Sunday, January 31, 2021

Brrrr! It's Cold In New York City -- AOC's Constituents Paying "$135 For Electricity" -- Sunday Night -- January 31, 2021

Link here

I don't often see Long Island colored light brown in this context:



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The Library Page

On my table next to me:

  • Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions Of Evolution, Nick Lane, c. 2010;
  • Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918 - 1923, edited by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, c. 2014

From the second,

Mrs Parker stood out asthe only female critic covering Broadway. She broke ground in a male-dominated profession when women in America could not vote, buy real estate on their own, or get a passport using their maiden name. The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, granting voting rights wasn't ratified until the summer of 1920 (common knowledge, no doubt) and other women's equality issues would take years to pass. 

Mrs Parker told her audience about black revues in Harlem as well as Greenwich Village experimental plays. She let the lily-white dailies cover the standard theater fare as she sought out new plays, playwrights, and actors. In early 1923, Mrs Parker attended a groundbreaking theatre debut, R.U.R. The Capek brothers, Josef and Karel, had coined the term "robot" for Rossum's Universal Robots.

Dorothy nee Rothschild never completed high school. Less than five years before she became NYC's only female theater critic and wrote for Vanity Fair, she left school to take care of her ailing father with slim prospects for her future. Her mother passed away before Dorothy turned five years old (1898).

Though Jewish, she attended a Roman Catholic elementary school, Blessed Sacrament, on West Seventy-ninth Street. Her education lasted until she was fourteen years old.

Her father died in December 1913, leaving Dorothy a little money. Dorothy worked odd jobs and lived with her older sister until she got the big break that changed her life. 

Vanity Fair was launched in 1914 by Condé Nast, the man behind the success of Vogue. The editors stumbled across one of Dorothy's poems, and published it. 

Dorothy would have been twenty-one years of age. On the back of that one poem being published, Dorothy Parker "marched down to the publishing offices on West Forty-fourth Street and asked for a job. She got it. As an editorial assistant.

And the rest is history. But that, too, is common knowledge.

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