unknown Jean received a huge build-up in the press, but Jean’s performance was panned by critics. Jean noted “I have two memories of St. Joan. The first was being burned at the stake in the picture. The second was being burned at the stake by the critics. The latter hurt more.”
Preminger immediately gave her another chance in his 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse. Again, Jean’s performance was lambasted by critics, almost ending her acting career. However, Jean moved to France and was cast in Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Breathless. French film reviewers called her “the best actress in Europe” and Jean became an international success. Jean did not identify with her characters or the film plots, saying that she was “making films in France about people she’s not really interested in.” The critics did not agree with Jean’s absence of enthusiasm, and raved about her performances, causing Hollywood to reconsider and welcome her back. New film offers from the United States began to roll in. Jean’s acclaimed role opposite Warren Beatty, in 1964’s Lilith, prompted critics to view her as a serious actress. She followed that with several more favorable roles including her only musical, Paint Your Wagon in 1969. Curiously, Jean’s singing was dubbed while co-stars (and non-singers) Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood sang their songs themselves. She also was part of the all-star ensemble cast of the early disaster film Airport in 1970.
Her brief and violent marriage to French director Francois Moreuil ended in divorce. In 1962, she married director Romain Gary, who was 24 years her senior. During the filming of Paint Your Wagon, Jean had an affair with Clint Eastwood. In 1970, she had an affair with a college student, a union which produced a daughter. Due to her outspoken support of the Black Panthers Party and the political climate in the United States at the time, the FBI created a false story that the baby was not fathered by her husband Romain Gary, but by a member of the Black Panthers Party. The story was reported by a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist. During her pregnancy, Jean claimed that her husband Gary was the father. She gave birth to a girl named Nina on August 23, 1970, but the infant died two days later. Jean soon confessed that her daughter was the result of an affair she had with a college student during a separation in her marriage. She and Gary divorced by the year’s end.
Jean married director Dennis Berry in 1972. She also began an increased dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs. She regularly suffered bouts of clinical depression and separated from Berry, though they did not divorce.
In August 1979, after being missing for eleven days, Jean was found dead in the back seat of her car parked near her Paris apartment. She had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. A note reading “Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.” was found in her hand. She was 40.
One year later, Jean’s second husband Romain Gary committed suicide.
Seven year-old Bridgette Andersen stole moviegoer’s hearts in her starring role as the title character in 1982’s Savannah Smiles. She followed that with the horror anthology film Nightmares in 1983, guest roles on television series like Family Ties, Remington Steel, Fantasy Island, and a TV movie playing a young Mae West.
Despite a part in the Disney Channel-produced sequel The Parent Trap II, Bridgette found her demand as an actress waning and her roles reduced to background characters and extra work in commercials.
Bridgette was not close with her family and turned to drugs in her teen years, eventually acquiring an addiction to heroin. In 1997, she was working in a Los Angeles health food store and trying desperately to kick her drug habit. One evening in May 1997, Bridgette overdosed on a combination of heroin and alcohol. She was taken to Queen of Angels hospital in Hollywood and placed on life support. Bridgette remained in a coma until she was declared brain dead on May 18, 1997. She was 21.
This weeks challenge word on the Illustration Friday website is chicken. This is the second of three illustrations Ive done for this word. Here is the first and here is the third, which I did over a year ago, but fits the theme.
The difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was ‘involved’. The pig was ‘committed’.”
This week’s challenge word on the Illustration Friday website is “chicken”. This is the first of three illustrations I’ve done for this word. Here is the second and here is the third, which I did over a year ago, but fits the theme.
In 1920, a railroad worker named Arthur Perdue noticed that the farmers bringing eggs for shipping were taking in more money that their vegetable-growing counterparts. Arthur, along with his wife Pearl, purchased a small flock of chickens and built a coop in their Salisbury, Maryland backyard. Soon the Perdues were taking in an extra ten to twenty dollars a week from their new venture. That was a lot of money in the days of the Great Depression.
Although reluctant, son Frank put aside his dreams of becoming a professional baseball player and dropped out of college to become the third full-time employee in his parents’ egg business. They soon switched the direction of the business to raising chickens for meat rather than eggs. When meat prices began to rise during World War II, the Perdues earned a fortune and the business grew steadily. Frank became president of the company in 1952. He devised an idea to make the chicken more appealing to the consumer. He added marigold petals to the chicken feed, thus giving the chickens a more yellow appearance. Then he shipped his product on ice, rather than frozen like his competitors. This gave the chickens a fresher taste.
In the early 1970s, Frank approached an ad agency and produced a commercial in which he starred as spokesperson for his product. Prior to this, selling chicken under a ‘brand name” was unheard of in the industry. Frank was considered a branding visionary. Frank’s advertisements were wildly popular and, despite his shyness, he was featured in over 200 commercials over the next 23 years. The ad’s tag line “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” became known nationwide. Frank also made it clear to his customers that he welcomed criticism of his product and would happily give a refund to anyone unsatisfied with his chicken.
Frank had built his family business to a multi-billion dollar corporation. Suffering from the beginnings of Parkinson’s disease, Frank turned the company’s reigns over to his son Jim in 1991. After a brief illness, Frank passed away in 2005.
In the 70s, my father’s humble beginnings as a butcher led to an executive position in the fresh meat and poultry division of a chain of local Philadelphia supermarkets. He had the opportunity to meet Frank Perdue. He described Mr. Perdue as a quiet, well-mannered man who, in person, looked like a chicken.
Brooklyn-born Samuel Mostel came from very humble beginnings, hoping to one day become an artist. After his graduation from City College of New York, when he took the same Beginner Art class over and over, he joined the Public Works of Art Project and began teaching art. He mixed his natural humor into his classes and was soon performing his brand of comedy for private parties, including gatherings at Labor Union Social Clubs. These performances would play a major role in his eventual blacklisting in the next decade.
In the early 1940s, Samuel landed a regular gig doing stand-up comedy at a small Manhattan nightclub. The club’s press agent dubbed him “Zero” saying he’s “a man who made something out of nothing. The name stuck and Zero’s blend of comedy and social commentary was a hit with audiences. He appeared in some off-Broadway plays and eventually had several programs on local New York television.
In the early 1950s, Zero was blacklisted for his alleged association with the Communist Party and his refusal to report on the activities of his colleagues. Unable to get work for years, theatrical agent Toby Cole, who strongly opposed blacklisting, offered Zero a role in his off-off-Broadway production of Ulysses. Zero received rave reviews and overwhelming praise and was awarded an Obie in 1958. That award led to the role of Pseudolus in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum. Although Zero was a joy for audiences, directors and fellow actors had great difficulty working with him. He had a tendency to ad-lib at length thus throwing off the timing of live performances and confusing other cast members waiting for specific cues. Producers preferred to sign Zero to short contracts, as the longer he played a part, the more he would put his own spin on it. In 1964, Zero opened on Broadway in his memorable role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, for which he won a Tony Award. However, mostly likely due to his reputation, Zero was passed over in favor of Israeli actor Topol, by director Norman Jewison for the movie version of Fiddler. (Years later, when Zero’s son Josh was cast in the Jewison-directed Jesus Christ Superstar, Zero joked “Watch it! He’s libel to cast Topol’s son instead.”)
In 1968, director Mel Brooks had to convince Zero to play Max Bialystock in his film The Producers. The film, which garnered lukewarm reviews in its initial release, has since become a cult classic and possibly Zero’s most memorable role.
Zero appeared in several movies through the 60s and 70s, including the film version of A Funny Thing Happened… and The Front, a story of a blacklisted actor that eerily mirrored Zero’s own struggles. He also filmed short segments for Sesame Street and The Electric Company for public television. During rehearsals in Philadelphia for a reworking of The Merchant of Venice, Zero collapsed in his dressing room and was taken to the hospital with a respiratory ailment. Over the next day or so, Zero complained of dizziness and lost consciousness. Doctors were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead at the age of 62, the result of an aortic aneurysm. Zero had recently completed a guest role on The Muppet Show and became the only guest in the show’s history to die before his appearance was broadcast. He enjoyed working with Jim Henson, noting “[Henson] has the best possible actors. If you have a disagreement with them, you can always use them to wash your car.”
