Joni Eareckson

This is a book that was always lying around the house as I was growing up in one of our apt.'s in Brooklyn when I was very young and it has always left an impression on me. I find it remarkable that as a quadriplegic she was able to draw with her mouth.

-1976, Zondervan Publishing House

Literary Pick (****)

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
-Haruki Murakami

Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland, Classic Hollywood Star, Dies at Age 104

 The Gone With The Wind co-star was one of the last surviving links to a bygone era.

No one was better at falling apart elegantly than Olivia de Havilland. We tend to think of de Havilland (who died on Saturday at age 104) in her Oscar-nominated role as the good-hearted but frail Melanie in Gone with the Wind, taking to her chambers while Vivien Leigh’s brash Scarlett took on the dirty work of survival. But there was also her Oscar-winning turn in The Heiress, in which her high-society spinster character pined away for a stealthy cad. Or her descent into institutionalized madness in The Snake Pit. Even late in life, in glossy dross like Airport ’77, there was a nobility in her deterioration, as if St. Peter might compensate her with a third Academy Award statuette if she just succumbed one time to a ridiculous, horrible air disaster.

De Havilland was not always the regal sufferer. She was actually a fun, vibrant foil to Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, Four’s a Crowd, and seven other movies. Still, just a year after 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, her indelible turn in the most popular movie of all time sealed her image forever.
Offscreen, de Havilland was gracious as well. She was too discreet to say much about her lifelong feud with her sister, fellow golden-age star Joan Fontaine—at least, until the eve of her 100th birthday, when she opened up about their difficult relationship in the pages of Vanity Fair.
A year younger, Fontaine nonetheless managed to do nearly everything first, from getting married to winning her Oscar (for 1941’s Suspicion, beating de Havilland, who was nominated that year for Hold Back the Dawn), to becoming a mother, to dying (at 96, in 2013). The two often vied for the same roles as well. Fontaine had once auditioned to play Melanie; in fact, Fontaine claimed, it was she who suggested to the filmmakers that her sister was dowdy enough for the part. Meanwhile, de Havilland had sought to play the nameless female lead in Rebecca, a role that proved to be Fontaine’s big break. When de Havilland finally won her first Oscar, for 1946’s To Each His Own, Fontaine waited in the wings to congratulate her sister, but de Havilland reportedly snubbed her and walked away.

“Our biggest problem was that we had to share a room,” de Havilland told Vanity Fair in 2016 with a sigh, elaborating that the trouble between them stemmed from Fontaine’s apparent desire to have what de Havilland had: “I suppose the way I saw it then was that I wanted Hollywood as my domain, and I wanted San Francisco society to be hers. I thought San Francisco was superior, I really did—the art, the opera, the clubs, the balls. I thought the sophistication Joan gained from her time in Japan made her perfectly suited for high society. But she wasn’t the slightest bit interested. ‘I want to do what you are doing’ was her mantra.”
The steel beneath de Havilland’s delicate façade was apparent, not just in movies or in her relationship with Fontaine. After Gone with the Wind, she chafed at the ingénue parts Warner Bros. kept foisting on her. Each time she objected, the studio would issue a suspension, and then demanded that she make up that time—in total, six months—after her seven-year contract was up. Instead, she sued the studio and won, setting a precedent that benefitted all entertainers signed to similar long-term show business contracts. The battle kept her off the screen for three years, but her first role upon her return was unwed mother Jody Norris in To Each His Own. The performance earned de Havilland her first of three Oscar nominations in the next three years and the first of her two best-actress victories. (She’d be nominated again for 1948’s The Snake Pit and 1949’s The Heiress, winning for the latter.)
The sisters came by their talent naturally; their mother, Lillian, was a stage actress before she married and moved to Tokyo, where the girls were born, and where her husband, Walter, practiced patent law. De Havilland was not yet three, in 1919, when Lillian, due to a rocky marriage and for the sake of her sickly daughters’ health, moved with her girls to Saratoga, California. Walter and Lillian divorced in 1925; once the divorce was final, Lillian married department-store owner George Fontaine. De Havilland took to acting as a teen and was just out of high school when she got to understudy Gloria Stuart as Hermia in Max Reinhardt’s 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Taking over for Stuart after she left for a film role, de Havilland earned glowing reviews and signed with Warner Bros. when Reinhardt adapted the production to the screen.
Over the years, de Havilland was linked romantically to Howard Hughes, James Stewart, and John Huston. (Never to Flynn, though; despite their obvious chemistry, they never acted upon their mutual attraction.) She was married twice, to author/screenwriter Marcus Goodrich, and to Paris Match editor Pierre Galante; each marriage produced one child before ending in divorce.
De Havilland settled in Paris when she married Galante in 1955, and despite occasional visits to Hollywood over the next three decades for film and TV appearances, she lived there for the rest of her life. She made headlines only rarely in her twilight years—most recently, when she tried to sue Ryan Murphy and the FX network for defamation over its series Feud: Betty and Joan, which featured de Havilland as a character (played by Catherine Zeta Jones).
The “FX series puts words in the mouth of Miss de Havilland which are inaccurate and contrary to the reputation she has built over an 80-year professional life, specifically refusing to engage in gossip mongering about other actors in order to generate media attention for herself,” her lawyers claimed—honing specifically on the fictionalized de Havilland describing Fontaine by using the word “bitch.” Ultimately, a California appeals court ruled to toss the suit on the grounds of the First Amendment.
For all her accomplishments, de Havilland will be best remembered for that epic she made when she was 22. Seven decades later, she was still justifiably proud of Gone with the Wind, a movie she had watched often and still found suspenseful every time. “But you know,” she said in a 2010 Evening Standard interview, “you never really need to watch the films you made again. They stay inside you, always with you.”
-Vanity Fair

Regis Philbin

Regis Philbin, the affable talk show host and a fixture of the small screen for decades, has died at 88.
"We are deeply saddened to share that our beloved Regis Philbin passed away last night of natural causes, one month shy of his 89th birthday," his family told NPR in a statement.
"His family and friends are forever grateful for the time we got to spend with him – for his warmth, his legendary sense of humor, and his singular ability to make every day into something worth talking about," they said. "We thank his fans and admirers for their incredible support over his 60-year career and ask for privacy as we mourn his loss."
With his larger-than-life persona, Philbin cultivated an air of informality on his talk shows, well known for the amusing banter he shared with his co-hosts. Although the Philbin of television seemingly oozed charisma, he suffered in his youth from a lack of self-confidence. "I missed so many opportunities along the way to do what I wanted to do because I didn't have the confidence to tell myself, much less anybody else, 'Yes, this is the business I wanted to be a part of,' " he told Fresh Air in 2011.

Feeling that he lacked the talent to make it in showbiz, after his graduation from Notre Dame he spent two years serving in the Navy. On his last day, a major in the Marines asked Philbin what he wanted to do with his life.
"I told him, 'What I'd like to do is go into television but I don't know if I have any talent or what I could do,' and he got very angry. ... He said, 'Well, what do you mean? Don't you know you can have anything you want in this life if you only want it bad enough? Do you want it?' And I said, 'Major, I'm not sure.' And he boomed at me, 'Do you want this?!' And I snapped to and gave him a salute and said, 'Yes, yes I want this.' "
The major, Philbin recounted, told Philbin to drive to Hollywood. "And that's what I did."
Philbin began his television career as an NBC page for The Tonight Show in the 1950s. He worked as a newscast broadcaster for several years, before getting his first big break in 1967, when he became the sidekick to Joey Bishop on The Joey Bishop Show. From there, he went on to host local morning shows.
His biggest stroke of luck might have come when Kathie Lee Gifford joined him in 1985 as co-host of ABC's The Morning Show in New York City. The pair was so successful, that Live with Regis and Kathie Lee was nationally syndicated three years later. With impressive ratings, it was a mainstay on American television through the '90s.
In 1999, Philbin took on another role — the inaugural host of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. He continued regularly hosting the show until 2002, making his famous question — "Is that your final answer?" — a national catchphrase.
Meanwhile, Philbin was continuing his daily job as host of Live. After Gifford left the show in 2000, Philbin went through several guest co-hosts, before soap opera actress Kelly Ripa was chosen as his permanent partner in 2001. They worked together for about a decade, before Philbin stepped down from the show in 2011 at the age of 80.
By that point, he held the Guinness World Record for the most hours spent in front of a television camera.
-NPR

Literary Pick (**)

Suicide Club
-Rachel Heng

Reading Rainbow Theme Song

Literary Pick (****)

A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki

I love how Japanese novels seem to be so low-key and relaxing to read, that's why it has become my favorite genre other than biographies.
Because of this novel I enjoyed independently learning about the Japanese tsunami flotsam debris (about 1.5 million tons) washing ashore the Canadian coast due to the 9.0 earthquake that occurred in 2011 and killed nearly 20,000 people. Many strange items were found in the debris in BC, including a Harley Davidson bike which was offered to be returned to it's owner Yokoyama, but instead he donated it to the Harley Davidson Museum in Milwaukee USA as a memorial to all those who lost their lives. A football was also found and traced back to a student who had lost every single belonging. Other items such as a fishing boat, a row boat were also found. Japan reportedly gave B.C. 1 million dollars to help with the cleanup.
The novel tells of how a couple living in Canada find the diary of a young girl who is contemplating suicide, and the journey begins to find who the author of this diary is in hopes of saving her.

The Greatest American Hero

Sit, Ubu, sit

Hugh Downs

Hugh Downs, Longtime ‘20/20,’ ‘Today’ Anchor, Dies at 99 

Hugh Downs, anchorman for the ABC news program “20/20” and, before that, NBC’s “The Today Show,” died Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 99.
Downs’ career in broadcasting spanned more than half a century. And despite his assertion “I am not a talent, I am a personality,” Downs proved a first-rate interviewer and journalist time and again. His personality was ingratiating and low-key; well into his 70s, his pleasant demeanor made him a welcome guest in the nation’s living rooms. With Barbara Walters, his co-host on both “Today” and “20/20,” he formed one of the most complementary partnerships in television news programming.
Prior to “Today,” Downs made a name for himself as emcee of the quizshow “Concentration” and as sage in residence on the Jack Paar “Tonight Show.”
After early work in radio and TV, Downs moved to New York in 1954 to join Arlene Francis on NBC’s “Home” show, clocking in some 900 hours on the program. In 1956 he became the announcer for “Caesar’s Hour,” starring Sid Caesar, and the following year joined “The Tonight Show.” He also supervised science programming for the NBC network. In 1958 he also became host of the daytime series “Concentration,” a gig he held for several years concurrent with his “Today Show” activities.

In 1960, when Paar walked off “The Tonight Show” in a dispute with network censors, Downs stepped in and saved the day, winning NBC’s admiration in the process. He was rewarded with the anchor spot of the “Today” show in 1962, replacing John Chancellor. He remained for nine years, reaching 12 million homes every morning for two hours.
During that period he also reported and narrated news documentaries and specials such as “The American Wilderness,” the Emmy-winning “The Everglades,” “The Ice People,” “The Great Barrier Reef,” “Survival on the Prairie” and “The First Americans.”
Downs left “Today” in 1971 to pursue other interests, consulting, teaching and writing work. In 1978 he joined ABC, hosting “20/20,” the network’s newsmagazine show. He also did a great deal of reporting, particularly in the early years, on medical breakthroughs and did adventure news segments.
He hosted PBS’ “Live From Lincoln Center” series from 1990-96. He also narrated a number of highly praised news specials including 1990’s “Depression: Beyond the Darkness”; 1988’s “The Poisoning of America,” which won him a second Emmy; “Growing Old in America”; and “The National Cholesterol Test.” He won additional Emmys for hosting PBS’ “Over Easy,” “Live From Lincoln Center: Yo Yo Ma in Concert” and a 1989 interview with Patty Duke on her manic depression.
The Guinness Book of World Records certified in 1985 that Downs had clocked the greatest number of hours on network commercial television (he lost the record for most hours on all forms of TV to Regis Philbin in 2004).
He won numerous awards for his communications and charitable work and served on a number of boards including as chairman of the board of governors of the National Space Society.
In 1960 Downs published his autobiography “Yours Truly, Hugh Downs”; later came “On Camera: My 10,000 Hours on Television.” Other published works include compiled science articles called “Rings Around Tomorrow,” sailing reminiscence “A Shoal of Stars” and several books on aging. He also published a collection of essays based on his 10-minute NBC radio broadcasts, “Perspective.”
Downs retired from TV journalism work in 1999.
Hugh Malcolm Downs was born in Akron, Ohio. He completed only one year of college at Bluffton in Ohio before his family’s Depression-strapped finances forced him to enter the job market. In 1939, after a long search, he landed a spot as an announcer on small Lima, Ohio, station WLOK — at $7.50 a week. Within a year he was program director and earning a princely $25 a week.
He soon moved on to WWJ in Detroit while studying at Wayne U. He would later attend Columbia U. and get a post-Master’s degree in gerontology from Hunter College.
During the war he was drafted into the Army and assigned to the 123rd Infantry. He was part of an experimental basic training program that condensed 13 weeks into four. Like many of his colleagues, he collapsed from exhaustion, was hospitalized and given a medical discharge.
In 1943 he joined NBC station WMAQ in Chicago as an announcer, interviewer and DJ. He broke into television as the announcer for Fran Allison and Burr Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” show out of Chicago.
Downs’ wife, Ruth, died in 2017.

-Variety