| 12-02 TABLE of CONTENTS:
MARIA! La Divina!
Colleges for Women
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Deborah Powell and Frank B. Goodrich.
Maria Callas
She refused to hire an agent. "Nobody
is going to own 10, 20, or 30 percent of me." Life magazine
wrote of her: "Her special greatness has been
achieved in the long-forgotten museum pieces which (she had) taken out
of mothballs only because at long last there was a soprano who could sing
them."
Another said, "Her force
of personality, dramatic conviction sweeps the performance along."
The soprano legend Maria Callas was born Dec.
02, 1923, and through the magic of audio recordings, her once superb voice
that vibrated with emotion like no other before or since will never die.
Her powerful will in searching for strong women roles (that reflected herself)
resulted in a number of older, discarded operas being revived, including
her showpiece Norma.
American-born of Greek descent, she was refused a
contract with the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1945 because she weighed
210 pounds. She went to Italy and became "MARIA!
La Divina!," one of the most revered opera singers of memory.
Finally she debuted at the New Lyric Theatre in Chicago, 1954, and opened
the Metropolitan's 1956-57 season in an ubelievable triumph.
Harold C. Schonber, noted music critic wrote: "...for
some 15 years after 1947 she was a symbol fired into the very psyche of
the opera goer. It was an amazing career, and never did a singer have so
faithful a body of admirers. Callas-worship knew no limits. She drove her
audiences wild; she had a kind of electrical transmission that very few
musicians have ever approached... Callas dead at 53, blazed through the
skies and was burned out very early. But what years those were!"
On CDs, on tapes, and on the precious LPs of so many
millions of opera lovers, Callas lives...
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Women's Colleges
Holyoke College opened in 1837, as the FIRST women's
college in the United States to offer comparable, formal education to women.
Other major women's colleges that set the stage for women's universal college
education were Vassar founded in 1865, Smith in 1872, Wellesley in 1875,
Bryn Mawr in 1886.
By 1880, 153 American college were opened to women...
a change of one to 153 in just 43 years!
In just 43 years - 5,000 years of institutionalized
prejudice against women's learning crumbled - but the battle for equality
in the front of the classroom, not only in the seats continues.
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12-02 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
Event 12-02-1777: Was the United States saved
by Lydia Barrinton Darragh's listening at a keyhole?
Tradition has it LBD listened through a keyhole to the British leaders
discussing an attack against Washington's army when her father's home was
occupied by the British. LBD claimed to need supplies and raced to the
American army's location at Whitemarsh to alert Washington so that when
the British launched its attack, Washington and his men were ready. Without
LBD's information the American army, instead of forcing the British troops
back to Philadelphia, would have faced almost total destruction. How much
is fact and how much true? How much was censored because it was a woman's
doing and never properly recorded in HIStories.
B. 12-02-1884, Ruth Draper, actor
whose dramatic monologues over a 40 year span garnered an unsurpassed international
reputation. RD toured regularly in Europe as well as Asia and South America
and Africa. She always acted by herself and used only material she had
written, using "sets" that consisted of various shawls she used
as costumes and a table or chairs.
B. 12-02-1886, Josephine Roche, director National
Consumers League and industrialist. When a child, her father forbade
her from going to the family coal mines because it was too dangerous. She
then asked the question that labor union organizers used so effectively
later on: "Then why is it safe enough
for the miners?"
B. 12-02-1894, Bess Furman, journalist
with the New York Times and the Associated Press, noted for her
reportage of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Event 12-02-1922, equal pay to men and
women for the same work became a fact in the Government Printing Office.
B. 12-02-1923, Maria Callas, American-born
opera singer with a strong sense of theater and presence. Her vocal
ability ranged from Wagnerian dramatic roles to bel canto. Instrumental
in reviving a number of older operas with strong female roles, including
Norma.
B. 12-02-1925, Julie Harris, renowned actor
of stage and screen, winner of numerous awards and awes. Her mother was
a nurse.
Event 12-02-1939, breaking with all traditions,
Thomas Dewey names Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms as co-manager of his
ill-fated presidential campaign. Hanna-McCormick-Simms, daughter of the
powerful Hanna family, was recognized as one of the shrewdest politicians
of her day, but her candidate came across as wooden and Truman gave 'em
hell.
Event 12-02-1988, Benazir Bhutto, becomes
the premier of Pakistan and the first woman to ever head an Islamic country.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
POWELL, DEBORAH:
"I have a three inch
tall bulldyke that lives on my shoulder. She wears a little red tuxedo
with sensible shoes, and has a tail and horns. She also carries a pool
cue that she jabs me with when she wants me to respond to something I would
really rather ignore. She whispers things for me to say and I open my mouth
and out they come... she jabbed, my mouth opened...
" 'And don't you ever lay another finger on me
as long as you live or I'll kick you in the (testicles) so hard you'll
be wearing them for little pink earrings."
--
Powell, Deborah. Bayou City Secrets. Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1991.
GOODRICH, FRANK B.:
"Nature gave me the
form of a woman - my actions have raised me to the level of the most valiant
of men."
--
Semiramis, 8th Century BC, from Women in Beauty and Heroism by Frank
B. Goodrich
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