Day: July 25, 2020

Regis Philbin, the genial host who shared his life with television viewers over morning coffee for decades and helped himself and some fans strike it rich with the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” has died at 88, People magazine reported.Philbin died Friday, just more than a month before his 89th birthday. He died of natural causes, according to a family statement to the magazine.Celebrities routinely stopped by Philbin’s eponymous syndicated morning show, but its heart was in the first 15 minutes, when he and co-host Kathie Lee Gifford — on “Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee” from 1985 to 2000 — or Kelly Ripa — on “Live! with Regis and Kelly” from 2001 until his 2011 retirement — bantered about the events of the day. Viewers laughed at Philbin’s mock indignation over not getting the best seat at a restaurant the night before or being henpecked by his partner.FILE – Co-hosts Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford share a champagne toast at the end of her last appearance on their morning talk show, in New York, July 28, 2000.”Even I have a little trepidation,” he told The Associated Press in 2008, when asked how he does a show every day. “You wake up in the morning and you say, ‘What did I do last night that I can talk about? What’s new in the paper? How are we gonna fill that 20 minutes?’ “”I’m not gonna say it always works out brilliantly, but somehow we connect more often than we don’t,” he added.After hustling into an entertainment career by parking cars at a Los Angeles TV station, Philbin logged more than 15,000 hours on the air, earning him recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most broadcast hours logged by a TV personality, a record previously held by Hugh Downs.”Every day, you see the record shattered, pal!” Philbin would tell viewers. “One more hour!”He was host of the prime-time game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” briefly television’s most popular show at the turn of the century. ABC aired the family-friendly program as often as five times a week. It generated around $1 billion in revenue in its first two years — ABC had said it was among the most profitable shows in TV history — and helped make Philbin himself a millionaire many times over.’Is that your final answer?’Philbin’s question to contestants, “Is that your final answer?” became a national catchphrase. Philbin was even a fashion trendsetter; he put out a line of monochromactic shirts and ties to match what he wore on the set.”You wait a lifetime for something like that and sometimes it never happens,” Philbin told the AP in 1999.In 2008, he returned briefly to the quiz show format with “Million Dollar Password.” He also picked up the Lifetime Achievement Award from the daytime Emmys.He was the type of TV personality easy to make fun of, and easy to love.When his son Danny first met his future wife, “we were talking about our families,” Danny told USA Today. “I said, ‘You know that show “Regis and Kathie Lee”?’ And she said, ‘I hate that show.’ And I said, ‘That’s my dad.’ “FILE – Regis and Joy Philbin attend a special screening of “The Hero” at the Whitby Hotel, June 7, 2017, in New York.Yet Philbin was a favorite of a younger generation’s ironic icon, David Letterman. When Letterman announced that he had to undergo heart surgery, it was on the air to Philbin, who was also there for Letterman’s first day back after his recovery.Letterman returned the favor, appearing on Philbin’s show when he went back on the air in April 2007 after undergoing heart bypass surgery.In the 2008 AP interview, Philbin said he saw “getting the best out of your guests” as “a specialty. … The time constraints mean you’ve got to get right to the point, you’ve got to make it pay off, go to commercial, start again. Play that clip. Say goodbye.” He gave his desktop a decisive rap.”And make it all conversational.”Regis Francis Xavier Philbin grew up in the New York borough of the Bronx, the son of Italian-Irish parents and named for the Roman Catholic boys high school his dad attended. He went to Notre Dame University, and was such an enthusiastic alum, he once said he wanted his ashes scattered there.After leaving the Navy in 1955, Philbin talked his way into a meeting with the stationmaster at KCOP-TV in Los Angeles. He got a job parking cars, then progressed into work as a stagehand, courier, newswriter and producer of a sports telecast. When its sportscaster didn’t show up one day, Philbin filled in.Program in San DiegoPhilbin got far more on-air experience in San Diego in the early 1960s, when KOGO-TV began producing “The Regis Philbin Show” for a national audience. The program of music and celebrity interviews was taped two weeks before each airing. It was canceled after four months.In 1967, Philbin was hired as the announcer and sidekick to comic Joey Bishop on his network show. When he heard that he was going to be fired because of poor ratings, Philbin tearfully announced he was leaving on July 12, 1968, walking off during a live broadcast. He returned three days later after letters of support poured in.He and Bishop had bad blood: Bishop called Philbin an “ingrate” for walking off during a salary dispute and later badmouthing him.Philbin’s second wife, Joy, was Bishop’s assistant.After three years of commuting to St. Louis each week for a local Saturday night show, Philbin became a star in local morning television — first in Los Angeles, then in New York. In 1985, he teamed with Kathie Lee Johnson, a year before she married former football star Frank Gifford, and the show went national in 1988.The gentle bickering and eye-rolling exasperation in Philbin and Gifford’s onscreen relationship was familiar to anyone in a long-lasting relationship.”No arguments, no harsh words in all this time,” Philbin told a theater audience in 2000. “Well, there was the time I didn’t talk to her for two weeks. Didn’t want to interrupt her.”FILE – Regis Philbin laughs with co-host Kelly Ripa during a broadcast of “Live! with Regis and Kelly,” Feb. 5, 2001, in New York.Gifford left the show in 2000. After a tryout period for a replacement, soap star Ripa (“All My Children”) filled the slot.The same hustler who parked cars in Hollywood worked just as hard to land the job on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”  “I begged my way on,” he told People magazine. “There was a short list, and I wasn’t on it. I called my agent, and we made a full assault on ABC in L.A.”The audience responded to Philbin’s warm, comic touch in the role. He later jokingly referred to himself as the man who saved ABC. It wasn’t complete hyperbole: ABC was suffering in the ratings before the game became a smash success. Forbes reported that two-thirds of ABC’s operating profit in 2000 was due to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”Philbin appeared to love every minute of it. Even the ultimate arbiter of hip, the MTV Video Awards, asked him to make an appearance.’No more mountains'”It’s better to be hot,” he told the AP. “It’s fun. I know this business. I was perfectly content with my morning show. People would ask me, ‘What’s next?’ There is nothing next. There are no more mountains for me to climb. Believe me when I tell you, all I wanted when I started this show in 1961 was to be a success nationally.”The prime-time game burned out quickly because of overuse and ended in 2002.Philbin enjoyed a side career as a singer that began when he sang “Pennies from Heaven” to Bing Crosby on Bishop’s show. He said a record company called him the next day, and he made an album.Even though the series “Regis Philbin’s Health Styles,” on Lifetime in the 1980s, was part of his lengthy resume, Philbin had health issues. Doctors performed an angioplasty to relieve a blocked artery in 1993. He underwent bypass surgery in 2007 at age 75.He’s survived by his wife, Joy, and their daughters J.J. and Joanna Philbin, as well as his daughter Amy Philbin with his first wife, Catherine Faylen, according to People.
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Peter Green, the dexterous blues guitarist who led the first incarnation of Fleetwood Mac in a career shortened by psychedelic drugs and mental illness, has died at 73.A law firm representing his family, Swan Turton, announced the death in a statement Saturday. It said he died peacefully in his sleep? this weekend. A further statement will be issued in the coming days.Green, to some listeners, was the best of the British blues guitarists of the 1960s. B.B. King once said Greenhas the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”Green also made a mark as a composer with Albatross,'' and as a songwriter withOh Well” and Black Magic Woman.''  He crashed out of the band in 1971. Even so, Mick Fleetwood said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2017 that Green deserves the lion's share of the credit for the band's success.Peter was asked why did he call the band Fleetwood Mac. He said, Well, you know I thought maybe I'd move on at some point and I wanted Mick and John (McVie) to have a band.' End of story, explaining how generous he was,'' said Fleetwood, who described Green as a standout in an era of great guitar work.Indeed, Green was so fundamental to the band that in its early days it was called Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.Peter Allen Greenbaum was born on Oct. 29, 1946, in London. The gift of a cheap guitar put the 10-year-old Green on a musical path.He was barely out of his teens when he got his first big break in 1966, replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers _ initially for just a week in 1965 after Clapton abruptly took off for a Greek holiday. Clapton quit for good soon after and Green was in.In the Bluesbreakers he was reunited with Mick Fleetwood, a former colleague in Peter B's Looners. Mayall added bass player McVie soon after.The three departed the next year, forming the core of the band initially billed as ``Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac featuring (guitarist) Jeremy Spencer.''Fleetwood Mac made its debut at the British Blues and Jazz festival in the summer of 1967, which led to a recording contract, then an eponymous first album in February 1968. The album, which included ``Long Grey Mare'' and three other songs by Green, stayed on the British charts for 13 months.  The band's early albums were heavy blues-rock affairs marked by Green's fluid, evocative guitar style and gravelly vocals. Notable singles included ``Oh Well'' and the Latin-flavored ``Black Magic Woman,'' later a hit for Carlos Santana.But as the band flourished, Green became increasingly erratic, even paranoid. Drugs played a part in his unraveling.On a tour in California, Green became acquainted with Augustus Owsley Stanley III, notorious supplier of powerful LSD to the The Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey, the anti-hero of Tom Wolfe's book ``The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.''  ``He was taking a lot of acid and mescaline around the same time his illness began manifesting itself more and more,'' Fleetwood said in 2015. ``We were oblivious as to what schizophrenia was back in those days but we knew something was amiss.''``Green Manalishi,'' Green's last single for the band, reflected his distress.In an interview with Johnny Black for Mojo magazine, Green said: ``I was dreaming I was dead and I couldn't move, so I fought my way back into my body. I woke up and looked around. It was very dark and I found myself writing a song. It was about money;The Green Manalishi’ is money.”In some of his last appearances with the band, he wore a monk’s robe and a crucifix. Fearing that he had too much money, he tried to persuade other band members to give their earnings to charities.Green left Fleetwood Mac for good in 1971.In his absence, the band’s new line-up, including Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, gained enormous success with a more pop-tinged sound.  
 
Green was confined in a mental hospital in 1977 after an incident with his manager. Testimony in court said Green had asked for money and then threatened to shoot out the windows of the manager’s office.  Green was released later in the year, and married Jane Samuels, a Canadian, in 1978. They had a daughter, Rosebud, and divorced the following year. Green also has a son, Liam Firlej.  Green returned to performing in the 1990s with the Peter Green Splinter Group.  In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with other past and present members of Fleetwood Mac.
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Ask a woman if she’s been called the B-word by a man — perhaps modified by the F-adjective — and chances are she’ll say, “You mean ever, or how many times?”Because most women will tell you it’s a pretty universal experience, especially if they’ve held a position of power in the workplace. “I’d say, maybe 25 times?” estimates Ellen Gerstein, who spent years in technology publishing, a fairly male-dominated field, before becoming a pharmaceutical executive. “And that’s just to my face.”In fact, Gerstein says, use of the word as a slur against women has come to feel so unfortunately routine that her own memories of it tend to blur together — unlike, say, the time 20 years ago when a male colleague asked her who she’d “lap danced” to push a project ahead. But she says she was filled with admiration when she heard Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez take to the floor of the House and call out a male colleague for vulgar words.”I thought, listening to her, ‘Wow, you’re 100% right,'” says Gerstein, now 52. “Why didn’t I apply those same standards to myself?”Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on Thursday, widely shared online, amounted to a stunning indictment not only of the words of Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Florida, who she said called her a “f—————g bitch” in front of reporters, but a culture of abusive language against women that can lead to violence. Her speech resonated with many women — in politics and out, supportive of her politics or not — who said the language had been tacitly accepted for far too long.The moment was extraordinary, says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, not because the language was new — as Ocasio-Cortez herself said, it was nothing she hadn’t heard waiting tables or riding the subway — but because of where it took place, and especially because the freshman congresswoman had the confidence and the support of her colleagues to call it out in such a public way.”This is all part of a shift,” Walsh says, attributing the change to the #MeToo movement, in large part. “Women are feeling empowered to speak up and believe they will be heard.” More than a dozen Democratic colleagues — but no Republicans — joined Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, in speaking out against sexist behavior, including from President Donald Trump.The moment led Gloria Steinem, the nation’s most visible feminist advocate, to reflect on her own struggles with the word Barbara Bush once famously said “rhymes with rich.””It took me years to learn what to do when someone calls you a bitch,” Steinem told The Associated Press in an email. “Just smile in a calm triumphant way, and say, ‘Thank you!'”Steinem, 86, said she hadn’t realized the strategy could be helpful to other women until it made it into the script of a recent off-Broadway play about her life, “and every night, women in the audience burst out in big relieved laughter.”Still, Steinem noted, “Refusing to be hurt may not really change the people who are trying to hurt you.” She called for both “cultural and workplace penalties for such behavior,” and, more profoundly, “raising our children to empathize and treat others as we want to be treated.”Gerstein, too, says she found it helpful to repurpose what was intended as a slur into a compliment. “I didn’t want to feel like a victim, so my theory was to own it,” she says. “As if to say, ‘What you’re really saying is I’m tough, I’m bossy, I’m determined and I’m damned good at what I’m doing.'”Ocasio-Cortez “owned” the word as well when she tweeted, in response to Yoho’s alleged remarks: “Bitches get stuff done.”  That itself was a throwback to a 2008 sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” in which Tina Fey and Amy Poehler discussed the slur as often applied to Hillary Clinton. “Yeah, she is. And so am I,” notes Fey on the “Weekend Update” segment. “You know what? Bitches get stuff done.”Feminist author Andi Zeisler, co-founder of the nonprofit Bitch Media, notes that the sketch marked the beginning of a long and evolving process of women “reclaiming” the word, much like the word “queer.””We don’t get to control who uses it and how,” explains Zeisler. “We can only control the way we conceive of it.”Of course, context is everything. When used as Yoho allegedly did, the word is intentionally gender-specific and heavy with implied power dynamics, says Walsh, of Rutgers.It “otherizes women, it dehumanizes them and tells women they don’t belong in these institutions and positions,” Walsh says. “It is about silencing women and keeping them out.”Jen Singer, a freelance writer in New Jersey, says that “when men call you a bitch, it’s a warning shot across your bow — a reminder that they have power and you had better not overstep your bounds.”It’s the feeling that Jennifer Bogar-Richardson, an educator also in New Jersey, felt when she learned that a superior had referred to her as a “ho” in a meeting with colleagues years ago, using words from a Chris Brown song to indicate she’d been disloyal.”I felt naked,” says Bogar-Richardson, 44, “because it obviously didn’t matter how smart I was, how intelligent or how well I did my job. I’m nothing more than that name.”Mila Stieglitz, a 22-year-old New Yorker who graduated college in May, found herself feeling conflicting emotions as she watched Ocasio-Cortez’s speech.  On the one hand, she was disheartened to learn of the sexist language experienced by the congresswoman — at 30, only eight years her senior — something she’d hoped was more an issue for an earlier generation. On the other, she said she was inspired by her outspokenness, and the support she received from colleagues.”As I enter the workforce, I recognize there’s been so much progress since my mother’s generation, for which I’m grateful,” Stieglitz said. “But these instances also highlight to me how much more needs to be done.” 
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Lights! Crickets. Birds. Bats. Action!  The ancient theater of Epidaurus, renowned for its acoustics, has reopened for a limited number of open-air performances, with organizers planning a live-streamed event Saturday for the first time in the Greek monument’s 2,300-year history.Live concerts and events have been mostly canceled in Greece this summer due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the Culture Ministry allowed the Epidaurus Theater in southern Greece and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens to host performances under strict safety guidelines.  “Only 45% of the seats are occupied, the refreshments areas are closed, there is no intermission, and tickets are only issued electronically,” said Maria Panagiotopoulou, spokeswoman for the cultural organization which organized the events.  “We normally have 80 performances in the summer. This year, it’s just 17. … We kept changing the plans. We planned for a September start, and then we were concerned that all events might be canceled. We ended up with something in the middle. It would have been the first summer without a performance in 65 years.”  Acts from abroad were off-limits due to the pandemic, and the scheduled artists were instructed not to give encores. Stewards wearing surgical gloves and plastic visors keep spectators apart as they clamber up the steep stone amphitheater steps to find their seats.  Just 4,500 of the usual 10,000 seats are being made available at Epidaurus Theatre, a honeycomb-colored stone venue with a shallow, half-funnel shape that allows music and voices from the stage to be clearly heard all 55 rows up.  Surrounded by pine-covered mountains of the southern Peloponnese region, audiences also can clearly hear the sounds of birds and crickets along with the protests of people who were locked out of the theater for arriving too late. Christina Koutra, a musicologist from Athens, said she was happy to make the winding three-hour trip to Epidaurus to watch the season’s first event, a solo performance of Bach by acclaimed Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos. “There is a feeling of harmony here. It’s a sacred place,” Koutra said from behind a face mask as she left the theater with her parents.“Culture cannot stand still. We have to take part and keep it going,” she said.The National Theatre of Greece will be performing “The Persians” by ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus for Saturday’s live-streamed show. 
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