Is it 2009 already?

I remember when everyone was freaking out about the year 2000. Where does the time go? Anyway, everyone have an awesome New Years! Please be safe and don't do anything stupid. I will catch y'all on the flip side.

Saddest Christmas ever

Eartha Kitt, Exotic Songstress and Actress, Dies at 81

By Robert Simonson
25 Dec 2008

Eartha Kitt
photo by David Turner/Studio D

Singer and actress Eartha Kitt, whose exotic, sex-kitten persona and sultry, purring vocal delivery was unlike anything that had come before her, though it has been much imitated since, died Dec. 25 of colon cancer, Variety reported. She was 81 and had remained a cabaret attraction until her final days.

Eartha Kitt was many things: a best-selling recording artist; a Tony-nominated stage actress; a sex symbol; a paragon of both high art and high camp; the author of three autobiographies. One thing she was not is unoriginal.

Born of severe poverty and deprivation, as an artist she nonetheless emanated the sophisticated ennui of a jaded jet-setter. Petite, with a truncated hourglass figure and an angular face a Cubist painter would admire, she radiated a brazen sexuality simultaneously dangerous and cartoonish (witness her famous portrayal of Catwoman in the television series "Batman"). Orson Welles, who cast her as Helen of Troy in a production of Dr. Faustus, once called her the "most exciting woman in the world."

The titles of her hit songs, mostly scored in the 1950s, illustrated her singular appeal, a mix of the alien, the arousing and the comic: "Let's Do It," "C'est si bon," "I Want to Be Evil," "Just an Old Fashioned Girl," "Monotonous," "Je cherche un homme," "Love for Sale," "I'd Rather Be Burned as a Witch," "Uska Dara," "Mink, Schmink," "Under the Bridges of Paris." Her most famous tune is the perennial holiday favorite, "Santa Baby," basically a long, manipulative mash note that turns St. Nick into a sugar daddy.

She made her mark on the U.S. stage in New Faces of 1952, a revue in which she stole the show with two songs that became staples for her, "Monotonous" and "Bal, Petit Bal." The lyrics to the former went:

T.S. Eliot writes books for me
King Farouk's on tenterhooks for me
Sherman Billingsley even cooks for me
Monotonous, monotonous.

Though she had occasional roles in important films, her larger-than-life persona was better suited to the Broadway and cabaret stages, where she never ceased to be appreciated. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in 1978's Timbuktu!, an African-American musical based on the earlier show Kismet. Twenty-two years later, when she was in her seventies, she returned to Broadway, playing an aging vamp in Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, winning another Tony nomination. She made her final Broadway performance in the 2003 Broadway revival of Nine. In 2006 she acted in the short-lived Off-Broadway musical Mimi Le Duck.

In recent years, she has been a regular attraction at Café Carlyle, the swank Manhattan cabaret spot. She most recently played there this past June. In 2006 she released the album "Eartha Kitt: Live at the Carlyle."

Eartha Mae Keith was raised in punishing circumstances. Born out of wedlock, she claimed to be the child of a rape; her mother was a part-African-American, part-Cherokee-Native-American sharecropper in South Carolina, her father a white plantation owner of German and Dutch lineage. She was given away by her mother when she was eight, and raised in Harlem. Eartha Kitt believed that Mamie Kitt was her biological mother. Her new family often beat her and she frequently ran away from home. By her teens, she was living on her own.

Ms. Kitt started her career in show business as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company. A tour took her to Europe and Paris, where she sang in nightclubs and was discovered by Welles. Upon returning to New York, she soloed at The Village Vanguard where a producer saw her and cast her in New Faces of 1952.

Her first album, "RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt," came out in 1954, featuring such songs as "I Want to Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon" and "Santa Baby.” In 1955 she came out with "That Bad Eartha," which featured "Let's Do It," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." Over the years, she learned to perform in nearly a dozen languages, including French, Spanish and Turkish.

Her marriage to William O. McDonald, a real estate developer, from 1960 to 1965, resulted in a divorce and one child, Kitt McDonald Shapiro. She is survived by Ms. Shapiro and four grandchildren.

See? I'm not a grinch after all

My fave Christmas song, "O Holy Night." Enjoy!

Finally!

Shrek's Foster to Release Solo CD Feb. 17; Song List Announced

By Andrew Gans
16 Dec 2008

Cover art for "Wish"

Tony Award winner Sutton Foster, currently starring in Shrek the Musical, will release her debut solo recording Feb. 17, 2009, on the Ghostlight Records label.

Entitled "Wish," the 15-track CD was produced by Joel Moss and co-produced by Michael Rafter. Executive producers are Kurt Deutsch and actress-singer Foster, whose original artwork is featured in the CD package.

The complete track listing for "Wish" follows:

"I'm Beginning to See The Light" -(Duke Ellington, Don George, Johnny Hodges, Harry James)
"Warm All Over" (Frank Loesser)
"The Late, Late Show" (Murray Berlin, Roy Alfred)
"Up on the Roof" (Carole King, Gerald Goffin)
"My Romance"/"Danglin'" - (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers/Maury Yeston)
"I Like The Sunrise" (Duke Ellington)
"Air Conditioner" (Christine Lavin)
"Sunshine on My Shoulders" - (John Denver, Richard Kniss, Michael Taylor)
"My Heart Was Set on You" - (Jeff Blumenkrantz)
"Flight" (Craig Carnelia) - Duet with Megan McGinnis
"Once Upon a Time" - (Charles Strouse, Lee Adams)
"Nobody's Cryin'" (Patty Griffin)
"Come the Wild, Wild Weather" - (Noel Coward)
"On My Way" (Music by Jeanine Tesori, Lyrics by Brian Crawley)
"Oklahoma" (Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers) - Bonus Track

In the liner notes for the new CD, Tony winner Dick Scanlan writes, "If the song list is eclectic, so is the singer. You know that magical quality of morning light after a night of torrential downpour? Redemptive. Pure. Joyful, but a joy hard-won by having survived the rain. Listen to Sutton's take on 'Sunshine' (a bold choice, given the knee-jerk dismissal the song often elicits). This is an ode to the sun offered up by someone who has known the clouds — perhaps quite recently — and is that much more grateful for warmth, for energy, for all that is life affirming. Optimistic by choice, because she knows the alternative is the easier option, and nothing good ever comes easy."

Foster will celebrate her new disc with a Feb. 19, 2009, concert in Manhattan as part of the Lincoln Center Songbook series.

Sutton Foster received a Tony nomination for her work in the hit musical The Drowsy Chaperone at the Marquis Theatre. The singing actress starred in the title role of Thoroughly Modern Millie and received the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Astaire awards for that performance. She also received a Tony nomination for her performance in Little Women, and her other Broadway credits include roles in Young Frankenstein, Les Misérables, Annie, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Grease!. Foster's regional and tour credits include What the World Needs Now, Dorian, Three Musketeers, South Pacific and The Will Rogers Follies.

Foster currently plays Princess Fiona in Shrek the Musical at the Broadway Theatre.

This made me cry

Bettie Page dies at 85; pinup queen played a key role in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and later became a cult figure

By Louis Sahagun

December 12, 2008

Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.

Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.

A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage apparel -- or nothing at all.

Decades later, those images inspired biographies, comic books, fan clubs, websites, commercial products -- Bettie Page playing cards, dress-up magnet sets, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses -- and, in 2005, a film about her life and times, "The Notorious Bettie Page."

Then there are the idealized portraits of her naughty personas -- Nurse Bettie, Jungle Bettie, Voodoo Bettie, Banned in Boston Bettie, Maid Bettie, Crackers in Bed Bettie -- memorialized by such artists as Olivia de Berardinis.

"I'll always paint Bettie Page," De Berardinis said Thursday night . "But truth be told, it took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting - it was part of the fun of being a woman."

"The origins of what captures the imagination and creates a particular celebrity are sometimes difficult to define," Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner said Thursday night. "Bettie Page was one of Playboy magazine's early playmates, and she became an iconic figure, influencing notions of beauty and fashion. Then she disappeared. . . . Many years later, Bettie resurfaced and we became friends. Her passing is very sad."

In an interview two years ago, Hefner described Page's appeal as "a combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern."

According to her agents at CMG Worldwide, Page's official website, www.BettiePage.com, has received about 600 million hits over the last five years.

"Bettie Page captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," said Roesler, chairman of the Indianapolis-based CMG Worldwide, who was at Page's side when she died. "She was a dear friend and a special client and one of the most beautiful and influential women of the 20th century."

A religious woman in her later life, Page was mystified by her influence on modern popular culture. "I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work," she said in an interview with The Times in 2006.

She had one request for that interview: that her face not be photographed.

"I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. . . . I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

Bettie Mae Page was born April 22, 1923, in Nashville. She was the oldest girl among Roy and Edna Page's six children. Her father, an auto mechanic, "molested all three of his daughters," Page said in the interview.

Her parents divorced in 1933, but life didn't get any easier for Bettie.

"All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me," Page recalled. "She didn't want girls. She thought we were troubleWhen I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that."

After high school, Page earned a teaching credential. But her career in the classroom was short-lived. "I couldn't control my students, especially the boys," she said.

She tried secretarial work and marriage. But by 1948 she had divorced a violent husband and fled to New York City, where she enrolled in acting classes.

She was noticed on the beach at Coney Island by New York police officer and amateur photographer Jerry Tibbs, who introduced her to camera clubs.

Page quickly became a sought-after model, attracting the attention of Irving Klaw and his sister, Paula, who operated a mail-order business specializing in cheesecake and bondage poses.

Under contract with the Klaws, Page was photographed prancing around with a whip, spanking other women, even being hog-tied. She also appeared in 8-millimeter "loops" and feature-length peekaboo films with titles including "Betty Page in High Heels."

"I had lost my ambition and desire to succeed and better myself; I was adrift," Page recalled. "But I could make more money in a few hours modeling than I could earn in a week as a secretary."

Her most professional photographs were taken in 1955 by fashion photographer Bunny Yeager. They included shots of Page lounging with leopards, frolicking in the waves and deep-sea fishing, and a January 1955 Playboy centerfold of her winking under a Santa Claus cap while placing a bulb on a Christmas tree.

At 35, Page walked away from it all. She quit modeling and moved to Florida, where she married a much younger man whose passions, she later learned, were watching television and eating hamburgers.

Page fled from her home in tears after a dispute on New Year's Eve 1959. Down the street, she noticed a white neon sign over a little white church with its door open.

After quietly taking a seat in the back, she had a born-again experience. Page immersed herself in Bible studies and served as a counselor for the Billy Graham Crusade.

In 1967, she married for a third time. After that marriage ended in divorce 11 years later, Page plunged into a depression marked by violent mood swings. She got into an argument with her landlady and attacked her with a knife. A judge found her innocent by reason of insanity but sentenced her to 10 years in a California mental institution.

She was released in 1992 from Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County to find that she had unwittingly become a pop-culture icon. A movie titled "The Rocketeer" and the comic book that inspired it contained a Bettie-esque character, triggering a revival, among women as well as men, that continues unabated.

With the help of admirers including Hefner, Page finally began receiving a respectable income for her work.

In an interview published in Playboy magazine in 2007, Page expressed mixed feelings about her achievements.

"When I turned my life over to the lord Jesus I was ashamed of having posed in the nude," she said. "But now, most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now. But I still don't understand it."

She spent most of her final years in a one-bedroom apartment, reading the Bible, listening to Christian and country tunes, watching westerns on television, catching up on the latest diet and exercise regimens or sometimes perusing secondhand clothing stores.

Occasionally, however, Page was persuaded to visit the Sunset Boulevard penthouse offices of her agents to autograph pinups of herself in the post-World War II years of her prime.

During one such event in early 2006, Page needed about 10 minutes to get through the 10 letters of her name. As she pushed her pen over a portrait of her in a negligee with an ecstatic smile, she laughed and said, "My land! Is that supposed to be me? I was never that pretty."

Sahagun is a Times staff writer.

louis.sahagun@latimes.com

Cadillac Records

Is anyone else super stoked to see this?